What happened
The Department of Homeland Security secretly surveilled and infiltrated labor unions and progressive groups during ICE’s surge in Minnesota, beginning four days after an immigration agent killed protester Alex Pretti in January, according to newly released government documents. The filing, from a defense attorney for one of 15 indicted protesters, documents “an array of invasive tactics” used to gather information on "many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes,” The New York Times said, "crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”

Who said what
DHS opened two investigations, according to the filing. “Operation Puppet Master” involved “involved extensive use of undercover informants” to “probe gatherings at churches,” union halls and other places, Talking Points Memo said, while “Operation Whipple Shield” was a “sweeping campaign to obtain financial records from people and groups organizing against” the ICE surge. The “surveillance reports in particular documented what largely appeared to be political activity protected by the First Amendment,” the Times said.

What next?
“So far, none of the organizations targeted” in the operations “have faced charges,” the Times said. But “prosecutors showed grand jurors a PowerPoint slide asserting that 18 groups — including the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions — were part of a conspiracy to impede the work of immigration officers,” and the subpoenaed financial records went “well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota.”

What happened
President Donald Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board yesterday voted to add his name back to the building’s facade and follow through with his plan to close most of the center for two years of renovations. This apparent “attempt to find a creative workaround” to the federal law governing the Kennedy Center also “aggressively” tests U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s May ruling that blocked the center’s closure and ordered Trump’s name removed, The New York Times said.

Who said what
The board decided the center’s facade would now read “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,” and its grounds would be renamed “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” according to Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), the ex-officio board member who successfully sued to get Trump’s name excised. She called the new decisions a “transparent effort to circumvent the court’s ruling.” 

The Kennedy Center has become an “unlikely — and highly visible — metaphor for presidential power” in Trump’s second term, The Associated Press said. His name was removed in June, but a “massive tarp” has shielded the court-ordered void from public view. Board member and longtime Trump ally Paolo Zampolli told the Times his goal was to reinscribe Trump’s name “as big as it can get.”

What next?
The board’s decisions will be subject to Cooper’s approval, with “information on the renovations and closure” submitted to him by Tuesday, CNN said.

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has “destroyed” millions of books as part of a “controversial project” to train its models, said London’s City A.M. newspaper. The alarm was first raised when antiquarian booksellers in Europe started to receive curious requests for thousands of obscure titles from anonymous buyers. According to recent court documents, an internal Anthropic program known as Project Panama concluded that books are essential for training advanced AI models.

Books teach systems “how to write well,” as opposed to using “low-quality internet speak,” one Anthropic senior executive said to City A.M. The company has bought millions of secondhand books, “sliced off their spines” using “industrial cutting machines,” scanned every page and recycled the rest, said the outlet.

This trend has “raised fresh concerns about copyright and the future of physical books,” said Turkish news agency Anadolu Ajansi. But dealing with the issue could be quite another matter, as copyright violations are “difficult to prove in court” due to “legal loopholes.”

The project “appears to be yet another example of AI companies using vast quantities of copyright-protected works to train their language models, without consent and without payment,” said Thomas Koch, of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, to Anadolu. Tech giants want to “feed an insatiable demand for training data,” but their methods could have serious ramifications for the publishing industry and the quality of future books, said City A.M.