Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Futurism reports: As dozens of cities across the US are forced to scrap their plans to build power-hungry data centers, some civic leaders are no longer asking. According to new reporting by Fortune, the state of Georgia’s for-profit utility company, Georgia Power, is looking to demolish and pave over some 30 homes — and 330 parcels of land — that currently block the route of a 1,000 mile transmission line. When it goes live, the line will distribute nearly 10,000…

Read More Read More

Musk plans a second campaign to poison U.S. democracy

Musk plans a second campaign to poison U.S. democracy

Axios reports: Tech billionaire Elon Musk is jumping into the midterms with a huge investment in a plan to boost Republican voter turnout, Axios has learned. Driving the news: Musk is resuscitating his dormant super PAC, America PAC, which spent more than $260 million to help get President Trump elected in 2024. America PAC will focus on door-knocking, digital advertising and direct mail aimed at turning out the conservative base, including voters who typically are less inclined to cast ballots in a non-presidential election year,…

Read More Read More

Why Iran chose to restart the fight after the U.S. stopped firing

Why Iran chose to restart the fight after the U.S. stopped firing

Abbas Al Lawati writes: Iran has brought days of relative calm in the Middle East to an end after launching what the US called a “surprise” attack in a striking change to the pattern of fighting. Rather than responding to a fresh American strike, Tehran chose to restart the fight itself, showing a growing willingness to use military force to shape the course of the war on its own terms. This in turn sets the stage for fresh escalation. “We…

Read More Read More

Blanche nomination at risk of delay as Cornyn seeks assurances on Trump settlement

Blanche nomination at risk of delay as Cornyn seeks assurances on Trump settlement

The Associated Press reports: A planned vote to move forward with Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general appeared in doubt Wednesday as a key Republican senator demanded more assurances from the Justice Department about the settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. GOP Sen. John Cornyn, a crucial swing vote, told reporters he was not willing to support Blanche’s nomination until the Justice Department adequately addressed in writing his concerns about the settlement that afforded Trump…

Read More Read More

The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

Popular Science reports: The reign of the dinosaurs undisputedly came to a dramatic conclusion 66 million years ago, after the six-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. However, the exact timeline of their extinction remains a matter of debate. Did most of the Earth’s species die a slow death of starvation after a dust-choked atmosphere blocked sunlight and ushered in a prolonged winter? Or did they quickly incinerate from globe-spanning wildfires sparked by falling, superheated space…

Read More Read More

Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Henrique Schneider writes: Data centers have emerged as a crucial element in the realms of geopolitics, energy security and industrial strategy. On the morning of March 1, 2026, three coordinated Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the Gulf, disrupting regional cloud services for days to weeks. The episode crystallized a transition that had been building for years: The quiet warehouses of the digital economy are now contested strategic assets. The scale of what is being built is…

Read More Read More

Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency

Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency

Johnny Ryan writes: On the face of it, Ireland behaves like a good European by being a staunch advocate of human rights and a beacon of progressivism on the western edge of the continent. But there is one vital area in which its record is less than perfect – one that should cause concern when the Irish government takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July. The EU’s tech and AI rulebook will be renegotiated during…

Read More Read More

Oman presents Iran with Gulf-backed plan for voluntary fees to use Strait of Hormuz

Oman presents Iran with Gulf-backed plan for voluntary fees to use Strait of Hormuz

Reuters reports: Oman has presented Iran with a plan backed by Gulf states to manage the Strait of Hormuz, including collecting voluntary fees for using it, ​a Gulf source and a Western diplomat told Reuters on Tuesday. The plan could serve as a basis to end the disruption to trade through the strait caused by the ‌U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. President Donald Trump, who abruptly called off a two-week U.S. bombing campaign over the weekend in his latest strategic U-turn,…

Read More Read More

A $154 billion CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

A $154 billion CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

At Fortune, Nick Lichtenberg writes: Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, whose company commands a market capitalization near $154 billion, told his social media followers this week that a tax-tiered voting system—one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax—would be a “good system.” That two-word endorsement, dropped into a viral thread, has reignited a debate over wealth, power, and democracy that most Americans thought was settled more than a century ago. The proposal would invert the founding…

Read More Read More

This MAGA influencer runs a charity to teach kids civics. Much of the money goes to him instead

This MAGA influencer runs a charity to teach kids civics. Much of the money goes to him instead

By Kali Bomeli This story was originally published by ProPublica In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached 2 million children with civics education since its founding in 2016. “I hope you understand…

Read More Read More

How Trump’s ‘America First’ administration could shut U.S. scientists out of the next Nobel-worthy discovery

How Trump’s ‘America First’ administration could shut U.S. scientists out of the next Nobel-worthy discovery

By Lisa Song This story was originally published by ProPublica For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself. The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field,…

Read More Read More

Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Science reports: Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research. Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never…

Read More Read More

How the AI data center blitzkrieg advances through secrecy and backroom deals

How the AI data center blitzkrieg advances through secrecy and backroom deals

The New York Times reports: A Louisiana state legislative committee was about to consider a bill in April 2024 when Richard Nelson, then the state’s revenue secretary, received an urgent message from Gov. Jeff Landry. Get the bill passed, the newly elected Republican governor told him, because they needed it for something else. Mr. Nelson walked across a room in Baton Rouge’s towering State Capitol to the bill’s author, Chris Turner, a Republican state representative. “‘Hey, we need to hijack…

Read More Read More

AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

Futurism reports: The tech overlords pushing the AI boom are quickly wearing out what little welcome they had. You may have noticed big-name AI labs pushing new commercials lately. Meta’s new 60-second ad spot insists that the “future is for everyone,” even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth eclipses the GDP of Hungary. Anthropic’s new commercial for Claude assures viewers that there’s “hope in hard questions,” seemingly embracing the discomfort that comes when your software is used to bomb…

Read More Read More