California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models Sunday.

The decision is a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models in the nation and paved the way for AI safety regulations across the country, supporters said.

Earlier this month, the Democratic governor told an audience at Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by software giant Salesforce, that California must lead in regulating AI in the face of federal inaction but that the proposal “can have a chilling effect on the industry.”

The proposal, which drew fierce opposition from startups, tech giants and several Democratic House members, could have hurt the homegrown industry by establishing rigid requirements, Newsom said.

“While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments,” Newsom said in a statement. “Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it.”

Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.

SpaceX return capsule arrives at ISS

The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.

SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness as the two craft soared 265 miles above Botswana.

NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots’ return.

The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February.

Chemical plant fire causes evacuations

Some residents east of Atlanta were evacuated while others were told to shelter in place Sunday to avoid contaminants from a chemical plant fire that sent dark, billowing gray smoke into the air.

Interstate 20 was shut down in both directions in the area, the Georgia Department of Transportation said in a post on X.

The fire ignited when a sprinkler head malfunctioned around 5 a.m. Sunday at the BioLab plant in Conyers, Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDaniel told reporters. The malfunction caused water to mix with a water-reactive chemical, producing a plume of chemicals. McDaniel said she wasn’t sure what chemicals may have been contained in the plume.

A small fire on the plant’s roof was initially contained, but reignited Sunday afternoon, Sheriff Eric Levett said in a video posted on Facebook as gray smoke spewed into the sky behind him.

Far-right party gets win in Austria

The Freedom Party secured the first far-right national parliamentary election victory in post-World War II Austria on Sunday, finishing ahead of the governing conservatives after tapping into anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other issues. But its chances of governing were unclear.

Preliminary official results showed the Freedom Party finishing first with 29.2% of the vote and Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party was second with 26.5%. The center-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21%. The outgoing government — a coalition of Nehammer’s party and the environmentalist Greens — lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.

Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and longtime campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to be chancellor.

But to become Austria’s new leader, he would need a coalition partner to command a parliamentary majority. Rivals have said they won’t work with Kickl in government.

In its election program, titled “Fortress Austria,” the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.

University suspends tenured law professor

The University of Pennsylvania law school says it is imposing a one-year suspension at half-pay and other sanctions along with a public reprimand on a tenured professor over her comments about race in recent years.

The university said Professor Amy Wax — who has questioned the academic performance of Black students, invited a white nationalist to speak to her class and suggested the country would be better off with less Asian immigration — will also lose her named chair and summer pay in perpetuity and must note in public appearances that she speaks for herself, not as a university or law school member. The university has not, however, fired her or stripped her of tenure.

Wax called allegations of mistreatment of students “totally bogus and made up.”

The university said in a notice that a faculty hearing board concluded after a three-day hearing in May of last year that Wax had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct.” Wax was also accused of “breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race” making “discriminatory and disparaging statements,” some in the classroom, “targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.”

Norway considers Russian border fence

Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 123-mile border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland.

Should the security situation in the delicate Arctic area worsen, the Norwegian government is ready to close the border on short notice, said Enger Mehl, who visited neighboring Finland this summer to learn about how the entire 830-mile Finnish-Russian land border was closed.

Helsinki is currently building fences with a total length of up to 124 miles in separate sections along the border zone that makes up part of NATO’s northern flank and serves as the European Union’s external border.

— From news services