By MICHAEL HILL

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — For decades, a carveout in New York’s child labor laws allowed kids as young as 11 to legally partake in the time-honored tradition of a paper route.

Flipping papers into suburban hedges, bicycling through snow squalls, dodging dogs and getting stiffed for tips became a rite of passage for generations of youths.

But a change to the law quietly made via the state budget this month makes clear the job is now not allowed for anyone under 14 years old. The move was first reported by Politico.

The change comes even though paper boys and girls have mostly gone the way of phone booths, mimeograph machines and their urban “newsie” forebears who shouted “Extra! Extra!” on street corners.

While many teens used to take on paper routes as after-school jobs, that became rarer decades ago as more daily newspapers switched to early morning deliveries. Newspapers are now increasingly online and tend to rely on adults with cars to make home deliveries, according to industry watchers.

“The need for a workforce of kids to go throwing newspapers on stoops is just a thing of the past,” said attorney Allan Bloom, an employment law expert with the Proskauer firm.

Lawmakers made the change as part of a broader update of child labor laws. Bloom likened it to a “cleanup” as lawmakers streamlined the process for employing minors and increased penalties for violating child labor laws.

Diane Kennedy, president of the New York News Publishers Association, said she was not aware of any newspapers in New York using youth carriers.

Christopher Page recalled buying his first guitar on earnings from a paper route started in the late ’70s in suburban Clifton Park, north of Albany.

“I just had a 10-speed that I destroyed,” said Page. “It was truly rain or shine, I’m out there riding the bike. Or even in the winter, I would still ride the bike in the snow through all the potholes and the ice.”

When dogs chased him on his bike, Page would ward them off with his shoulder bag full of newspapers.

At age 13, Jon Sorensen delivered the Syracuse Herald-American on Sunday with his 11-year old brother in the Finger Lakes town of Owasco from the back of their mother’s Chevy station wagon.

“That was back when papers were papers — a lot of sections and a lot of weight,” recalled Sorensen, now 68 and Kennedy’s partner. “I can remember trudging through the snow. … I don’t think I ever dropped one, because if you did you had to be heading back to the car and pick up another copy.”

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Sorensen stayed in the newspaper business as an adult, covering state government and politics for papers including New York Daily News and The Buffalo News.

“The hardest part of the job wasn’t delivering the paper, it was collecting,” Sorensen recalled. “It wasn’t always easy to get people to pay up.”

By CHRISTOPHER WEBER

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When the Vermilion Valley Resort in California’s eastern Sierra shut down for the winter, the staff left cabin doors unlocked just in case a wayward hiker needed shelter during the frequent mountain snowstorms. That decision may have saved the life of Tiffany Slaton, the 27-year-old Georgia woman who was missing for nearly three weeks in remote wilderness.

Owner Christopher Gutierrez spotted a cabin door ajar and a pair of shoes nearby when he arrived Wednesday morning to begin reopening the resort for spring. Suddenly, a young woman appeared in the doorway.

“She pops out, didn’t say a word, just ran up and all she wanted was a hug,” Gutierrez said during a Wednesday evening news conference. “It was a pretty surreal moment, and that’s when I realized who this was.”

It was Slaton, whose parents had reported her missing on April 29 after not hearing from her for more than a week. The Fresno County Sheriff’s office launched a search, and deputies and volunteers scoured more than 600 square miles of the Sierra National Forest, with no luck. Searchers were hampered by heavy snow blocking many roads.

On Monday, the sheriff’s office had announced it was scaling back the search effort. Two days later, she emerged from the cabin.

Gutierrez gave Slaton a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and called authorities, who brought her to a hospital for evaluation. She was hungry and dehydrated, but otherwise in good condition, sheriff’s officials said.

Sheriff’s spokesperson Tony Botti said it was the longest period of time he’s seen someone be missing in the wilderness and survive.

“Three weeks, it’s unheard of,” he said. “It speaks to the tenacity that Tiffany has, that she’s a fighter.”

Thanks to tips from the public, investigators determined that Slaton had been spotted around April 20 near Huntington Lake, more than 20 miles to the southwest through rough terrain. But authorities didn’t provide details about when or where Slaton’s trek began, what her plans were, and what route she took to end up at Vermilion Valley Resort, which sits the Sierra Nevada about halfway between Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon national parks.

This image provide by the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, shows Tiffany Slaton, of Jeffersonville, Ga., when she was rescued in Fresno County, Calif., Wednesday, May 14, 2025 after being reported missing in the High Sierra for three weeks. (Fresno County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

Botti said sheriff’s officials planned to interview Slaton to learn the details of her experience, and how she survived in icy conditions at elevations topping 6,500 feet.

Across the country in Jeffersonville, Georgia, her parents were out shopping when they got word that their daughter had been found.

“I just grabbed somebody and I said, ‘Can I hug you?’ And I did,” said her mother, Fredrina Slaton. “I was crying and hugging.”

Tiffany’s father, Bobby Slaton, said “a ton of weight has been lifted.” He thanked the search-and-rescue team and all the community members who helped in the effort to find her.

Sheriff’s officials said snowplows cleared a key mountain pass earlier Wednesday, which allowed Gutierrez to access the resort on Lake Edison for the first time this year. Gutierrez said he had to spend about an hour and a half breaking up ice before he could get into the property.

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Slaton’s parents said Tiffany was raised with a love of the outdoors, and they always stressed the importance of being able to fend for yourself in a tough situation.

“So it’s nice to know, as parents, that all the things that we’ve taught her, she actually did,” her mother said. “We believe that life is an adventure.”

A St. Paul motorist’s blood-alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit to drive when he slammed into a tree at 60 mph in his North End neighborhood last week, killing one passenger and critically injuring the other, according to charges filed Thursday.

The crash happened just before 10 a.m. May 9 on Cottage Avenue near Galtier Street, an area four blocks west of Rice Street. A 53-year-old man who was a back-seat passenger died two days later while hospitalized. He hasn’t been named, pending notification of next of kin.

A blood sample taken from the driver, Austin Wah, 25, of St. Paul, four hours after the crash showed his blood-alcohol concentration was 0.37, according to the criminal complaint. The legal limit to drive in Minnesota is .08 BAC.

Wah, who was also injured in the crash, remained hospitalized Thursday, when he was charged by warrant in Ramsey County District Court with criminal vehicular homicide and criminal vehicular operation.

According to the complaint, police officers who responded to the crash about 9:50 a.m. in the 200 block of Cottage Avenue West found a Toyota Corolla that had crashed head-on into a tree.

The car’s registered owner, a 35-year-old man, was partially pinned in the front passenger seat and complained of a neck injury. The 53-year-old man was extricated from the car. Both men were taken to Regions Hospital in critical condition and underwent surgeries.

At the crash scene, on a boulevard, officers recovered an empty vodka bottle and another one that was less than a quarter-full.

Officers did not see skid marks in the street to indicate the driver had attempted to stop.

Officers spoke to a witness who said a bald Asian male got out of the driver’s seat and that his face and legs were bleeding. The witness said he told the driver to stay there, but the driver walked away.

Another witness told officers he knew where the driver lived and took them to an apartment at the end of Cottage Avenue. Wah answered the door with no shirt on and had injuries to his chin and left leg. He smelled of alcohol.

Wah’s grandfather told officers that Wah had drunk alcohol earlier that morning at the apartment. He said he met Wah outside after Wah was in a car accident and they walked back to the apartment.

Four witnesses of the crash later identified Wah as the man who had gotten out of the Corolla’s driver’s seat.

Medics responded to treat Wah, who told them he had not drunk alcohol or taken drugs.

At the hospital, the 35-year-old man told police that Wah drove while he was in the front seat and the man’s uncle was in the back.

A registered nurse collected Wah’s blood sample at 1:53 p.m. and it was sent to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for analysis.

Wah agreed to speak with an investigator and claimed the two men showed up at his apartment drunk and asked him for a ride to a store. He admitted to having drank two beers. He said he crashed near a stop sign and walked home, and admitted that he did not call 911 despite knowing his passengers were seriously injured. He said he has an instruction permit to drive.

The results of Wah’s blood sample came back Wednesday.

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Based on damage to the car, an investigator estimated that Wah was going 60 mph at the time of impact. Officers obtained a search warrant to collect event data recorder information from the car.

The deadly crash was the first of two over the weekend in St. Paul’s North End that involved an alleged drunken driver.

On Sunday, Paw Moo Htoo, 30, of St. Paul, was going over 100 mph when he blew through a red light and crashed into an SUV at the intersection of Dale Street and Arlington Avenue, killing the driver, Marvin Martin Scroggins, 42, of St. Paul, according to charges filed Tuesday.

By MATT O’BRIEN

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.

The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.

One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”

“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”

The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”

Musk and his companies haven’t provided an explanation for Grok’s responses, which were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment Thursday.

Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.

Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.

“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.

Graham’s post brought what appeared to be a sarcastic response from Musk’s rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“There are many ways this could have happened. I’m sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon,” wrote Altman, who has been sued by Musk in a dispute rooted in the founding of OpenAI.

Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.

Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Monday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.

In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.

Golbeck believes the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.

“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”