Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio's Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an "AI rewrite specialist" who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts. The reporters on these beats -- covering Lorain, Lake, Geauga, and most recently Medina County -- are assigned entirely to reporting, spending their time on in-person interviews and meeting sources for coffee. Editors review the AI-produced drafts and reporters get the final say before publication. Quinn says the arrangement has effectively freed up an extra workday per week for each reporter. The newsroom adopted this model last year to expand local coverage into counties it could no longer staff with full teams, and Quinn described the setup in a February 14 letter after a college journalism student withdrew from a reporting role over the newsroom's use of AI. Quinn blamed journalism schools for the student's reaction, saying professors have repeatedly told students that AI is bad.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One skier still missing and six others rescued after group swept up in Sierra Nevada mountains during severe storm

Eight skiers who went missing after an avalanche swept the Castle Peak area of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California have been confirmed dead, authorities said during a Wednesday press conference.

One skier is still unaccounted for, while six others, who had been stranded, have since been rescued.

Money clears path for work on Gateway project increasing number of tunnels linking New York City and New Jersey

The Trump administration transferred the balance of federal funds it owed to the Gateway rail tunnel initiative on Wednesday, along with additional money beyond the original amount, clearing the path for work on the project to restart as early as next week.

Once finished, the project will increase the number of rail tunnels linking New York City and New Jersey, as well as repair a century-old tunnel that was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 used by more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily.

Trump’s disapproval rating indicates he’s less popular with Americans than some insects like ants. Will it mean anything in November?

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A couple of years ago, the polling company YouGov asked people about insects. The resulting survey found that butterflies are America’s favorite insect, with eight in 10 people having a “very or somewhat positive” reaction to them.

Many journalists will tell you to never trust the polling, and they’ve been proven right many times over. Still, aren’t you curious how a random group of 1,148 adults feels about bugs?

Dozens of world leaders head to Washington for what White House says will largely be a fundraiser on Thursday

Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC tomorrow for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.

The White House has indicated that tomorrow’s summit for his new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.

‘Iran would be very wise to make a deal,’ says Karoline Leavitt when asked about possibility of US strikes against Iran during press conference

On a recent morning Eric Taylor, city manager for a small Georgia town of about 5,000 residents called Social Circle, was contacted by a staffer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“They asked me to turn on the water,” he said of a 1m sq ft warehouse nearby that the federal government recently purchased for $128m, with plans to use it for locking up as many as 10,000 detainees as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan.

The drama about two startup innovators defeated by their egotistical overreach feels as if it presages these AI times

The crisis facing a couple of middle-aged Belgian tech bros in the 1990s might be better suited to a European streaming-TV drama – maybe with the two antiheroes’ travails confined to the first episode, setting up a lengthier intergenerational drama taking us to the present. Nonetheless, here it is: a feature film in the Berlin competition from screenwriter Angelo Tijssens and director Anke Blondé, handsomely produced and shot, and impeccably acted. But it’s also weirdly parochial, leaving you with the sense that it has not reached beyond its immediate concerns; and it’s not clear as to why, exactly, we need a fictionalised crisis from the 90s inspired by a real-life financial fraud scandal.

Well, perhaps the point is that very smallness and sadness: a pathetic tale of the first, almost-forgotten dotcom bust, which holds an omen for our AI-obsessed present. Arieh Worthalter and Jan Hammenecker play Geert and Luc, two balding guys who, in the late 90s, are Belgium’s pinup boys of tech innovation. Their startup company has gone public and made them both very rich, and all their local friends, family and businesses have plunged every cent of their savings into shares. Geert and Luc are now poised to turn the mud of Flanders into a European Silicon Valley.