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President-elect Trump's nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, says he is withdrawing his name from consideration. He wrote on X that his confirmation was, quote, unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump-Vance transition, end quote.
The prospect of Gaetz as Attorney General riled lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The former congressman, who resigned his seat after being tapped for AG, was the subject of a House ethics investigation into alleged sex trafficking and illicit drug use, which he has denied. The findings of the ethics report have not been released, and as NPR's Susan Davis reports, the pressure to make it public...
You had senators like John Cornyn of Texas and others saying that the Senate should have should be able to have access to that report. There was questions about whether a member could ultimately leak it, whether the public had a right to know. That question was not going to go away.
U.S. Envoy Amos Hochstein met today with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about ending the fight in southern Lebanon. Here's NPR's Scott Newman. Hochstein met Thursday afternoon with Netanyahu and later with the newly appointed defense minister, Israel Katz, and the chief of staff of Israel's military, Herzi Halevi. Neither Hochstein nor Israeli officials briefed media on details of the talks.
Hochstein, after meetings in Lebanon earlier this week, said he had made, quote, substantial progress toward a ceasefire agreement.
Seven weeks ago, Israeli ground forces invaded south Lebanon, where the Iran-backed militant group is based. Since September, Israel has also launched a series of targeted airstrikes to kill Hezbollah's leadership. Scott Newman, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Today, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Galat, and Hamas.
Hamas military chief Mohammad Dave, whom Israel said it killed in July for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. If you are a student hoping to enroll in college next year, you can now fill out the FAFSA form. The financial aid application helps millions of students unlock money to help pay for higher education. NPR's Janaki Mehta has more. Turmoil, chaos, debacle.
All words that have been used to describe the last rollout of the FAFSA form. This year, things look to be different. It's a piece of cake, honestly. That's Christina Martinez, a financial aid advisor at California State University Los Angeles. She's been helping dozens of students fill out the form and say things are going smoothly so far. On average, she says it's taking students 20 minutes to finish the form. Financial aid experts are getting similarly positive reviews from around the country.
The Department of Education says it's fixed glitches from the last cycle and increased its call center volume by almost 80 percent since January to prepare for the surge of applications that'll start rolling in today. Janaki Mehta, NPR News. This is NPR.
Casino workers and other activists pushing for smoke-free gambling halls protested today outside a hotel where New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy was scheduled to speak. They've been arguing that the tobacco smoke has made them or their colleagues sick. Murphy, a Democrat, says he's willing to sign a bill to end smoking inside Atlantic City's casinos, but so far the effort remains stalled in the state legislature.
A new study in the journal Nature reveals that people who were in its sample preferred poems that were written by artificial intelligence over poems that were written by human beings. NPR's Netta Ulaby reports a study from the University of Pittsburgh used work by 10 famous writers. Here is NPR's Scott Simon reading a poem about the Mississippi River. I do not know much about gods, but I do know that they are the most beautiful things in the world.
But I think that the river is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, and intractable. That's by T.S. Eliot, one of the writers used in the study, along with William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Emily Dickinson. The study found that not only did people have a hard time distinguishing AI poetry from the work of these canonical writers, they preferred the work of AI and tended to think it was human-authored.
The researchers said the simplicity of AI-generated poetry might be easier for readers today to understand. Complex language in the poems was misinterpreted by some as AI incoherence. Netta Ulibi, NPR News. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News, in Washington.
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