Yesterday's News 9/30

Monte Mader (0:00)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Yesterday's News. I'm Monte Maeder. Yesterday's News is where we take 15 to 20 minutes to talk about the relevant news, hopefully weed through some of the distractions, help you stay focused, informed, a little less overwhelmed, maybe a little less time on your phone, social media, and a little bit more of your life back. Wouldn't that be nice? On this day, September 30th, 1938, Neville Chamberlain stepped off a plane at Heston Aerodrome and held a sheet of paper signed by Adolf Hitler. It was a one-page declaration negotiated overnight in Munich in which Germany promised to settle its future disputes with Britain by consultation. Chamberlain read it aloud to the cameras. That evening from Downing Street, he told the crowd it meant, quote, peace for our time, end quote. Czechoslovakia, which had not been invited to the conference, lost the Sudentland that week. Germany took the rest of the country in March. Poland was invaded 11 months after the paper was signed. The Munich declaration is remembered as the model of a voluntary agreement. There's no enforcement, no inspection, no consequence. Signed by the party, it was meant to restrain.

Trump says tech firms signed an accord to self-police AI and promises no guardrails. The president hosted Anthropix, Dario Amadei, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Google's Sundar Pichai, Metta's Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft's Satya Nadella at the White House Monday and announced a voluntary accord under which the companies will conduct internal and external reviews of their systems. He said the government would not limit AI development or support guardrails, and that regulation already exists because we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice that is run by the criminal defense attorney of the president, the FBI and all of that. He also unveiled America.gov, a chat bot meant to help citizens navigate federal services, and said the executives had agreed to fund local schools or cut energy costs near their data centers to soften community opposition. The accord has no enforcement mechanism whatsoever, no public reporting requirement, no penalties either. They have no incentive whatsoever to test safety, report honestly none of that. It was announced 48 hours after Axios reported that the same companies are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their models bypassed guardrails, escaped test environments, or evaded monitoring, and 24 hours after Bill Gates said on national television that AI could cause a billion deaths. The FBI, the president cited as backup, lost its co-deputy director the same day. Voluntary commitments from AI companies are not new. The Biden White House collected a set in July of 2023 Several of the signatories have since acknowledged in the Axios reporting that they cannot fully account for what their models do. Monday's accord asked the same companies to review the same systems and report to themselves.

The Supreme Court lets Trump resume third country deportations without a hearing. The court on Tuesday stayed a rule by the US. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston that had barred government from deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to without first giving them a chance to show they would face harm there. The administration may resume the practice while the court hears full arguments in December. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have left the limits in place. I agree. Due process and why are we sending them to countries they have no connection to? According to a tally by human rights groups, more than 25,000 people have been removed to 29 third countries under the policy, most to Mexico, but also to South Sudan, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and Central African Republic. The State Department advises Americans not to travel to South Sudan because of crime, kidnapping and armed conflict, but just send people there that have no connection to that region. The ruling came three days after DHS announced its nationwide public safety surge in 11 Democratic states, particularly in sanctuary cities.

Mike Lee blocks a bill to stop Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center. After a federal court blocked the president from adding his own name to John F. Kennedy's on the facade of the Kennedy Center, Trump said he might tear the building down. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon went to the floor Monday night to pass, by unanimous consent, a bill barring the demolition of any national memorial to a president without an act of Congress. Senator Mike Lee of Utah objected, which under Senate rules is enough. The administration is separately in court defending a full renovation of the building, which it calls decrepit. The Kennedy Center was authorized by Congress in 1958 under Eisenhower and designated as the National Memorial to Kennedy by Congress in 1964 The building belongs to the federal government. Whether the executive can demolish a memorial Congress created is the question Merkley's bill would have answered because we're being controlled by a toddler who is exceptionally mediocre and also exceptionally arrogant. Odd how those two always seem to come together.