
Iowa attorney general to end lawsuit against a sheriff over his immigration pos
Attorney General Brenna Bird sued Winneshiek County Dan Marx in March over his Facebook post saying his department doesn't always need to detain people at the request of federal immigration authorities. Bird sued even though Marx deleted the post and an investigation from her office showed that Marx fully complied with each of the nearly two dozen requests he had received from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold someone suspected of immigration violations.
Marx had declined to post a conciliatory message the attorney general's office had scripted.
Bird alleged the original post violated state law by impeding and discouraging cooperation with federal immigration officers. The lawsuit jeopardized state funding to the county.
As President Donald Trump took office and initiated his campaign of mass deportations, Marx told constituents on Feb. 4 that he shares some of their 'mistrust and many of your concerns with the legitimacy of how these federal agents conduct business" and that requests to hold individuals without a court order are 'violations" of constitutional rights.
At the same time, there was a legislative push in states across the country to support Trump's immigration efforts and curtail ' sanctuary cities " that generally limit cooperation with immigration authorities. The Trump administration had also begun taking legal action against governments that have adopted policies inhibiting ICE arrests and deportations.
Marx said in a statement Friday that he met with Bird in person and explained it was 'never my intent to discourage immigration enforcement." Marx also thanked his constituents for their patience and 'outpouring of support through this situation," he said.
When Bird visited the county Monday, dozens of people showed up to support Marx and criticize the lawsuit as a bullying tactic, television station KGAN reported.
Bird said Friday she intended to dismiss the case because the county has 'now fully complied." 'Winneshiek County and Sheriff Marx are in compliance with 27A," she said in a statement, referencing the chapter in Iowa code that ensures cities and counties fully comply with federal immigration law. 'They have committed to continue to honor ICE detainers and cooperate with federal immigration authorities." Marx's February post echoed critiques of what are known as ICE 'detainer" requests that ask local or state law enforcement agencies to hold individuals until they can be taken into custody by federal authorities. Marx said those requests often clash with the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which bars against unreasonable searches and seizures of individuals without a warrant based on probable cause.
If federal agents' 'actions or paperwork are not within constitutional parameters," he wrote, 'then we will make every effort to block, interfere and interrupt their actions from moving forward." (AP) SKY SKY
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July 21, 2025, 08:00 IST
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Indian Express
28 minutes ago
- Indian Express
The chatbot culture wars are here
For much of the past decade, America's partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices. Those battles aren't over. But a new one has already started. This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased. Conservatives have been taking aim at AI companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading AI developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a 'new wave of censorship' by training their AI systems to give biased responses to questions about President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called 'woke AI.' 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' he said in a speech. 'The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries.' The order was announced alongside a new White House AI action plan that will require AI developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models' outputs are 'objective and free from top-down ideological bias.' Republicans have been complaining about AI bias since at least early last year, when a version of Google's Gemini AI system generated historically inaccurate images of the American Founding Fathers, depicting them as racially diverse. That incident drew the fury of online conservatives, and led to accusations that leading AI companies were training their models to parrot liberal ideology. Since then, top Republicans have mounted pressure campaigns to try to force AI companies to disclose more information about how their systems are built, and tweak their chatbots' outputs to reflect a broader set of political views. Now, with the White House's executive order, Trump and his allies are using the threat of taking away lucrative federal contracts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were recently awarded Defense Department contracts worth as much as $200 million — to try to force AI companies to address their concerns. The order directs federal agencies to limit their use of AI systems to those that put a priority on 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' over disfavored concepts such as diversity, equity and inclusion. It also directs the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies about which systems meet those criteria. If this playbook sounds familiar, it's because it mirrors the way Republicans have gone after social media companies for years — using legal threats, hostile congressional hearings and cherry-picked examples to pressure companies into changing their policies, or removing content they don't like. Critics of this strategy call it 'jawboning,' and it was the subject of a high-profile Supreme Court case last year. In that case, Murthy v. Missouri, it was Democrats who were accused of pressuring social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to take down posts on topics such as the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud, and Republicans challenging their tactics as unconstitutional. (In a 6-3 decision, the court rejected the challenge, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.) Now, the parties have switched sides. Republican officials, including several Trump administration officials I spoke to who were involved in the executive order, are arguing that pressuring AI companies through the federal procurement process is necessary to stop AI developers from putting their thumbs on the scale. Is that hypocritical? Sure. But recent history suggests that working the refs this way can be effective. Meta ended its long-standing fact-checking program this year, and YouTube changed its policies in 2023 to allow more election denial content. Critics of both changes viewed them as capitulation to right-wing critics. This time around, the critics cite examples of AI chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as AI is integrated into fields such as education and health care. There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to. The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring AI companies to change their chatbots' outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration's argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech. 'What it seems like they're doing is saying, 'If you're producing outputs we don't like, that we call biased, we're not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,'' Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. 'That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.' There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a 'neutral' or 'unbiased' AI system is. Today's AI chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they're using. And testing an AI system for bias isn't as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds. Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration's executive order would set 'a really vague standard that's going to be impossible for providers to meet.' There is also a technical problem with telling AI systems how to behave. Namely, they don't always listen. Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Musk has been trying to create an AI chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, 'anti-woke' truth seeker. But Grok's behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as 'Mecha-Hitler.') At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that human-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left. Recently, Musk has lamented that AI systems have a liberal bias that is 'tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.' Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that 'controlling the many subtle answers that an AI will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.' It's not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an AI chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the 'model spec,' a set of instructions given to AI models about how they should act — there's no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want. But asking whether the Trump administration's new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether AI developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, AI companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight. 'Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,' Lakier said. 'I'm surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.'


Hans India
an hour ago
- Hans India
CM: Karnataka ranks number one in per capita income among states
Bengaluru: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Saturday asserted that 'due to the implementation of the five guarantee schemes by our government, Karnataka has become number one in the country in terms of per capita income'. He also claimed that BJP leaders do not understand economics. He was speaking at the inauguration and foundation stone laying ceremony of various development works and a beneficiaries' meeting held in the Arasikere Assembly constituency. 'Karnataka is now ranked number one in the country in terms of per capita income. The main reason for this is the increased purchasing power of the people. And the increase in purchasing power is a direct result of our guarantee schemes. BJP leaders don't understand economics. That's why they're spreading false propaganda claiming that the state government has no money for development. Even if they try to mislead the people with politically motivated lies, the people of Karnataka will not be fooled,' CM Siddaramaiah asserted. He said that in the government's performance review meetings, lakhs of beneficiaries had come forward to express their gratitude, which proved that the Congress government had delivered on its promises. He further explained that while Rs 1.20 lakh crore had been allocated for developmental projects, Rs 56,000 crore was being spent on guarantee schemes to deliver development directly to people's doorsteps. Speaking about the national-level conference of backward communities held in Delhi, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said that the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had clearly expressed his understanding of the issues faced by backward communities. He stated that the Congress government had formulated programs for the uplift of Backward Classes, women, Dalits, the oppressed, and the poor from all castes. CM Siddaramaiah stated that Congress was the only party that designed and implemented programmes aimed at achieving social justice, uplifting the poor, and upholding the values of the Constitution. He challenged the BJP to look at history and see that only the Congress had consistently worked to implement social justice, both in the state and at the national level. He praised local Arasikere MLA Shivalingegowda, saying he was focused on both carrying out people-centric development works in the constituency and presenting the party and government's pro-people initiatives effectively in the Legislative Assembly. Expressing confidence, he said that Shivalingegowda, already elected four times, will definitely win again in the next election.


Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
'Aid must be permitted to reach people': Barack Obama voices concern over Gaza; calls for action to 'stop preventable starvation'
Former US President Barack Obama (AP photo) Former US President Barack Obama on Monday urged immediate action to prevent what he called the "preventable" starvation unfolding in Gaza, referring to the situation caused by the war that erupted between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023. "While a lasting resolution to the crisis in Gaza must involve a return of all hostages and a cessation of Israel's military operations, these articles underscore the immediate need for action to be taken to prevent the travesty of innocent people dying of preventable starvation," Obama posted on X, alongside links to two New York Times articles. "Aid must be permitted to reach people in Gaza. There is no justification for keeping food and water away from civilian families," he added in a follow-up post. Meanwhile, Israel's military on Sunday announced a "tactical pause" in fighting amid mounting concerns over starvation in the region. US President Trump, responding to reporters' questions about the images of starving children in Gaza, accused Hamas of diverting aid. "When I see the children and when I see, especially over the last couple of weeks people are stealing the food, they're stealing the money, they're stealing the money for the food. They're stealing weapons, they're stealing everything," said Trump. "It's a mess, that whole place is a mess. The Gaza Strip, you know it was given many years ago so they could have peace. That didn't work out too well," he added. The Israeli military has stated there is no evidence that Hamas has systematically stolen humanitarian aid. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel's handling of aid, saying limited humanitarian access has been permitted -- provided it doesn't bolster Hamas or endanger hostages. "We've done this so far," Netanyahu said, according to The Jerusalem Post. "But the UN is spreading lies and falsehoods about Israel. They say we don't allow humanitarian supplies in, yet we do. There are secure corridors. They've always existed, but now it's official. No more excuses."