COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s governor signed a bill Thursday banning most abortions around six weeks of pregnancy, setting up an anticipated legal challenge from providers. The law, which goes into effect immediately, restores the ban South Carolina had in place when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. The ban […]

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A wave of newly approved abortion restrictions in the Southeastern United States has sent providers scrambling to reconfigure their services for a region with already severely limited access. Stiff limitations enacted in South Carolina and pending in North Carolina and Florida — states that had been holdouts providing wider access to […]

EDMONTON _ The governments of Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec are joining the federal privacy commissioner in investigating the company behind the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. Alberta’s privacy authority says the joint investigation would see if OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT, obtained valid consent from Canadians to collect, use and disclose their personal information via its chatbot. ChatGPT, which […]

TORONTO — Ontario should put in place “effective guardrails” on the public sector’s use of artificial intelligence technologies, the Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Ontario Human Rights Commission said Thursday in a joint statement. The government must urgently develop “robust and granular” rules so it can reap the benefits of AI technologies in an […]

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Abortion will soon be severely restricted in one of the last bastions for legal access in the U.S. South. The South Carolina Senate approved a bill Tuesday that would ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy — before most people know they are pregnant — and sent it to […]

MONTREAL — Artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio says regulation in Canada is on the right path, but progress is far too sluggish. Speaking in Montreal, the Universite de Montreal professor said he backed a bill tabled in the House of Commons last June that adopts a more general, principles-based approach to AI guardrails and leaves […]

MONTREAL — Nearly 30 years after Quebec’s second sovereignty referendum, the Parti Quebecois says there are secrets about how the victorious No side spent money that the public deserves to know about. On Wednesday, the province’s legislature debated a motion introduced by PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon calling on the province’s chief electoral officer to […]

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — The ransomware attack that hit Newfoundland and Labrador’s health-care IT systems in 2021 was “almost an inevitability” and resulted in the theft of personal data from the “vast majority” of the province’s population, says a report released Wednesday. The security of the province’s health information system was lacking in several important […]

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When Yekaterina Maksimova can’t afford to be late, the journalist and activist avoids taking the Moscow subway, even though it’s probably the most efficient route. That’s because she’s been detained five times in the past year, thanks to the system’s pervasive security cameras with facial recognition. She says police would tell […]

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The only five women in South Carolina’s 46-member Senate have vowed to resist new abortion restrictions up for debate after the group filibustered a near-total ban last month. But it remains to be seen whether the coalition known as the “sister senators” — three Republicans, one Democrat and one independent — […]

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Social media company TikTok Inc. filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to overturn Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights and is based on “unfounded speculation” that the Chinese government could access users’ data. The lawsuit by TikTok, owned by […]

LONDON (AP) — The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users’ personal information across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears. The penalty of 1.2 billion euros is the biggest since the EU’s strict […]