What happened
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee yesterday released a report detailing allegations that President Donald Trump was an “active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s.” They urged the Justice Department to appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators.

Who said what
The 53-page report says “actual evidence” from 11 women indicates that Trump “abused, assaulted and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with,” Epstein. It “largely cites allegations that have already been public,” said The New York Times. But the report “presented at least one new allegation against Trump,” the Miami Herald said: former Miss Switzerland Beatrice Keul “says she was raped by him at the Plaza Hotel in New York during a beauty pageant in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.”

Trump has been “totally exonerated on anything related to Epstein,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. He “kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club” in the mid-2000s “because he was a creep.”

What next?
The report acknowledged that Trump’s DOJ “would be unlikely to appoint a special counsel,” NBC News said. But it says a willing Congress can make the administration account for its “slow-walking and haphazard release of all the Epstein files,” Politico said, and increase “federal support to assist with state and foreign prosecutions of Epstein’s co-conspirators.” 

What happened
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to force California to set aside the midterm ballots of 20,000 people it alleges could be noncitizens. The Justice Department’s California lawsuit is part of its “unprecedented” and “escalating effort to insert the federal government into how states run their elections,” CNN said. The DOJ yesterday demanded that Washington State sequester 400 potential noncitizen ballots. 

Who said what
The appellate panel said in a 2-1 decision that it couldn’t weigh in until a lower court ruled on the issue. Although the decision was on procedural grounds, the two judges in the majority “also wrote separate concurrences making it clear they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots at this late date,” The Associated Press said. They “questioned the accuracy” of the DOJ’s list and argued that the proposed remedy “risks disenfranchising citizens.” 

What next?
U.S. District Judge David Carter scheduled a hearing for today on whether to block California from counting the ballots. The DOJ’s sequestration demands in California and Washington and its “objectively frivolous” lawsuit to preemptively block a Republican loss in Alaska’s Senate race are “almost certainly destined to fail,” Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck said at One First. But those “impending judicial rejections” may not be sufficient when Trump’s DOJ is “putting its formidable thumb on next week’s elections” to help Republicans.

Togo has asked its citizens to contribute texts, recordings and translations to help “develop artificial intelligence models that address the linguistic diversity of the country,” said Semafor. More than just a “regional experiment,” it’s a “blueprint for how developing nations can use technology to assert their cultural sovereignty and economic relevance in the digital age.”

Africa has about 2,000 different languages, and very few are represented comprehensively in AI models, African computer science and linguist experts said at The Conversation. Failing to be a part of the tech revolution not only “marginalizes millions of people” but also “increases the technology divide.”

AI’s inability to handle most African languages reflects the “gap between the number of real-world speakers and a language’s digital footprint,” said African Business. Across 20 language models, only 41 African languages are represented, according to findings published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. Meanwhile, “over 98% of African languages” are “unsupported,” and just four — Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans and Malagasy — are “always handled.”

The lack of African languages in AI models has become a “major concern for the continent’s policymakers and tech leaders,” said Semafor. Africa has only 0.6% of global data center capacity despite accounting for 18% of the world’s population, according to World Bank estimates.

Building AI models from scratch is “expensive” and consumes “limited resources,” said Semafor. But Togo’s initiative suggests that the future of AI in Africa “may hinge less on who builds the biggest model than on who makes the technology useful to the most people.”