Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Reuters reports: A handful of billionaires and companies are driving corporate spending in U.S. midterm elections this year, and they aren’t the usual power brokers who have sat atop the political food chain in Washington in previous decades. Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political…

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Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

  A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist…

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How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

Chang Che writes: In January 2025, a new regime of Silicon Valley’s AI maximalists took charge of AI policy whose ethos can be summed up by a Bay Area party slogan: “Accelerate or die.” Established federal guardrails were cast off, and a global consensus was scrapped. The February 2025 AI safety summit in Paris was renamed the “AI Action Summit.” In a speech there, Vice-President J.D. Vance warned against “excessive regulation” of the AI industry and criticized those who partnered…

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Americans are backing progressives because they want candidates who will fight for the working class

Americans are backing progressives because they want candidates who will fight for the working class

Robert Reich writes: Most discussions about the Democratic party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats, such as the Florida state representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who scored an upset win in the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday. But an equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats. Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016…

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Trump’s unrequited love for Kim Jong Un will lead to more heartache

Trump’s unrequited love for Kim Jong Un will lead to more heartache

The Associated Press reports: North Korea said Wednesday that a U.S. decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea does not change what it sees as the provocative nature of the drills, dampening hopes for a resumption of diplomacy between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump. The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made the comments Wednesday night in her country’s first reaction to Trump’s moves to drastically cut back the…

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Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

The Hill reports: The top lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing an ethics complaint with the Florida Bar after he launched a “Worst of the Worst” list for federal jurists, attacking their rulings. James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, has in recent weeks taken to social media to criticize judges who have made unfavorable rulings on the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The complaint, filed Wednesday by a group of nearly 130 former federal and state…

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Why the Andoque people of the Amazon fear the seductive dolphin

Why the Andoque people of the Amazon fear the seductive dolphin

Eliran Arazi writes: ‘A nasty one, the dolphin,’ Derode grumbled when he returned home, trading the humid heat of an Amazonian afternoon for the cool, sheltered interior. Inside, his wife Rosa and I shot hungry looks at his empty hands. Once again, the Caquetá River surrendered no fish. I was only two weeks into my fieldwork with the Andoque people in southern Colombia, and my eyes zigzagged in confusion between the two septuagenarian spouses. What did a dolphin have to…

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GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

Axios reports: The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio. In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a “centerpiece” of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) — and that it’s working. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will…

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Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Chang Che writes: So many people had signed up for China’s premier artificial-intelligence expo in mid-July — over 200,000 by some estimates — that the ticketing system had crashed. A mob of frustrated AI enthusiasts had formed outside as a result. “How could they do this to us?” one woman cried. “Report the venue! Dial 12345!” a man hollered, evoking the Chinese equivalent of 311. A decade ago, people around the world traveled to Silicon Valley to glimpse the future….

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Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Wired reports: Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often…

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American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

Greg Sargent writes: It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary…

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‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran

‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran

Politico reports: President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding…

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Trump administration moves to allow roads and logging in pristine national forests

Trump administration moves to allow roads and logging in pristine national forests

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century. The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin…

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Why rivers are so mathematical

Why rivers are so mathematical

Natalie Wolchover writes: A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. The Blanco is a tributary of the San Marcos, which flows into the Guadalupe, and on into the Gulf of Mexico. You can probably…

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