NEW YORK (AP) — Montana’s first-of-its kind law that makes it illegal for residents to use TikTok in the state is already facing its first legal challenge with a lawsuit filed by five people who use the app and argue the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights. Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte […]

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Montana became the first state in the U.S. to enact a complete ban on TikTok on Wednesday when Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a measure that’s more sweeping than any other state’s attempts to curtail the social media app, which is owned by a Chinese tech company. The measure, scheduled to […]

HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s leader said Thursday the city’s public libraries would not recommend books featuring “bad ideologies” to residents after they pulled titles related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and certain political figures, further shrinking the city’s freedoms. Chief Executive John Lee was addressing a lawmaker’s question about dozens of books […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department offered Wednesday to allow the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to view a classified cable from U.S. diplomats in Kabul sent shortly before the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas had threatened earlier this week to make an unprecedented push to hold Secretary […]

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Planned Parenthood of Montana on Tuesday asked a state judge to temporarily block a law that bans the abortion method most commonly used after 15 weeks of gestation, arguing it is unconstitutional. The organization filed the complaint over the law to ban dilation and evacuation abortions just hours after Republican Gov. […]

TORONTO — Neither Bell Canada nor the Ontario government will say how much money they made from a jail phone system that charged what lawyers describe as “exorbitant” rates for inmate calls over eight years. Bell operated the Offender Telephone Management System from 2013 to 2021 — which allowed inmates to only place collect calls […]

TORONTO — Deforestation, contaminated air, polluted water and the loss of wetlands are a growing concern, Ontario’s auditor general concluded in a “state of the environment report” released Tuesday. Bonnie Lysyk also said Ontario’s environment has improved in many areas over the last several decades. Yet she found the Doug Ford government is not providing […]

The head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told Congress on Tuesday that government intervention will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. “As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could change the way we live. We are too,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman […]

BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins will resign following a monthslong investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into her appearance at a political fundraiser and other potential ethics issues, her attorney said Tuesday. The Justice Department’s watchdog has yet to release its report detailing the findings of its investigation, but an attorney […]

OTTAWA — A culture within Canada’s cyberspy service of “resisting and impeding” independent review has frustrated efforts to ensure it is obeying the law, say newly released documents from the federal intelligence watchdog. The unusually candid National Security and Intelligence Review Agency records from 2021 are the latest evidence of the watchdog’s irritation at trying […]

Some of the largest U.S. cities challenging their 2020 census numbers aren’t getting the results they hoped for from the U.S. Census Bureau — an effort by Memphis to increase its official population resulted in three people being subtracted from its count during an initial appeal. Some successes have come from challenges to totals of […]

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is appealing a recent decision by the Federal Court, which sided with Facebook in a case tied to the Cambridge Analytica affair. A judge in April dismissed the federal privacy watchdog’s bid for a declaration that the social media giant, now known as Meta, broke the law […]