By an overwhelming majority, the House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve a limited federal shield law that would enable reporters to protect the confidentiality of their sources from compulsory disclosure under most circumstances. See the record of the October 16 House debate here.
The White House issued a strong statement of opposition and suggested the President would veto the reporter’s shield bill if adopted by Congress as written. “The legislation would make it extremely difficult to prosecute cases involving leaks of classified information and would hamper efforts to investigate and prosecute other serious crimes,” the October 16 statement said (pdf).
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.
Despite an emerging awareness of the importance of state and local government innovation capacity, there is a shortage of plausible strategies to build that capacity.
Innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics will allow us to accelerate the search process using foundation AI models for science research and automate much of the experimentation with robotic, self-driving labs.
FAS commends the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for clearing a historic 75 pieces of legislation, including multiple crucial bills to confront the wildfire crisis.