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CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email. It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it." [...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border... Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March.

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09 May 2026 4:34pm GMT

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09 May 2026 4:02pm GMT

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times. And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie." The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind".... McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication.

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09 May 2026 3:34pm GMT

Hyprland 0.55 introduces Lua configs, user-defined layouts, ICC profiles, scrolling updates, and color management improvements.

09 May 2026 3:07pm GMT

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09 May 2026 3:01pm GMT

Valve's second Steam Client update for May 2026 fixes Steam Controller firmware, Steam Input, charging puck, and streaming issues.

09 May 2026 2:39pm GMT

America's school districts "spent billions on technology during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. "But now some states are limiting in-school screen time because of concerns about its impact on children." Nationwide [U.S.] schools invested at least $15 billion and possibly as much as $35 billion from federal pandemic relief funds on laptops, learning software and other technology between 2020 and 2024, according to an estimate by the Edunomics Lab, an education think tank. By last school year, 88% of public schools reported in a federal survey they had given every child a laptop, tablet or similar device. Now, some states and school districts are walking back their technology use following pressure from parents who claim too much in-school screen time has zapped children's attention spans and left them worse off academically. At least a dozen states introduced or adopted policies this year that attempt to regulate screen time in schools - from prescribing limits to allowing families to opt out of virtual instruction... In Missouri, a bill would require every school district in that state to come up with a screen time policy is making its way through the state legislature. "Ed tech is just big tech in a sweater vest," said Missouri state Rep. Tricia Byrnes (R), who introduced the legislation and blames what she described as the overuse of technology for middling test scores... Complicating the issue is research that shows students do not see any academic gains when provided with laptops. A meta-analysis of studies on reading comprehension suggests paper-based texts are better than digital-based reading... A body of research has established that excessive or unstructured screen time can have detrimental effects on children, including harming language development, weakening social skills and triggering anxiety and depression. But the effects of school-issued devices and in-school usage on children's development are less understood, said Tiffany Munzer, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and digital media researcher at the University of Michigan. Some studies report that high-quality digital tools can support students' learning goals, Munzer said. But "a lot of the apps that are marketed as educational ... are not actually educational and contain a lot of commercialized content."

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09 May 2026 2:34pm GMT

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09 May 2026 2:11pm GMT

Kdenlive 26.04.1 fixes a serious project file vulnerability and ships stability improvements across editing, audio, subtitles, transitions, and project recovery.

09 May 2026 2:09pm GMT

These connected companions could disrupt everything from make-believe to bedtime stories. No wonder some lawmakers want them banned.

09 May 2026 11:00am GMT

It's hard to mix electronic manufacturing and flexible geometry.

08 May 2026 11:13pm GMT

The plan isn't final and could change, but his ouster would be no surprise.

08 May 2026 10:10pm GMT