Latest news with #federalGovernment
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Extremist rebels capture remote but key town in central Somalia
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The extremist rebels of al-Shabab seized control of the central Somali town of Mahaas on Sunday after an assault involving explosions and a ground offensive, according to witnesses. Mahaas, in the central region of Hiraan, is located about 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of the federal capital, Mogadishu. The town is a key government outpost and a critical center in the fight against al-Shabab, which for years has been fighting to overthrow the federal government and impose Islamic law.
CNN
6 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
Are AI models ‘woke'? The answer isn't so simple
President Donald Trump wants to make the United States a leader in artificial intelligence – and that means scrubbing AI models of what he believes are 'woke' ideals. The president on Wednesday said he signed an executive order prohibiting the federal government from procuring AI technology that has 'been infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas such as critical race theory.' It's an indication that his push against diversity, equity and inclusion is now expanding to the technology that some expect to be as critical for finding information online as the search engine. The move is part of the White House's AI action plan announced on Wednesday, a package of initiatives and policy recommendations meant to push the US forward in AI. The 'preventing woke AI in the federal government' executive order requires government-used AI large language models – the type of models that power chatbots like ChatGPT – adhere to Trump's 'unbiased AI principles,' including that AI be 'truth-seeking' and show 'ideological neutrality.' 'From now on, the US government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness and strict impartiality,' he said during the event. It brings up an important question: Can AI be ideologically biased, or 'woke?' It's not such a straightforward answer, according to experts. AI models are largely a reflection of the data they're trained on, the feedback they receive during that training process and the instructions they're given – all of which influence whether an AI chatbot provides an answer that seems 'woke,' which is itself a subjective term. That's why bias in general, political or not, has been a sticking point for the AI industry. 'AI models don't have beliefs or biases the way that people do, but it is true that they can exhibit biases or systematic leanings, particularly in response to certain queries,' Oren Etzioni, former CEO of the Seattle-based AI research nonprofit the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, told CNN. Trump's executive order includes two 'unbiased AI principles.' The first one, called 'truth seeking,' says large language models – the type of models that power chatbots like ChatGPT – should 'be truthful in seeking factual information or analysis.' That means they should prioritize factors like historical accuracy and scientific inquiry when asked for factual answers, according to the order. The second principle, 'ideological neutrality,' says large language models used for government work should be 'neutral' and 'nonpartisan' and that they shouldn't manipulate responses 'in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI.' 'In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex,' the executive order says. Developers shouldn't 'intentionally code partisan or ideological judgements' into the model's responses unless the user prompts them to do so, the order says. The focus is primarily on AI models procured by the government, as the order says the federal government should be 'hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace.' But many major technology companies have contracts with the government; Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI were each awarded $200 million to 'accelerate Department of Defense adoption of advanced AI capabilities' earlier this month, for example. The new directive builds on Trump's longstanding claims of bias in the tech industry. In 2019, during Trump's first term, the White House urged social media users to file a report if they believe they've been 'censored or silenced online' on sites like Twitter, now named X, and Facebook because of political bias. However, Facebook data found in 2020 that conservative news content significantly outperformed more neutral content on the platform. Trump also signed an executive order in 2020 targeting social media companies after Twitter labeled two of his posts as potentially misleading. On Wednesday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) said he sent letters to the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and xAI, pushing back against Trump's 'anti-woke AI actions.' 'Even if the claims of bias were accurate, the Republicans' effort to use their political power — both through the executive branch and through congressional investigations — to modify the platforms' speech is dangerous and unconstitutional,' he wrote. While bias can mean different things to different people, some data suggests people see political bents in certain AI responses. A paper from the Stanford Graduate School of Business published in May found that Americans view responses from certain popular AI models as being slanted to the left. Brown University research from October 2024 also found that AI tools can be altered to take stances on political topics. 'I don't know whether you want to use the word 'biased' or not, but there's definitely evidence that, by default, when they're not personalized to you … the models on average take left wing positions,' said Andrew Hall, a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business who worked on the May research paper. That's likely because of how AI chatbots learn to formulate responses: AI models are trained on data, such as text, videos and images from the internet and other sources. Then humans provide feedback to help the model determine the quality of its answers. Changing AI models to tweak their tone could also result in unintended side effects, Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science and co-founder of AI company Sentient, previously told CNN. One adjustment, for example, might cause another unexpected change in how a model works. 'The problem is that our understanding of unlocking this one thing while affecting others is not there,' Tyagi told CNN earlier this month. 'It's very hard.' Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot spewed antisemitism in response to user prompts earlier this month. The outburst happened after xAI — the Musk-led tech company behind Grok — added instructions for the model to 'not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect,' according to system prompts for the chatbot publicly available on software developer platform Github and spotted by The Verge. xAI apologized for the chatbot's behavior and attributed it to a system update. In other instances, AI has struggled with accuracy. Last year, Google temporarily paused its Gemini chatbot's ability to generate images of humans after it was criticized for creating images that included people of color in contexts that were historically inaccurate. Hall, the Stanford professor, has a theory about why AI chatbots may produce answers that people view as slanted to the left: Tech companies may have put extra guardrails in place to prevent their chatbots from producing content that could be deemed offensive. 'I think the companies were kind of like guarding against backlash from the left for a while, and those policies may have further created this sort of slanted output,' he said. Experts say vague descriptions like 'ideological bias' will make it challenging to shape and enforce new policy. Will there be a new system for evaluating whether an AI model has ideological bias? Who will make that decision? The executive order says vendors would comply with the requirement by disclosing the model's system prompt, or set of backend instructions that guide how LLM's respond to queries, along with its 'specifications, evaluations or other relevant documentation.' But questions still remain about how the administration will determine whether models adhere to the principles. After all, avoiding some topics or questions altogether could be perceived as a political response, said Mark Riedl, a professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It may also be possible to work around constraints like these by simply commanding a chatbot to respond like a Democrat or Republican, said Sherief Reda, a professor of engineering and computer science at Brown University who worked on its 2024 paper about AI and political bias. For AI companies looking to work with the government, the order could be yet another requirement companies would have to meet before shipping out new AI models and services, which could slow down innovation – the opposite of what Trump is trying to achieve with his AI action plan. 'This type of thing… creates all kinds of concerns and liability and complexity for the people developing these models — all of a sudden, they have to slow down,' said Etzioni.
CTV News
19-07-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
Thousands of Canadians are set to receive family sponsorship invitations. What's your experience with the program?
The Parents and Grandparents Program allows Canadians to apply to sponsor family members for permanent residency. (Pexels) The federal government will begin sending invitations for sponsoring parents and grandparents for permanent residency starting July 28, but some are calling for a 'fair' and 'transparent' family reunification process. A website was set up asking people with concerns about the Parents and Grandparents Program to urge the government to re-open the interest-to-sponsor form. A person with the handle 'A Dissapointed (sic) Canadian' wrote in a post Friday that a petition was submitted to the House of Commons, but it requires an MP to authorize it before it goes live. The petition comes as the 2025 intake is set to open soon for 17,860 potential sponsors who submitted an interest-to-sponsor form in 2020, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). However, IRCC said it won't be opening a new interest-to-sponsor form and will only send invitations to apply to potential sponsors from the 2020 pool of submissions. reached out to the email listed on the website for more information about who is behind the petition and website, but didn't immediately hear back. According to information posted on the website with the petition, the program is not 'fair and transparent.' 'For the fifth year in a row, IRCC will choose applicants from the same outdated pool created in 2020, shutting out thousands of Canadians who've become eligible since then,' according to information in the FAQ of the website. wants to hear from individuals in Canada about their experience with the Parents and Grandparents Program. Did you encounter difficulty sponsoring your parents or grandparents? If so, how long have you been waiting? Have you heard back from the government? Do you have any concerns about the federal program and any ideas on how it can be improved? How did your experience with the program affect your family? Did the process take an emotional toll? Share your story by emailing us at dotcom@ with your name, general location and phone number in case we want to follow up. Your comments may be used in a story.
CTV News
19-07-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
Trying to sponsor your parents or grandparents to live in Canada? We want to hear from you
The Parents and Grandparents Program allows Canadians to apply to sponsor family members for permanent residency. (Pexels) The federal government will begin sending invitations for sponsoring parents and grandparents for permanent residency starting July 28, but some are calling for a 'fair' and 'transparent' family reunification process. A website was set up asking people with concerns about the Parents and Grandparents Program to urge the government to re-open the interest-to-sponsor form. A person with the handle 'A Dissapointed (sic) Canadian' wrote in a post Friday that a petition was submitted to the House of Commons, but it requires an MP to authorize it before it goes live. The petition comes as the 2025 intake is set to open soon for 17,860 potential sponsors who submitted an interest-to-sponsor form in 2020, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). However, IRCC said it won't be opening a new interest-to-sponsor form and will only send invitations to apply to potential sponsors from the 2020 pool of submissions. reached out to the email listed on the website for more information about who is behind the petition and website, but didn't immediately hear back. According to information posted on the website with the petition, the program is not 'fair and transparent.' 'For the fifth year in a row, IRCC will choose applicants from the same outdated pool created in 2020, shutting out thousands of Canadians who've become eligible since then,' according to information in the FAQ of the website. wants to hear from individuals in Canada about their experience with the Parents and Grandparents Program. Did you encounter difficulty sponsoring your parents or grandparents? If so, how long have you been waiting? Have you heard back from the government? Do you have any concerns about the federal program and any ideas on how it can be improved? How did your experience with the program affect your family? Did the process take an emotional toll? Share your story by emailing us at dotcom@ with your name, general location and phone number in case we want to follow up. Your comments may be used in a story.
France 24
14-07-2025
- Politics
- France 24
US Supreme Court clears way for Trump to dismantle Department of Education
The US Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump' s administration to resume dismantling the Department of Education, part of his bid to shrink the federal government's role in education in favor of more control by the states. In the latest high court win for Trump, the justices lifted a federal judge's order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies. A legal challenge is continuing to play out in lower courts. The Supreme Court's action came in a brief, unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented. A group of 21 Democratic attorneys general, school districts and unions behind a pair of legal challenges had warned in court papers that Trump's shutdown efforts threatened to impair the department's ability to perform its core duties. Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group representing the school districts and unions, said the court's action "dealt a devastating blow to this nation's promise of public education for all children." "We will aggressively pursue every legal option as this case proceeds to ensure that all children in this country have access to the public education they deserve," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO. Created by Congress in 1979, the Department of Education's main roles include administering college loans, tracking student achievement and enforcing civil rights in schools. It also provides federal funding for needy districts and to help students with disabilities. Federal law prohibits the department from controlling school operations, including curriculum, instruction and staffing. Authority over these decisions belongs to state and local governments, which provide more than 85% of public school funding. The department's Republican critics have portrayed the department as a symbol of bureaucratic waste, underlining the need for smaller federal government in favor of greater state power. In March, Trump sought to deliver on a campaign promise to conservatives by calling for the department's closure. "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs," Trump said on March 20 before signing an executive order to close the department to the "maximum extent" allowed by law. Trump said that certain "core necessities" would be preserved, including Pell grants to students from lower-income families and federal funding for disadvantaged students and children with special needs, though he said those functions would be redistributed to other agencies and departments. Trump in March directed that the department transfer its $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio to the Small Business Administration and its special education services to the Department of Health and Human Services. Although formally eliminating the department would require an act of Congress, the downsizing announced in March by Education Secretary Linda McMahon aimed to slash the department's staff to roughly half the size it was when Trump took office in January. McMahon called the court's action on Monday a "significant win for students and families." "The US Department of Education will now deliver on its mandate to restore excellence in American education," McMahon wrote in a social media post. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Supreme Court's action had handed the president "the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out." "Lifting the (lower court's block) will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended," wrote Sotomayor, who was joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Boston-based US District Judge Myong Joun, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, had concluded in a May 22 ruling that the mass firings would "likely cripple the department." He ordered the affected workers to be reinstated and also blocked the administration's plan to hand off department functions to other federal agencies. The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals on June 4 rejected the Trump administration's request to pause the injunction issued by the judge. The Justice Department in a court filing asking the Supreme Court to lift Joun's order, accused him of judicial overreach. The plaintiffs had warned that mass firings at the department could delay the disbursement of federal aid for low-income schools and students with special needs, prompting shortfalls that might require cutting programs or teaching staff. They also argued in court papers that Trump's shutdown effort would undermine efforts to curb discrimination in schools, analyse and disseminate critical data on student performance and assist college applicants seeking financial aid.
