How should students, and schools, use AI? San Diego County districts take a patchwork approach

SAN DIEGO — When students are introduced to most new topics, schools can slowly scaffold learning. But that’s not been the case with artificial intelligence, as Poway Unified School District learned.

“We gave students keys to the sports car before we gave them any drivers’ ed,” says Amy Fousek, the district’s director of educational technology, in a November interview.

Across San Diego County, school districts are scrambling to create rules, policies and best practices around generative artificial intelligence — the familiar kinds of AI tools, trained on vast amounts of data, that can generate text, images, code and more.

The approach local schools have taken so far is a patchwork. Some districts are focused on developing rules governing how students can use AI to do their schoolwork. Others, like Poway Unified, are working to develop kids’ AI literacy.

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores to offer heavy discounts on basics, cost $70 million to build

NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled new details about how his planned city-run grocery stores in each borough would work on Tuesday, saying the stores will offer discounted prices for an “essential basket of goods” like bread, eggs and produce.

Mamdani said his administration is still working out the calculation for exactly how much cheaper the items are going to be.

“Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation, and workers will be treated with dignity,” Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday. He announced the location of the Manhattan store during a speech marking his first 100 days in office on Sunday.

The city will start procurement for the East Harlem store this summer, he said, though it won’t be opened until 2029. A private operator will run the store.

—New York Daily News

Alzheimer’s research: Boston scientists find blood test can predict disease before symptoms

BOSTON — The secret might be hidden in our blood. Boston researchers in a new study have found that a blood test can predict Alzheimer’s disease progression years before symptoms or brain scan changes.

The Mass General Brigham scientists discovered that a blood test of plasma phosphorylated tau 217 (pTau217) can detect the earliest signals of Alzheimer’s disease in cognitively healthy adults. The blood test could help identify who may be at risk for cognitive decline, and help “push back the clock to enable earlier Alzheimer’s disease prediction.”

“We used to think that PET scan detection was the earliest sign of Alzheimer’s disease progression, revealing amyloid accumulation in the brain 10 to 20 years before symptoms appear,” said lead author Hyun-Sik Yang, a neurologist with Mass General Brigham Neuroscience Institute.

“But now we are seeing that pTau217 can be detected years earlier, well before clear abnormalities appear on amyloid PET scans,” added Yang, who’s also an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

—Boston Herald

Antisemitic violence at highest level in 30 years, report finds

TEL AVIV, Israel — The number of serious antisemitic crimes worldwide rose to its highest level in three decades last year, according to a report by Tel Aviv University released this week.

Twenty Jews were killed in four attacks on three continents in 2025, according to the university's latest annual report — the highest death toll from antisemitic attacks in more than 30 years. The report, released on Monday, also found that the number of physical assaults such as beatings and stone-throwing had increased in many countries.

The report paints a complex picture. While some countries recorded slight decreases in the total number of antisemitic incidents, levels everywhere remained significantly higher than before 2022 — that is, before the current escalation in the Middle East began.

The massacre in Israel by the militant Islamist Hamas organization on October 7, 2023, was followed by the devastating Gaza war, as well as military confrontations involving Israel and the United States against Iran and its regional allies.

—dpa