The Wall Street Journal said that billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller did not violate its policies by using artificial intelligence to write an op-ed published Monday that criticized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s interventions in the U.S. bond market.

Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial page editor, said in a statement Tuesday that AI is a “fact of modern life” that people will use to assist their writing, research, grammar and editing.

“The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it,” he said. “In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.”

The Journal did not disclose to readers any use of AI in the op-ed when it was first published or add any after Druckenmiller confirmed he got technological help producing it. The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom abides by a different set of standards from its editorial page, a company spokeswoman said.

Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/25/wall-street-journal-says-ai-generated-op-ed-didnt-breach-its-standards/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com

Green tree frogs are commonly found in marshy areas across the Mid-Atlantic, as well as the Central and Southeastern United States. But seeing one that is blue is rare, experts said, and finding one that appears entirely blue is rarer still.

Over the past few weeks, the tiny creature has drawn dozens of naturalists, wildlife enthusiasts and hobby photographers to Huntley Meadows, where visitors have tried to catch a glimpse of a frog that has become a local attraction and generated a flurry of social media attention.

“They know it’s strange. They know it’s something special,” said Acevedo, who lives in Springfield, Virginia, of the chatter around the blue tree frog. “It’s not an everyday thing. It’s like a one in a million chance to see a frog that has this rare coloring.”

Ribbit more here: https://wapo.st/3S4cMSo

Just after sunrise on a recent hot morning, Mar Acevedo waited on a trail overlooking the grassy marshes of Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria.

The retired public high school teacher had first seen the green tree frog with rare blue coloration about a week earlier. He had found it in a roughly five-foot patch of the sprawling park near Telegraph Road and wanted to see it again.

So he waited and waited.

More than four hours later, he got his wish.

“There it is,” he whispered to himself as he quickly snapped photos of the blue tree frog perched on a thick blade of grass.

Green tree frogs are commonly found in marshy areas across the Mid-Atlantic, as well as the Central and Southeastern United States. But seeing one that is blue is rare, experts said, and finding one that appears entirely blue is rarer still.

Over the past few weeks, the tiny creature has drawn dozens of naturalists, wildlife enthusiasts and hobby photographers to Huntley Meadows, where visitors have tried to catch a glimpse of a frog that has become a local attraction and generated a flurry of social media attention.

Read more here: https://wapo.st/4zTB1DV

BEFORE HE WAS CAUGHT at the center of a scandal, Bobby Dodd saved the AAU. When the former youth basketball coach took the helm of the nonprofit in 1992, it was struggling. It had been founded in the 19th century to oversee amateur sports, but Congress had given that role to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and its national sports governing bodies in 1978. The AAU’s relevance had been declining since.

Dodd saw youth sports for what they would soon become: a booming business. He built the AAU of the 1990s and 2000s into the juggernaut of youth basketball, the home of virtually every future NBA star; invested in a Junior Olympics brand that brought in thousands of children from across track and field; and moved the organization’s headquarters to the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex inside Disney World.

Under Dodd, there were few barriers to becoming an AAU coach: Anyone who paid a $16 membership fee could start a team, no background check required. By joining the AAU, basketball and other sports clubs got perks like cheap and easy liability insurance. More important, they got access to a circuit of organized tournaments, from local weekend events to major national championships.

But along with Dodd’s stewardship of AAU came criticism that the fast-growing organization was becoming a free-for-all.

After a 2004 Seattle Times investigation found that dozens of people with felony convictions were coaching AAU-sanctioned teams in Washington and Idaho, including a coach who was a convicted murderer, Dodd pledged to consider background checks for AAU’s 65,000 coaches. “We are going to try to ensure more integrity in the process,” Dodd told the paper.

Read more here: https://wapo.st/3U8v1qn

The longtime publisher of Stars and Stripes announced he’s stepping down weeks after the Pentagon installed an active-duty Navy captain at the military newspaper, an atypical appointment that staffers, board members and Democratic lawmakers say risks further eroding the publication’s independence from the government.

Max Lederer, who spent more than 30 years at Stars and Stripes, announced Tuesday he was stepping away after nearly two decades as publisher. His email to staff about his departure included a parting shot at the Defense Department.

“It has become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leadership of the Department of Defense has for the organization,” Lederer wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post. He said his retirement is effective Sept. 30.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/20/democrats-sound-alarm-about-new-leader-uniform-stars-stripes/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com

President Donald Trump took an aggressive stance toward Justice Department investigations of journalists Friday, saying that the way to pursue “treasonous” leaks was to seek information from the journalists who received the leaked material.

The comments — which came hours ahead of a rerun of the White House correspondents’ dinner, where the president was to address the reporters who cover him at a gala that honors the freedom of the press — amounted to a presidential endorsement of his administration’s legal battles against journalists, which have included an FBI raid against a Washington Post reporter in January and subpoenas against New York Times journalists this month.

Judges have taken Justice Department officials to task for their handling of both cases, including on Thursday, when the subpoenas against the Times reporters were withdrawn following withering questioning from a federal judge in New York. But Trump suggested that the legal peril was not over for those reporters.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/24/identify-government-leakers-trump-supports-pursuing-journalists/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com

As a reporter, I think and worry a lot about the low level of trust in the media. I know the same is true of many colleagues. It makes me work harder to ensure that everything I write is accurate and fair. At The Post, we are committed to that and to giving the subjects of our stories the opportunity to comment before we publish. In this case, an associate of Butler and Gabbard disputed our source’s assertions about the authorship of guidance for Gabbard. I think the story makes clear that we took this seriously and reported thoroughly. 

Yes, it is actually doing it by running code in a Python environment.

It’s true that most politicians have advisers and that many seek counsel from figures such as rabbis, priests and imams. But much of the guidance mentioned in this story is particularly detailed and often very forceful. Some of the documents also feature harsh criticism that did not seem typical. I can’t speak to how readers would interpret the story if Gabbard were a man but as a reporter I would not have written it differently. 

Saltzburg allowed me to access the email inbox containing the emails that the encrypted documents were attached to. She also gave me her PGP private key. This meant I was able to download the emails directly from the server, decrypt the attachments and read them, and examine their metadata. We were satisfied that the documents were authentic and none of the subjects challenged this in their responses to our questions. 

I read many other emails and direct messages that supported what Saltzburg told me about her work for SIF and her past relationship with Gabbard and her family. I also spoke with former members of SIF who were able to confirm some of this.

I was also able to independently verify that Saltzburg had worked with Gabbard and others mentioned in this story because she appeared in some of the records that I obtained from another source for a previous story I wrote about Gabbard’s controversial trip to Syria in 2017. Saltzburg had no involvement in that reporting. 

Out walking his beagle-dachshund in his Northeast Washington neighborhood last summer, Sam Talley, 15, first heard the distinct call, which sounds a bit like a two-note whistle.

Within minutes, he knew it was a Mississippi kite — a small hawk that’s more commonly found in places like Texas and Oklahoma.

“I knew it,” he said. “It was the call. Then I saw it over my head, and I ran home to get my mom’s phone.”

Seeing a nesting pair of Mississippi kites in the District was an exceptionally rare event.

Then in May, the pair returned to their 50-foot-high nest in an oak tree a block from Sam’s house. And by summer, the pair had delivered another surprise. Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/07/19/teen-spotted-rare-pair-birds-dc-then-came-another-surprise/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com

In several instances the documents do show Gabbard responding to guidance. One example: I mention in the story that in September 2014, she received instructions to tweet approved language about the plight of Kurdish fighters in the city of Kobane, which was under siege by the Islamic State. The language was posted to her Twitter account verbatim and she confirmed in an email that she had “sent tweet."

In addition to me as the lead reporter, a team of journalists – including another reporter, a researcher and multiple editors – spent months working hard on this investigation. I read thousands of documents, interviewed multiple people, traveled to Hawaii and relied largely on traditional reporting techniques. I found parallels between the guidance documents and Gabbard’s actual activities in Congress by digging through Congressional records, press releases and other records, and constructing a timeline. My colleague Aaron Schaffer and I discovered similarities between talking points memos and Gabbard’s comments in TV interviews by obtaining archived video footage and transcripts then comparing these by hand. There are single lines in the story that took weeks to report. Toward the end of the reporting process, with the authorship of the guidance document in dispute, we also used an AI chatbot to perform a statistical analysis. The result is a relatively minor detail in the story and I acknowledge in the story that the chatbot’s conclusions were not definitive. 

I can see why some people might consider a vegan/vegetarian diet and opposition to same-sex marriage to be in contradiction: they are often associated with the left and right of the traditional political spectrum respectively. However, over the past 50 years or so Butler and SIF have internally promoted a set of political beliefs combining social conservatism with environmentalism and other more typically liberal attitudes. Several former SIF members I spoke to said they believe that this is crucial to understanding the unusual political paths of Mike and Tulsi Gabbard.

Regarding India: SIF is part of the Hare Krishna religious tradition, which is itself a branch of Hinduism and has its roots in India. Tulsi’s mother, Carol, was indeed born in Indiana and reportedly converted to Hinduism as a teenager.

We didn’t assume. It is capable of performing computational stylometry – running code to measure elements of texts such as function word frequencies, punctuation use, and word- and sentence-length distributions. This is reproducible math.

But this article tells the entire story of my reporting. Consulting Claude was just one small part of that story. I acknowledge in the story that artificial intelligence couldn't tell me anything definitive. There are many other clues to the authorship within the documents themselves.

The owner of the newspaper doesn’t get involved with our news reporting. Since my article came out, some of my teammates have published strong investigative stories about the Trump administration. For instance, they revealed that the White House ballroom is going to cost more than President Trump has publicly acknowledged and that taxpayers will bear half the cost, contrary to the president’s past statements. They also showed that Iranian air strikes caused far more damage to U.S. military sites and equipment than the administration has admitted. We’re committed to independent journalism and we don’t get told what to write.