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Pay Up or Stop Scraping: Cloudflare Program Charges AI Bots for Each Crawl (Maria) 

The author writes, “Cloudflare is experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. In a blog Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that its ‘pay-per-crawl’ feature is in a private beta. A small number of publishers — including AdWeek, The Associated Press, and The Atlantic  — will participate in the experiment. Each publisher will set their own prices, Cloudflare said. …‘Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it’s essential that creators continue making it,’ CEO Matthew Prince said. ‘AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators,’ while still helping AI innovate.”

I’m a Conservative Evangelical. I’m Done With the Army (Al) 

From The New York Times: “I am proud of my service and I care deeply about the Army. But this month I began the process of resigning in protest of President Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from the military. The president issued the order in January and the Supreme Court last month allowed the administration to start enforcing it. The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.”

Federal Judge Seeks Clarity on Whether Birthright Citizenship Order Means Babies Could Be Deported (Reader Steve) 

The author writes, “Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The US is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship is applied. Trump and his supporters have argued that there should be tougher standards for becoming an American citizen.”

ICE is Excluding Data on Transgender People in Detention (Sean) 

From Vera: “Under the radar, ICE has begun excluding congressionally mandated data on transgender people in immigration detention from its biweekly statistical reports. This omission is part of a pattern demonstrating the Trump administration’s hostility toward the lives and rights of transgender people and signals its broader attempts to evade oversight as it ramps up mass deportations and detention.”

Kristi Noem Secretly Took Personal Cut of Political Donations (Dana) 

The author writes, “In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show. In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown. Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public.”

Early Humans Survived in a Range of Extreme Environments Before Global Migration, Study Says (Laura) 

From AP News: “Humans are the only animal that lives in virtually every possible environment, from rainforests to deserts to tundra. This adaptability is a skill that long predates the modern age. According to a new study published Wednesday in Nature, ancient Homo sapiens developed the flexibility to survive by finding food and other resources in a wide variety of difficult habitats before they dispersed from Africa about 50,000 years ago.”