Lawmakers are aiming to roll out the first spending package Sunday ahead of the March 1 deadline for agencies covered under four of the annual appropriations bills‚ though there are still significant areas of disagreement between the parties. Congressional leaders hope to announce something Sunday night‚ a source familiar with the talks said Thursday. Agencies covered by the fiscal 2024 Agriculture‚ Military Construction-VA‚ Energy-Water and Transportation-HUD spending bills face the March 1...

A Democratic consultant who worked for a rival presidential campaign paid a New Orleans magician to use artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden for a robocall that is now at the center of a multistate law enforcement investigation‚ according to text messages‚ call logs and Venmo transactions the creator shared with NBC News. Paul Carpenter says he was hired in January by Steve Kramer — who has worked on ballot access for Democratic presidential candidate...

Manhattan judge Arthur Engoron has denied former president Donald Trump’s request for a 30-day extension on the due date for a recently ordered $355 million payment in his high-profile New York civil-fraud case. Engoron sent an email to the case’s defendants on Thursday‚ saying they had “failed to explain‚ much less justify‚ any basis for a stay” in a letter submitted the day before. “I am confident that the Appellate Division will protect your appellate rights‚” he wrote. The...

Google blocked the ability to generate images of people on its artificial intelligence tool Gemini after some users accused it of anti-White bias‚ in one of the highest profile moves to scale back a major AI tool. A viral post on X shared by the account @EndofWokeness appeared to show Gemini‚ which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT‚ responding to a prompt for “a portrait of a Founding Father of America” with images of a Native American man in a traditional headdress‚ a Black...

Elon Musk took aim at Google search on Friday after claiming the company’s AI business is biased and “racist‚” expanding his attacks on the tech giant and fanning conspiracy theories it is working to rig the 2024 election amid intense backlash over diversity in its now-halted Gemini AI image generator. “The problem is not just Google Gemini‚ it’s Google search too‚” Musk said in a post on X‚ hours after the company “paused” its latest artificial intelligence model‚ Gemini...

They recently met for lunch‚ and in a matter of hours‚ their teenage crushes came back. Source: They kissed on a school bus. Now‚ 77 years later‚ they’re reconnected. (Gift link) Lovely story.

"There's no substance to it." The post The worst song in the world‚ according to Steve Coogan: “It’s what stupid people dance to at weddings” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Life-affirming. The post The crazy encounter a young Caroline Polachek had with Mike Patton first appeared on Far Out Magazine.