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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Russians pull billions from banks, amid fears the Kremlin will seize deposits for war in Ukraine

Russians pull billions from banks, amid fears the Kremlin will seize deposits for war in Ukraine

The Washington Post reports: Russians are pulling billions from the country’s banking system ― a record cash outflow amid intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks and rising fear that the Kremlin could start seizing deposits to finance its war. Nearly $3.4 billion (286.4 billion rubles) was withdrawn in the first two weeks of August, on top of the $7.3 billion withdrawn in July and more than $4.5 billion in June, according to Russian Central Bank data. Total withdrawals this year could nearly…

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In a major shift, Gov. Josh Shapiro restricts data center development in Pennsylvania

In a major shift, Gov. Josh Shapiro restricts data center development in Pennsylvania

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports: Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a sweeping executive order on Tuesday dramatically restricting data center development in Pennsylvania, marking a major shift from his initial embrace of the increasingly unpopular projects. Shapiro, a first-term Democrat running for reelection and a rumored 2028 presidential contender, had been an early champion of data center development in the state, including a $20 billion commitment from Amazon to build at least two data centers in Bucks and Luzerne Counties. Now he…

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How Israel is trying to shape what AI tells users about Gaza

How Israel is trying to shape what AI tells users about Gaza

Politico Influence reports: Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum. — French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion’s share of Israel’s Foreign Agents Registration Act-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an “institute” aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc. — In a…

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Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday. The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into…

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Trump admin has deleted or altered nearly 400 datasets, endangering public health, education and more

Trump admin has deleted or altered nearly 400 datasets, endangering public health, education and more

The Guardian reports: A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world. These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities. Over the past year…

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Trump’s plan to paint the Eisenhower building: Abject stupidity, or, territorial marking?

Trump’s plan to paint the Eisenhower building: Abject stupidity, or, territorial marking?

The New York Times reports: A judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration could inch forward on a plan to paint the gray granite exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Building white. In an order from the bench in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich said that initial tests to evaluate how the paint would affect the building’s walls and other preparations would not directly harm preservationist groups who sued to stop the effort. But she warned…

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Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

Ian Towle, CC BY By Ian Towle, Monash University Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Each of these is a “genus”, the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.) These names dominate how we talk about human origins. But new fossils, advances in genetic analysis, and more rigorous methods for figuring out who’s related to whom…

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