News in brief

By The Associated Press

Former Art Institutes students approved for $6B in loan cancellation

WASHINGTON | The Biden administration says it’ll cancel $6 billion in student loans for people who attended the Art Institutes, a system of for-profit colleges that closed the last of its campuses in 2023 amid accusations of fraud. The Education Department says the Art Institutes chain lured students with lies.

The department said Wednesday it’ll automatically erase loans for 317,000 people who attended any Art Institute campus between Jan. 1, 2004, and Oct. 16, 2017. The Education Department says it’s taking action after reviewing evidence from the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Iowa and Pennsylvania.

The Democratic administration says in total it has approved the cancellation of almost $160 billion in student loans through a variety of existing programs.

Russian state media posting more on TikTok

Russian state-affiliated accounts have boosted their use of TikTok and are getting more engagement on the short-form video platform ahead of the U.S. presidential election, according to a study published Thursday by the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

The report states that Russia is increasingly leveraging TikTok to disseminate Kremlin messages in both English and Spanish, with state-linked accounts posting far more frequently on the platform than they did two years ago.

Such accounts are also active on other social media platforms and have a larger presence on Telegram and X than on TikTok. However, the report says user engagement — such as likes, views and shares — on their posts has been much higher on TikTok than on either Telegram or X.

—From AP reports