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When will things return to normal post-shutdown?

admin - Latest News - November 13, 2025
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How long will it take for the government to be fully operational now that the shutdown is over? NBC News’ Julie Tirskin explains what we know so far.



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Nov. 28, 2025, 6:00 PM ESTBy Freddie Clayton and Fiona DayThe rolling plains of Kenya’s Maasai Mara and the millions of animals that live there face a shiny new intrusion: a gleaming Ritz-Carlton safari camp.With private plunge pools, butler service and panoramic views commanding more than $5,000 a night, the 20-hectare lodge has become a luxury lightning rod for controversy.Leaders of the Maasai — an ethnic group of traditionally nomadic herders with ancestral ties to the area — and conservationists warn the new tourist destination threatens a migration corridor vital to the movement of vast numbers of animals and have filed a lawsuit to halt its operations.What’s at stake, they argue, is not just a new lodge, but the accelerating pressures of tourism on wildlife, biodiversity and the very spectacle that draws these tourists in the first place. The camp opened on Aug. 15 during the height of the Great Migration, where millions of wildebeest, zebras and other grazing animals move back and forth between the Serengeti plains in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR) in Kenya, a process that researchers say allows animals to find food and water and maintain genetic diversity among herds.The Ritz-Carlton, Masai Mara Safari Camp. The rapid growth in lodges and camps has sometimes clashed with conservation efforts.Jiri Lizler / Marriott InternationalTourists have long flocked to the savannah by the hundreds of thousands, hoping to witness one of the largest movements of mammals in the world, as herds cross rivers and plains teeming with predators.But the new camp, which boasts “front-row seats to one of the world’s greatest natural wonders” on its website, may threaten the migration that visitors come to witness, conservations and Maasai leaders say. The Ritz-Carlton camp, on a bend in the Sand River, sits on “one of the most favored corridors for these animals,” Maasai elder Meitamei Olol Dapash told NBC News in an interview Sunday.“Any guide will tell you, that is the crossing they use,” said Dapash, who filed a lawsuit in August in a Kenyan court against Ritz-Carlton’s owner, Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, as well as the project’s local owner and operator, Lazizi Mara Limited, and Kenyan authorities.Dapash, executive director of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research and Conservation (MERC), who has a PhD in Sustainability Education from Prescott College in Arizona, alleges in the lawsuit that the 20-suite camp obstructs the crucial migration corridor and is asking the court to restore the land to its original condition.He told NBC News in an interview there had been instances of wildebeest turning back to avoid the camp and that an elephant was seen struggling to find a path across the river after using the location for more than a decade.Female lions with cubs in Masai Mara, Kenya.Henrik Karlsson / Getty Images file“Attachment to the land and to the wildlife exists up to this very day,” Dapash said, adding that the Maasai had seen populations dwindling. The new camp, he added, “was the last straw for us, we just didn’t want to let this happen.”The Kenya Wildlife Service government agency pushed back at claims the lodge has impacted wildebeest migration, citing monitoring data that it says shows it does not “fall within, obstruct, or interfere with any wildebeest migration corridors” and adding that migrating wildebeest “are using the entire breadth of the Kenya-Tanzania border.”It said that “all ecological, environmental and regulatory requirements were thoroughly met and validated.”Marriott International told NBC News that the development underwent an environmental impact assessment (EIA) “in full compliance with” Kenya’s environmental protections.The company said it is committed to “the principles of responsible tourism” but declined to comment on Dapash’s claims that the Ritz-Carlton blocked a key route for local wildlife or its own steps to mitigate the construction’s impact, saying these were matters for Narok County, which manages the reserve on the Maasai’s behalf.Narok County did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment. In court documents seen by NBC News, the county claims that the safari camp complies with the Maasai Mara Management Plan, which imposes a moratorium on new developments amid concerns that poorly regulated tourism was stifling wildlife migration and threatening the reserve’s ecosystem.Lazizi Mara Limited said the moratorium is part of the case before the court, adding: “We wouldn’t want to comment on issues that are pending determination.”Dapash told NBC News that he had “no issue with business, but this is not just about hotel, it is about the long-term survival of the game reserve.” “We feel like we are losing the land, we are losing the wildlife,” he said.The lawsuit comes amid mounting concerns about the health of the 580-square-mile reserve, where tourist numbers have nearly tripled in recent decades. The Maasai Mara National Reserve reported over 300,000 tourists in 2023. In 1980, total visitor entry was 114,000. Tourism in the Mara generates an estimated $20 million annually and thousands more indirectly, according to the reserve. In 2023, tourism across the country contributed around 7% of Kenya’s gross domestic product, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.But the rapid growth in lodges and camps has sometimes clashed with conservation efforts. “A hotel is never just a hotel,” Dr. Chloe Buiting, a vet and wildlife researcher working in the Maasai Mara, said in an interview. “It’s infrastructure, it’s roads, it’s changes to the water and the resources and the use of land.”Seasonal variation in the availability and quality of food forces animals to move around, said Joseph Ogutu, a Kenyan researcher at the University of Hohenheim in Germany. But he said developments like the Ritz-Carlton are having “a negative effect on migration, because most of these facilities are close to rivers where animals either drink water or breed or seek refuge.”Dapash’s cause has also found support among experts and tourism groups.Grant Hopcraft, a professor of conservation ecology at the University of Glasgow, who has been collaring migratory wildebeest in the Serengeti-Mara since 1999, presented maps and data to the court in October showing “regular cross-border movement of wildebeest” at the location of the lodge, according to his affidavit.RIDE International, a U.S.-based nonprofit providing cultural exchanges and immersive tours in East Africa, has also thrown its support behind Dapash’s lawsuit.The Mara has been suffering for a long time, said Riley Jon Blackwell, the company’s executive director, with “large hotel chains coming in and trying to service the luxury guests who command to see the best of the best for wildlife.”The Ritz-Carlton safari camp was “not surprising,” he added in an interview. “It’s just kind of a culmination of a long time, of a direction of things leading this way.”The camp holds a 2.2-star rating on Google Reviews, with many posters criticizing its environmental impact. Others have praised their stay at the park. A court is scheduled to hear the case in December.If Dapash is successful with his lawsuit, Buiting said it could “set a very interesting precedent” for future developments in the reserve.“From a legal perspective, this could actually be groundbreaking, a turning point,” she added.Freddie ClaytonFreddie Clayton is a freelance journalist based in London. Fiona DayFiona Day is a social news editor for NBC News based in London.Reuters contributed.
November 18, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 18, 2025, 5:00 AM ESTBy Jared PerloJudge Victoria Kolakowski sensed something was wrong with Exhibit 6C.Submitted by the plaintiffs in a California housing dispute, the video showed a witness whose voice was disjointed and monotone, her face fuzzy and lacking emotion. Every few seconds, the witness would twitch and repeat her expressions.Kolakowski, who serves on California’s Alameda County Superior Court, soon realized why: The video had been produced using generative artificial intelligence. Though the video claimed to feature a real witness — who had appeared in another, authentic piece of evidence — Exhibit 6C was an AI “deepfake,” Kolakowski said.The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat. Citing the plaintiffs’ use of AI-generated material masquerading as real evidence, Kolakowski dismissed the case on Sept. 9. The plaintiffs sought reconsideration of her decision, arguing the judge suspected but failed to prove that the evidence was AI-generated. Judge Kolakowski denied their request for reconsideration on Nov. 6. The plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment.With the rise of powerful AI tools, AI-generated content is increasingly finding its way into courts, and some judges are worried that hyperrealistic fake evidence will soon flood their courtrooms and threaten their fact-finding mission. NBC News spoke to five judges and 10 legal experts who warned that the rapid advances in generative AI — now capable of producing convincing fake videos, images, documents and audio — could erode the foundation of trust upon which courtrooms stand. Some judges are trying to raise awareness and calling for action around the issue, but the process is just beginning.“The judiciary in general is aware that big changes are happening and want to understand AI, but I don’t think anybody has figured out the full implications,” Kolakowski told NBC News. “We’re still dealing with a technology in its infancy.”Prior to the Mendones case, courts have repeatedly dealt with a phenomenon billed as the “Liar’s Dividend,” — when plaintiffs and defendants invoke the possibility of generative AI involvement to cast doubt on actual, authentic evidence. But in the Mendones case, the court found the plaintiffs attempted the opposite: to falsely admit AI-generated video as genuine evidence. Judge Stoney Hiljus, who serves in Minnesota’s 10th Judicial District and is chair of the Minnesota Judicial Branch’s AI Response Committee, said the case brings to the fore a growing concern among judges. “I think there are a lot of judges in fear that they’re going to make a decision based on something that’s not real, something AI-generated, and it’s going to have real impacts on someone’s life,” he said.Many judges across the country agree, even those who advocate for the use of AI in court. Judge Scott Schlegel serves on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Louisiana and is a leading advocate for judicial adoption of AI technology, but he also worries about the risks generative AI poses to the pursuit of truth. “My wife and I have been together for over 30 years, and she has my voice everywhere,” Schlegel said. “She could easily clone my voice on free or inexpensive software to create a threatening message that sounds like it’s from me and walk into any courthouse around the country with that recording.”“The judge will sign that restraining order. They will sign every single time,” said Schlegel, referring to the hypothetical recording. “So you lose your cat, dog, guns, house, you lose everything.”Judge Erica Yew, a member of California’s Santa Clara County Superior Court since 2001, is passionate about AI’s use in the court system and its potential to increase access to justice. Yet she also acknowledged that forged audio could easily lead to a protective order and advocated for more centralized tracking of such incidents. “I am not aware of any repository where courts can report or memorialize their encounters with deep-faked evidence,” Yew told NBC News. “I think AI-generated fake or modified evidence is happening much more frequently than is reported publicly.”Yew said she is concerned that deepfakes could corrupt other, long-trusted methods of obtaining evidence in court. With AI, “someone could easily generate a false record of title and go to the county clerk’s office,” for example, to establish ownership of a car. But the county clerk likely will not have the expertise or time to check the ownership document for authenticity, Yew said, and will instead just enter the document into the official record.“Now a litigant can go get a copy of the document and bring it to court, and a judge will likely admit it. So now do I, as a judge, have to question a source of evidence that has traditionally been reliable?” Yew wondered. Though fraudulent evidence has long been an issue for the courts, Yew said AI could cause an unprecedented expansion of realistic, falsified evidence. “We’re in a whole new frontier,” Yew said.Santa, Calif., Clara County Superior Court Judge Erica Yew.Courtesy of Erica YewSchlegel and Yew are among a small group of judges leading efforts to address the emerging threat of deepfakes in court. They are joined by a consortium of the National Center for State Courts and the Thomson Reuters Institute, which has created resources for judges to address the growing deepfake quandary. The consortium labels deepfakes as “unacknowledged AI evidence” to distinguish these creations from “acknowledged AI evidence” like AI-generated accident reconstruction videos, which are recognized by all parties as AI-generated.Earlier this year, the consortium published a cheat sheet to help judges deal with deepfakes. The document advises judges to ask those providing potentially AI-generated evidence to explain its origin, reveal who had access to the evidence, share whether the evidence had been altered in any way and look for corroborating evidence. In April 2024, a Washington state judge denied a defendant’s efforts to use an AI tool to clarify a video that had been submitted. Beyond this cadre of advocates, judges around the country are starting to take note of AI’s impact on their work, according to Hiljus, the Minnesota judge.“Judges are starting to consider, is this evidence authentic? Has it been modified? Is it just plain old fake? We’ve learned over the last several months, especially with OpenAI’s Sora coming out, that it’s not very difficult to make a really realistic video of someone doing something they never did,” Hiljus said. “I hear from judges who are really concerned about it and who think that they might be seeing AI-generated evidence but don’t know quite how to approach the issue.” Hiljus is currently surveying state judges in Minnesota to better understand how generative AI is showing up in their courtrooms. To address the rise of deepfakes, several judges and legal experts are advocating for changes to judicial rules and guidelines on how attorneys verify their evidence. By law and in concert with the Supreme Court, the U.S. Congress establishes the rules for how evidence is used in lower courts.One proposal crafted by Maura R. Grossman, a research professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo and a practicing lawyer, and Paul Grimm, a professor at Duke Law School and former federal district judge, would require parties alleging that the opposition used deepfakes to thoroughly substantiate their arguments. Another proposal would transfer the duty of deepfake identification from impressionable juries to judges. The proposals were considered by the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules when it conferred in May, but they were not approved. Members argued “existing standards of authenticity are up to the task of regulating AI evidence.” The U.S. Judicial Conference is a voting body of 26 federal judges, overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. After a committee recommends a change to judicial rules, the conference votes on the proposal, which is then reviewed by the Supreme Court and voted upon by Congress.Despite opting not to move the rule change forward for now, the committee was eager to keep a deepfake evidence rule “in the bullpen in case the Committee decides to move forward with an AI amendment in the future,” according to committee notes. Grimm was pessimistic about this decision given how quickly the AI ecosystem is evolving. By his accounting, it takes a minimum of three years for a new federal rule on evidence to be adopted.The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July as the administration’s road map for American AI efforts, highlights the need to “combat synthetic media in the court system” and advocates for exploring deepfake-specific standards similar to the proposed evidence rule changes. Yet other law practitioners think a cautionary approach is wisest, waiting to see how often deepfakes are really passed off as evidence in court and how judges react before moving to update overarching rules of evidence. Jonathan Mayer, the former chief science and technology adviser and chief AI officer at the U.S. Justice Department under President Joe Biden and now a professor at Princeton University, told NBC News he routinely encountered the issue of AI in the court system: “A recurring question was whether effectively addressing AI abuses would require new law, including new statutory authorities or court rules.”“We generally concluded that existing law was sufficient,” he said. However, “the impact of AI could change — and it could change quickly — so we also thought through and prepared for possible scenarios.”In the meantime, attorneys may become the first line of defense against deepfakes invading U.S. courtrooms. Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Scott Schlegel.Courtesy of Scott SchlegelJudge Schlegel pointed to Louisiana’s Act 250, passed earlier this year, as a successful and effective way to change norms about deepfakes at the state level. The act mandates that attorneys exercise “reasonable diligence” to determine if evidence they or their clients submit has been generated by AI. “The courts can’t do it all by themselves,” Schlegel said. “When your client walks in the door and hands you 10 photographs, you should ask them questions. Where did you get these photographs? Did you take them on your phone or a camera?”“If it doesn’t smell right, you need to do a deeper dive before you offer that evidence into court. And if you don’t, then you’re violating your duties as an officer of the court,” he said.Daniel Garrie, co-founder of cybersecurity and digital forensics company Law & Forensics, said that human expertise will have to continue to supplement digital-only efforts. “No tool is perfect, and frequently additional facts become relevant,” Garrie wrote via email. “For example, it may be impossible for a person to have been at a certain location if GPS data shows them elsewhere at the time a photo was purportedly taken.”Metadata — or the invisible descriptive data attached to files that describe facts like the file’s origin, date of creation and date of modification — could be a key defense against deepfakes in the near future. For example, in the Mendones case, the court found the metadata of one of the purportedly-real-but-deepfaked videos showed that the plaintiffs’ video was captured on an iPhone 6, which was impossible given that the plaintiff’s argument required capabilities only available on an iPhone 15 or newer. Courts could also mandate that video- and audio-recording hardware include robust mathematical signatures attesting to the provenance and authenticity of their outputs, allowing courts to verify that content was recorded by actual cameras. Such technological solutions may still run into critical stumbling blocks similar to those that plagued prior legal efforts to adapt to new technologies, like DNA testing or even fingerprint analysis. Parties lacking the latest technical AI and deepfake know-how may face a disadvantage in proving evidence’s origin.Grossman, the University of Waterloo professor, said that for now, judges need to keep their guard up.“Anybody with a device and internet connection can take 10 or 15 seconds of your voice and have a convincing enough tape to call your bank and withdraw money. Generative AI has democratized fraud.”“We’re really moving into a new paradigm,” Grossman said. “Instead of trust but verify, we should be saying: Don’t trust and verify.”Jared PerloJared Perlo is a writer and reporter at NBC News covering AI. He is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
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