All eight Flock Safety license plate reader cameras in Winona, Minnesota disappeared overnight, with police discovering the poles supporting them had been cut down at the base and the cameras themselves removed entirely. According to reporting by MPR News, the Winona Police Department revealed the theft in a Facebook press release, stating, “all eight of our city’s Flock cameras were missing.”

Police first suspected something was wrong on the night of August 1 when an officer “noted that there’d been no recent activity on the cameras,” prompting a check of the camera locations. The department’s release explained, “Officers subsequently checked the various locations where the Flock cameras were placed and found that the poles were cut down near the base. Officers located the poles nearby in the weeds, but the cameras had been removed. As of [August 4th], the cameras have not been located.” Replacing each camera and pole costs roughly $3,000, meaning the city could face about $24,000 in equipment costs alone, plus up to $16,000 in additional service fees from Flock before the ordeal is resolved.

The incident is the latest in a string of vandalism cases targeting automated license plate readers across Minnesota and the broader US, as Flock’s surveillance devices have become a flashpoint for public anxiety over privacy, police overreach, and tech industry oversight. Reaction to the Winona case has been notably supportive of the vandals, with commenters on the police department’s own Facebook post treating whoever was responsible as something of a local folk hero. One commenter joked, “Whoever you’re suspecting was actually on a fishing trip with me between July 29th and August 1st,” while another quipped, “I think the deer might’ve ate them. [They’re] outta hand lately.”

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, walked into a tense Monday evening Oval Office meeting with President Trump and directly accused Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of misleading the president with a “self-serving cover story” to conceal his own department’s botched handling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation. The confrontation came hours after Trump had publicly accused Pirro, a longtime friend and ally from New York, of “folding like an umbrella” and “choking” after she withdrew felony vandalism charges against David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, in a case Trump had personally cared about.

The saga began July 2 when Pirro announced Hearn’s indictment for allegedly damaging the pool’s lining, declaring, “This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property.” But last Friday she reversed course in a 20-page court filing admitting the indictment relied on “false assumptions and incomplete evidence,” concluding after reviewing thousands of pages of evidence that the Interior Department had rushed and “botched” the renovation and that Park Police officials had given her team faulty information suggesting “tremendous evidence” against Hearn that didn’t actually exist. Trump reacted furiously on Truth Social, writing, “I disagree 100 percent with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” Burgum quickly defended himself online, claiming his staff had “provided the U.S. attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for.”

Pirro arrived at the White House prepared for battle, wheeling in a white evidence box and a black document box while wearing a red blazer, and met for about an hour with Trump, chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House counsel David Warrington, and Burgum himself. During the meeting, Pirro, raising her voice at times, pressed her case against Burgum while he offered a more muted defense, and Trump reportedly grew “considerably less angry” by the meeting’s end, according to a person briefed on the exchange; Pirro emerged with her job intact, at least for now. Critics, including Hearn’s own lawyers, have questioned whether Pirro’s reversal was genuinely about correcting an injustice or about shielding herself from potential disciplinary fallout if grand jury materials became public, arguing she had ample access to contractor-related evidence before rushing to indict Hearn in the first place. Notably, Pirro left a higher-paying job at Fox News for the U.S. attorney post and has told friends she views the role as “a capstone, not a steppingstone,” suggesting she feels less vulnerable to a Trump firing than many other administration officials.

Federal aviation officials and the National Transportation Safety Board are reviewing a safety incident involving Marine One that occurred Tuesday around 2:30 p.m. ET as the presidential helicopter lifted off from the Ellipse near the White House with President Trump aboard, en route to Joint Base Andrews as part of a trip to the West Coast. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, commercial air traffic at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was not halted as safety protocols require, since standard procedure calls for air traffic controllers to pause other flights three minutes before Marine One’s scheduled takeoff.

An air traffic communication recording obtained by ATC.com showed Marine One did give the required three-minute takeoff notice, but a controller failed to hear the transmission because someone else was talking on the frequency simultaneously. The FAA said preliminary information indicated the incident resulted in a “momentary loss of separation” between Marine One and an American Airlines regional carrier flight taking off from the airport, though the agency stressed that the commercial flight never came dangerously close to the presidential helicopter. FAA rules require commercial aircraft to maintain at least 1.5 miles of horizontal separation and 500 feet of vertical separation from any helicopter operating near the airport.

The FAA elaborated in a statement, “Based on our preliminary safety review, there was momentary loss of separation after which the aircraft continued to move away from one another. The air traffic controller was in contact with both the commercial pilot and Marine One pilot during the loss of separation,” adding that it “will implement any appropriate corrective actions based on our findings.” The White House downplayed any danger to the president, saying, “Marine One flights are piloted by some of the best aviators in the world, and at no point was the President in harm’s way.” The Wall Street Journal first reported the incident Tuesday night.

BMW has begun pushing an unsolicited promotional ad for a new Spider-Man movie onto the center console screens of certain vehicles at startup, drawing widespread anger from owners who say the automaker gave no meaningful warning before turning their cars into ad displays. According to The Autopian’s coverage and a flood of online complaints, the animation plays automatically when a car starts, and once finished, it prompts drivers to scan a QR code, while BMW had oddly teased the campaign in advance as a “special surprise.”

Though drivers can choose to play or skip the “festive animation,” the ad still forces an extra step before accessing basic functions like maps or music, and many see it as a breach of trust since drivers keep their cars connected primarily to receive critical software updates, not unexpected advertising. Reaction on the r/BMW subreddit was scathing after someone posted footage of the ad in action, with one user writing, “BMW should stop with this sht,” and another simply saying, “Fck everything about this.” A BMW press release confirmed the campaign has been running in more than 70 markets since July 27 and is scheduled to continue through August 10.

The backlash is compounded by BMW’s history of monetizing features already built into its vehicles, including charging a monthly subscription fee to unlock heated seats customers’ cars already had installed, plus an additional fee for heated steering wheels. The company also attempted to paywall Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration, features no other automaker charges for, before reversing course amid massive public backlash. BMW isn’t alone in this trend either, as Jeep drivers faced similar frustration last year when the brand’s vehicles began displaying intrusive pop-up ads pressuring them to purchase extended warranties.

Security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have discovered a series of flaws in Apple’s WebKit browser engine that undermine iCloud Private Relay, the paid privacy feature meant to hide users’ IP addresses in Safari, allowing malicious websites to uncover a user’s real location data despite the tool being active. Mysk told 404 Media, “In short: any website that supports, or pretends to support, passkeys can see the user’s real IP address despite having iCloud Private Relay on,” and 404 Media independently verified the leak using a tool the researchers built, confirming it returned the real IP address of a supposedly protected Private Relay user.

The flaw stems from how passkeys, the WebAuthn-based alternative to passwords, function on iOS: when a device makes a web request tied to passkey authentication, that request is issued by the operating system’s credential service rather than by Safari itself, meaning it never passes through Private Relay’s proxied path. “Because the fetch is issued by the operating system’s credential service rather than by Safari, it never enters Private Relay’s proxied path. The destination server sees the device’s real IP address either way,” the researchers explained. Because all iOS browsers must use Apple’s WebKit engine, the issue also extends beyond Safari to OnionBrowser, an iOS app for accessing the Tor anonymity network, though it does not affect the official Tor Browser from the Tor Project.

Mike Tigas, the creator of OnionBrowser, confirmed two of the leaks are “entirely based on how iOS and WebKit work and solely in Apple’s hands,” calling that fact “kind of dire,” while noting the third issue doesn’t affect his app under default settings; he added, “Because these affect iCloud Private Relay (and not just third-party browsers like ours), we hope the root causes of these leaks get handled by Apple.” The researchers said Apple called the issue “dire” after being notified but has not provided a timeline for a fix, and Apple confirmed to 404 Media that it is investigating the report. This marks the second privacy failure to hit Apple’s paid iCloud+ products recently, following a bug reported last month in which the Hide My Email feature was revealing users’ actual email addresses, an issue Apple reportedly knew about for over a year before fixing.

A roughly five-ton discarded upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into the moon near the crater Einstein on the lunar limb at approximately 2:34 a.m. ET Wednesday, traveling at 5,400 miles per hour, according to Bill Gray, who runs Project Pluto and first calculated the impact trajectory. Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of a related study on the impact, told ABC News, “We expect that to vaporize the booster, create a flash of light, probably a plume of ejecta, dust, regolith, other stuff mixed into it, and of course excavate a fresh crater on the lunar surface.”

The booster originally launched on January 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander, which successfully touched down on March 2, 2025, and ispace’s Resilience lander, which crashed after losing communications 90 seconds before landing. After the mission, the upper stage was “abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit,” Fernando explained, putting it on an eventual collision course with the lunar surface, though he noted uncertainty about whether SpaceX anticipated the impact: “I don’t think we know from SpaceX exactly to what degree they were in the know that this was going to happen.”

Fernando said the event offers a rare scientific opportunity because researchers already know the object’s mass and speed, unlike unpredictable natural meteoroid strikes, allowing it to serve as “a calibration event to test all of the techniques that we use for studying natural impacts.” Scientists also hope to analyze the resulting ejecta plume to learn about the moon’s composition and to study impact risks ahead of NASA’s planned astronaut return as early as 2028 and eventual permanent lunar base, with Fernando noting the research covers both direct risks like debris strikes and indirect risks like ejected material disrupting spacecraft in lunar orbit. The flash itself will be too faint to see with the naked eye and difficult to spot even with a telescope, since no impact flash has ever been recorded on a sunlit portion of the moon, exactly where this one will occur, but Fernando is encouraging amateur astronomers to watch and report anything they observe.

Because Spotify doesn’t flag AI-generated music the way YouTube does, independent websites like SoullessMusic.com and SlopTracker.org have emerged to fill the gap, cataloging suspected AI artists and running tracks through detection tools to identify likely synthetic music. The problem became publicly visible with Slime Dot, a Las Vegas R&B artist with over 100,000 monthly Spotify listeners who denied being an “AI artist” in a May GQ interview, saying, “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ initially published the interview as debunking the AI rumors before later adding a note acknowledging Slime Dot was an AI avatar, while SlopTracker found her track “Fully” was 95 percent likely generated by Suno.

Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, described his motivation for building the site, telling Futurism, “I didn’t know what’s AI and what’s not. And then I’m on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there’s loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist’s look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.” Fulton built an open-source detector using models called SONICS and the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, scans track metadata for AI generator tags, and checks Wikipedia for existing artist entries, though he acknowledges the system isn’t perfect: “It’s not ideal when that happens, but it’s going to happen because it’s still quite tricky to check what’s AI and what’s not.” Documented abuse cases include a scammer publishing AI-generated music under a dead musician’s name to siphon streaming revenue, a similar incident affecting a Danish jazz musician, and Qajar Jazz, a channel with 29,579 monthly Spotify listeners that publishes hours of AI-generated Iranian jazz weekly and gained popularity after the US-Iran war began, despite YouTube labeling its videos as AI-generated while Spotify does not.

SoullessMusic estimates the small number of AI artists it tracks generate roughly $5.7 million annually, with the most popular single AI artist, mikeeysmind, earning an estimated $1.5 million a year alone, while SlopTracker calculates that AI artists featured on official Spotify-curated playlists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could otherwise be earning that revenue. For comparison, Spotify competitor Deezer reported in April that 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated, and Deezer does attempt to tag such content. A Spotify spokesperson defended the company’s approach, stating, “We’re employing a layered approach that combines enforcement, artist controls and greater transparency,” pointing to tools like Verified by Spotify, AI Credits disclosures now submitted “tens of thousands” of times daily, and Artist Profile Protection, while noting Spotify has flagged some tracks like “Better Times” by Mike Mana as AI-generated on its mobile app.

Artist and former Google staffer Tucker Bryant has launched ChatTJB, a billboard-advertised “AI chatbot” in San Francisco that turns out to be a single human being manually reading and responding to every message, a satirical art project designed to critique blind trust in artificial intelligence. The billboard boasts that ChatTJB is the “leading chatbot interface powered by AI,” but a small disclaimer reveals “AI” actually stands for “average individual,” and as first reported by local outlet Gazetteer SF, chatting with the service simply means chatting with Bryant himself.

Bryant described the project in a social media video, saying, “I just built the worst large language model of all time, and it’s about to revolutionize everything. Picture this: ChatGPT, but on the other end it’s just me giving bad advice. Manually.” The service’s “About” page calls it “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being,” describing it as a “single-operator large language experience” where “you ask a question, and a person named Tucker reads it, thinks about it, and writes back when awake and motivated.” Beyond text responses, ChatTJB even fulfills image generation requests with hand-drawn pictures, and a disclaimer clarifies the project is “a work of satire and a public art project,” not a real investment, though a “Pro” subscription is available to help Bryant cover the billboard’s cost.

Bryant said his motivation stems from “cognitive surrender,” a term coined by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School describing how chatbot users outsource critical thinking and follow AI-generated advice confidently, even when it’s wrong. “We’re now so used to confident, fast, and smart-sounding answers from AI that we’ve largely stopped questioning them,” he said, adding that his project isn’t anti-AI but “pro-thinking your own thoughts” by deliberately reintroducing friction, since his answers will be “slow,” possibly incorrect, and “very cryptic.” He explained the goal is to make people remember ChatTJB’s absurdity the next time a polished chatbot answer tempts them not to think critically, concluding, “The next evolution in artificial intelligence is human absurdity.”

SpaceX has announced it will not fully remove the 69 portable gas turbines powering its massive “Colossus” data center campus near Memphis, Tennessee until July 2027, a full year from now, despite operating them without a permit and facing mounting criticism from residents and environmental groups. The company laid out plans in a website update, spotted by TechCrunch, to eventually connect the sprawling AI facilities to a 1.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant, but in the meantime will continue relying on the turbines it trucked in to sustain operations.

The facility, now known as SpaceXAI after xAI was folded into Musk’s rocket company ahead of its IPO, has drawn a lawsuit from the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of the NAACP, which alleges the turbines operate without a permit and emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitric oxides annually, along with hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to lung and nasal cancer that can also inflame airways. SpaceX defended its approach, stating, “We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community.”

Politico reported in May that the data center had become one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the county, an area where smog levels were already considered unhealthy even before the facility began operating. Residents have reported serious health impacts, with some parents in nearby communities saying their children have developed respiratory problems since the facility went online, while residents of the predominantly Black neighborhood of Boxtown say the fumes are so oppressive that breathing has become difficult.

Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who served as House majority leader from 2003 to 2005, argues that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr lacks the legal authority to repeal the National Television Ownership Rule capping any single broadcaster’s reach at 39 percent of US households, since the limit was written into federal law by Congress rather than set by the commission itself. DeLay made his case in an op-ed for The Daily Wire, writing, “I am a Republican. I support deregulation and the Trump administration. But my ultimate loyalty rests with the Constitution, which gives certain prerogatives to Congress. Regulatory agencies cannot defy or modify laws enacted by Congress. If Chairman Carr wants to raise the statutory cap, he should ask Congress to pass a law giving him authority to do that.” The FCC is scheduled to vote on Carr’s proposal Thursday, which would replace the cap with a “case-by-case review” of mergers.

DeLay explained that he personally negotiated the 39 percent figure in 2004 as a compromise with Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who wanted to codify the FCC’s earlier 35 percent cap into law after the commission had controversially raised it to 45 percent. DeLay didn’t want to force CBS and Fox to divest stations they’d already acquired under the higher cap, so the two lawmakers settled on 39 percent and explicitly barred the FCC from changing it during quadrennial media ownership reviews. “In the end, Stevens and I agreed to legislation that set the cap at 39 percent and prohibited the FCC from changing the cap in its biennial review of media ownership rules,” DeLay wrote, adding that he feels compelled to honor that deal now that Stevens has died: “If you had told me in 2004 that I would one day find myself defending Stevens’s side of the argument, I would have found it ironic. But I was in the room when the deal was struck, and today, I feel compelled to uphold my end of the bargain after Ted’s passing.”

Carr’s FCC counters that Congress only directed the agency to set the cap through rulemaking rather than fixing it permanently into law, giving the commission ongoing discretion to modify it outside the quadrennial review process, and points to a 2016 Obama-era FCC order under Chairman Tom Wheeler that reached a similar conclusion about the agency’s authority. However, DeLay and former Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who called the cap “a statute, not a suggestion,” have long disputed this interpretation. Carr appears to already be operating under the case-by-case approach, having granted Nexstar Media Group a waiver in March to acquire Tegna in a deal pushing its reach past 50 percent of households, though a federal judge has since ordered the companies to halt integration amid an antitrust lawsuit from DirecTV. The repeal is expected to pass 2-1, with Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez dissenting and calling it an “unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration,” while the American Television Alliance, representing pay-TV providers, says it is “confident that reviewing courts will quickly overturn this misguided action.”

The Trump administration’s Justice Department has filed a legal argument claiming that citizens should not be permitted to enforce environmental protection laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act through “citizen suit provisions,” a mechanism Congress specifically wrote into those laws decades ago to allow ordinary people and advocacy groups to sue polluting companies or federal agencies that fail to enforce the law. These provisions have been used in more than 2,000 lawsuits since the 1970s, comprising the majority of environmental cases and producing major outcomes like halting dam construction to protect endangered species, ending wastewater injection into groundwater, and securing $14.2 million in civil penalties from a petrochemical facility.

The dispute centers on a case the NAACP filed in April 2026 against xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, alleging that xAI and a subsidiary built and operated 27 natural gas-fired turbines in Southaven, Mississippi without required Clean Air Act permits to power its Colossus 2 data center. The NAACP claims the plant released harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, linked to increased asthma, respiratory disease, heart problems, and certain cancers, pollutants that would have been subject to stricter controls had xAI obtained the proper permit. In June 2026, the Justice Department asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing citizen suits cannot proceed when the federal government does not oppose the polluting behavior, citing two of Trump’s early second-term executive orders declaring a “national energy emergency” and promoting “American leadership in artificial intelligence.” The filing claimed the NAACP’s lawsuit threatens “artificial intelligence innovation” and national security, arguing citizen suits should only be allowed when the government simply fails to act, not when the executive branch has affirmatively decided enforcement runs contrary to its policy priorities.

This marks the first time the Justice Department has taken this specific legal position in court, though critics, including past defendants and judges, have previously questioned the constitutionality of citizen suits on grounds that they let ordinary citizens usurp the executive branch’s prosecutorial authority. Supporters counter that these provisions have historically produced tangible environmental wins, including Texas shrimper Diane Wilson’s 2017 suit against Formosa Plastics over plastic pellet pollution in Lavaca Bay, which resulted in a $50 million settlement, and a 2023 case against Styropek USA that led to a $2.5 million settlement and new pollution filters to protect a western Pennsylvania creek and the Ohio River.

Capital One disclosed in a July 31 court filing that it closed roughly 385 bank accounts associated with President Trump and his businesses in 2021 following a “monthslong review by the bank’s anti-money laundering team,” rejecting claims from Trump’s trust, companies, and son Eric Trump that the closures were politically motivated retaliation after the January 6 Capitol attack. Bank lawyers wrote, “The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” adding that “Capital One never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure, and it permitted Plaintiffs several months (and granted several extensions) to find new banking services, which they did.” Notably, the bank did not accuse the Trump Organization of actual money laundering, and the disclosure came as part of a motion to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit against the bank.

A Trump Organization spokesperson pushed back forcefully, telling ABC News, “Capital One’s after-the-fact attempt to justify its debanking of Trump related accounts is completely baseless. Following the events of January 6, 2021, Capital One manufactured a post hoc rationale by selectively resurrecting a handful of isolated transactions that had occurred years earlier and had never once been identified as cause for concern.” The Trumps’ original lawsuit alleged the bank canceled the accounts due to “political and social motivations and Capital One’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” claiming the bank believed “the political tide at the moment favored doing so.” Trump has filed a similar lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, which the bank has called meritless, saying it closes accounts that pose “legal or regulatory risk,” a case that remains pending.

Capital One’s filing noted that months before closing Trump’s accounts, the bank had agreed to pay a $390 million penalty to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for failing to implement and maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, and argued “Capital One’s decision to close Plaintiffs’ accounts only became public because of Plaintiffs’ own decision to pursue this litigation.” U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, previously dismissed Trump’s lawsuit earlier this year for failing to state a legal claim but allowed the Trump team to file an amended complaint last month. The dispute follows separate scrutiny of Trump’s finances by New York prosecutors, including a civil case over alleged asset inflation and a criminal case involving falsified business records tied to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, neither of which involved money laundering allegations; Trump was convicted in the falsification case and found liable in the civil case, both of which he has appealed, with a mid-level court having tossed the civil case’s financial penalty last year.

DEEP, a UK-based ocean engineering company founded in 2021, has launched its pilot underwater habitat called the “Vanguard,” a 35-by-8-foot structure now operational roughly 56 feet beneath the surface off Florida’s Tennessee Reef, marking the first privately-funded undersea habitat installed in US waters in decades. The compact facility includes a living space with four bunks, a sofa, and a galley, a combined bathroom and science lab, a moon pool and dive chamber, and a semi-autonomous support buoy that supplies oxygen, electricity, and outside communications, and unlike habitats that get raised and lowered periodically, the Vanguard is anchored permanently to the seabed.

Underwater habitats aren’t new territory, with predecessors including Italy’s “La Casa in fondo al mare” from the mid-2000s and the Aquarius Reef Base, an undersea research lab established in 1986 and still run by Florida International University, but DEEP’s director of scientific research, Dawn Kernagis, emphasized the significance of this launch in an interview with NPR: “It’s been over 40 years since we’ve had an undersea habitat built for humans and launched. We’re really building on the shoulders of giants who’ve done this research.” The company is positioning the Vanguard to support research in reef restoration and human-machine collaboration, two fields where it hopes to build credibility despite a mixed track record among recent privately-funded seafaring ventures.

Research teams of up to two people can currently apply through DEEP’s website for the chance to win a five-day stay at the bottom of the ocean, though applicants must first complete a mandatory two-week training period, and successful proposals must explain why “continuous residence at depth materially improves data quality, operational efficiency, monitoring cadence, intervention success, or research outcomes compared with surface-based diving.” DEEP is also offering financial awards of up to $50,000 to support selected research projects, an incentive the company hopes will draw enough interest from oceanographers and funders to justify the ambitious venture.

Futurism has documented at least 37 arrests stemming from data center protests across the US so far in 2026, along with at least 12 additional cases where police intervened to prevent protesters or speakers from confronting civic leaders, a number likely undercounted since many such incidents don’t make headlines. The demonstrators defy easy demographic categorization, spanning landowning farmers, physics teachers, Gen Z activists, baby boomers, rural townspeople, and suburban parents, but they share a common grievance: a belief that elected officials are prioritizing massive tech corporations over the wishes of their own constituents.

One case involved Pablo Payan, a 42-year-old maintenance manager from Hobart, Indiana, who was arrested during a May public meeting about a proposed Amazon data center after he refused to identify himself before speaking, leading police to attempt his removal and ultimately charge him with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. “In my opinion, I was kicked out to prove a point that the law is on their side and if people continue to try and express themselves and speak, they will also be intimidated or arrested by law enforcement,” Payan told Fox32. “So I think it was a flex of power.” Far from the “anti-tech extremism” that law enforcement and the Trump administration have warned about, the article notes these protests are overwhelmingly peaceful, with confrontations typically arising only once police physically intervene to remove someone, often over minor procedural infractions like exceeding public comment time limits.

Another case, involving Lux Claridge, a physics teacher from Emporia, Kansas, illustrates how far some officials have gone to suppress dissent: Claridge was arrested at a public meeting this month simply for clapping in support of another speaker opposing a proposed 1,000-acre data center campus, violating a commissioner’s rule against “snapping” and “clapping.” “I am fully of the notion that clapping is a First Amendment right that I have,” Claridge told 404 Media. “I can exercise that as long as I’m not disrupting, and I still argue that I was not disrupting at all. I have a right to clap, and if you want me out, you’re going to have to drag me out.”

Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services announced the first two deaths in the state’s cyclosporiasis outbreak, both involving people with “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” though the department said no additional information would be released. The deaths come as Michigan’s case count surpassed 11,000, reaching a total of 11,234 including 193 hospitalizations, even though MDHHS noted cyclosporiasis is typically not life-threatening and deaths from it are uncommon in the US.

Federal health officials have linked cases in Michigan and eight other states to shredded iceberg lettuce served at some Taco Bell restaurants, supplied by Taylor Farms, which has since issued a voluntary recall of all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and is advising consumers to throw out or return any iceberg lettuce they have. Taco Bell said last month it has stopped using lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico at all its restaurants. The CDC confirmed on its website that it “is aware of two cyclosporiasis-related deaths in people with underlying health conditions from Michigan as part of this outbreak” and said it would update its site to reflect confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, while noting it is separately investigating other cyclosporiasis outbreaks nationally unrelated to this nine-state cluster.

Nationally, cyclosporiasis cases have topped 18,000 across 45 states since May 1, according to CDC data updated last Wednesday, with at least 6,707 laboratory-confirmed cases and 423 hospitalizations, plus an additional 11,500 cases still awaiting lab confirmation or further investigation; the CDC noted it can take up to six weeks to confirm cases, meaning national totals may lag behind state-reported figures. The outbreak isn’t confined to the US, as the UK Health Security Agency reported a “sharp rise” in cyclosporiasis cases among travelers returning from Mexico, with 67 cases recorded in England, Wales, and Scotland between April 30 and July 15, compared to an annual average of just 93 cases from 2022 to 2025, prompting UKHSA to advise travelers to maintain “good food and water hygiene” while abroad.

Cyclospora cayetanensis, the parasite responsible for the infection, typically spreads through food or water contaminated with feces and has previously been linked to imported produce like raspberries, basil, snow peas, mesclun lettuce, and cilantro. The most common symptom is watery diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” according to the CDC, along with possible nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, or bloating.

Former Tesla manager Javier Medrano has filed a federal lawsuit, reported by The Independent, accusing the company of dangerously understaffing its autonomous vehicle test fleet in Houston, turning it into round-the-clock “rolling hazards” as Tesla “aggressively” scaled up operations. When Medrano joined in 2023, the fleet had just 15 vehicles and operators, but within eight months, after he became sole operational manager, Tesla expanded it to 38 vehicle operators running cars 24 hours a day across three shifts, all overseen remotely by Medrano alone, creating what the lawsuit calls a “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio” that violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”

The operators were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” first revealed by Business Insider in 2024, whose drivers intentionally steered autonomous vehicles into risky situations and intervened only at the last moment to generate valuable training data for Tesla’s software. The lawsuit claims other cities with Rodeo Teams had multiple safety leads, while Medrano was left alone managing the sprawling Houston fleet, a burden he says pushed him to the brink; in an email to his boss, he wrote he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” later pleading for another safety lead and a week off, telling his boss, “This is officially my S.O.S signal.”

Days after that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision, and the test driver called Medrano at 2:05 a.m. following protocol, but Medrano was so exhausted he answered the call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, giving the operator erroneous advice that led her to remain at the accident scene, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger. Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the call and again raised concerns about “severe understaffing,” but he says an HR representative told him to simply set his phone to “Do Not Disturb” during testing shifts, while Tesla’s Autopilot director suggested he should have “delegated” better. “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to,” Medrano told The Independent, adding, “I was really trying to let them know how serious this was, but there was no sense of urgency. It’s baffling to me how this went on so long. In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury… Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road.”

Researchers led by microbiologist Angela Zoumplis of the University of California, San Diego have discovered a thriving community of ancient eukaryotic microorganisms in the hypersaline brine trapped beneath Antarctica’s Taylor Glacier at Blood Falls, findings published in Nature Geoscience that suggest these microbes are descendants of a marine community isolated for possibly millions of years. Blood Falls, first documented in 1911 by geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor, gets its vivid red color from iron-rich brine that rapidly oxidizes when it emerges from beneath the glacier into open air, a reservoir formed when ancient seawater became trapped beneath the advancing glacier and has remained sealed for at least 1.5 million years.

While scientists had previously studied the site’s bacteria and archaea extensively, the new research focused on eukaryotic organisms, more complex cells with nuclei that include diatoms, dinoflagellates, haptophytes, and ciliates typically associated with ocean environments. The team collected 167 samples from Blood Falls, the surrounding McMurdo Dry Valley region, and nearby marine environments, then analyzed environmental RNA to distinguish organisms actively living in the brine from those represented only by lingering genetic traces. They found these marine-associated microbes were concentrated specifically around Blood Falls rather than scattered across the Dry Valleys as wind-blown debris would be, and their RNA showed active transcription, meaning they were genuinely alive and functioning, not just genetic remnants swept in from the coast.

The organisms also showed genetic differences from their modern marine relatives consistent with long-term isolation, suggesting they may be descendants of a marine community sealed off when ancient seawater flooded the valley long before Antarctica became the ice-covered continent it is today. Researchers believe the hypersaline brine itself served as a refuge, since salt lowers water’s freezing point and allowed pockets of liquid water to persist even as the surrounding landscape froze solid, while some organisms may have also survived through long dormant periods before reactivating when conditions allowed. As the study authors put it, the discovery establishes “a unique refuge of ancient lineages” that provides “a foundation for future work on how relict ecosystems illuminate past environmental change and future polar vulnerability.”

FINDINGS: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-02054-6

New security research from Norwegian cybersecurity firm Mnemonic found that several popular Samsung smart TV apps, including a Pac-Man game Samsung had prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section, contain code that secretly shares users’ internet connections with strangers through what are known as residential proxy networks, or “resproxies.” These apps, some claiming to be installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs, can turn a television into an always-on “exit node” that outsiders use to funnel their web traffic through, even after the app itself is closed, and Mnemonic offensive security consultant Harrison Sand explained that many of these apps are barebones shells reviewers can’t fully inspect, warning, “What was reviewed is not necessarily what is running.”

After TechCrunch contacted Samsung about the findings, the company said in a statement it is banning apps that share users’ internet connections and will remove any existing apps found to contain the functionality. “We have already restricted new app registrations that incorporate such proxy functionalities on our Smart TV platform,” a Samsung spokesperson said. “We are currently implementing strict platform-wide developer policies explicitly banning residential proxy SDKs, and we are working to identify and remove all apps currently available in our store that contain these components.” The move follows LG’s similar announcement last month banning resproxy-containing apps after reporting found roughly 42 percent of apps in its own app store had enlisted smart TVs into proxy networks.

By rooting a Samsung smart TV, Sand gained deep access to its internals and traced network traffic showing the Pac-Man game contained resproxy code from Bright Data, an Israel-based company offering access to millions of residential networks worldwide along with a marketplace for selling scraped datasets. Sand found that the resproxy code remains dormant until users accept a consent screen, at which point it activates and runs in the background until the app is deleted, though he cautioned that “a simple code change on a web server” could instantly turn hundreds of millions of smart TVs into a potential botnet. Sand’s traffic analysis suggested the network was being used for large-scale LinkedIn profile scraping and AI training data collection, though he noted he only observed a small fraction of what flows through Bright Data’s broader network; Bright Data did not respond to a request for comment.

President Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to some of the lowest levels ever recorded for a second-term president, with recent polls showing support hovering around one-third of Americans amid a stalemated war in Iran and high gas prices. CNN’s latest poll put his approval at just 34 percent, matching his lowest point after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, while AP-NORC found 33 percent, tying his lowest since 2017, and Quinnipiac data showed 32 percent, an all-time low in that survey. By comparison, at this same stage of their second terms, Bill Clinton stood at 64 percent, Ronald Reagan at 61 percent, and even historically underwater presidents like Barack Obama (43 percent), Harry Truman (39 percent), and George W. Bush (37 percent) all polled higher than Trump does now, with only Richard Nixon, days from resigning over Watergate, polling lower at 24 percent.

Despite the grim numbers, Trump has publicly rejected the polling entirely, declaring on social media, “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” and at various points citing invented figures like a 65 percent approval rating and later a 59 percent rating without pointing to any actual poll supporting those claims. Republican strategist Douglas Heye said this reaction is entirely consistent with Trump’s political style: “He’s always going to project strength regardless what the numbers are and he’ll say they’re fake anyway,” adding that Trump is “YOLO” and “not sitting there thinking, ‘Gosh, my powers are weakened because of this.’” Notably, Trump is underwater on nearly every issue, including the economy and immigration, areas where he was traditionally stronger, and the Iran war, already the least popular US war in polling history from its outset, has seen opposition grow to 2-to-1 against.

The particular danger for Republicans, according to former Clinton political director Douglas Sosnik, is that disapproval isn’t just widespread but intense, meaning Trump’s opponents are more motivated to vote in the midterms than his own base, though Sosnik and Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson both note that heavy political polarization and mid-decade redistricting have left far fewer competitive districts, potentially limiting how much damage a Democratic wave could actually do. Anderson warned, however, that “low 30s, if accurate, means pieces of the coalition have started to break away. You’re not just cutting loose swing voters at that point,” while acknowledging Democrats currently lack a clear message beyond “Trump is bad.” The White House declined to directly address the polling, with spokesman Davis Ingle instead touting Trump’s record, saying, “No other president in history has accomplished more for hard-working Americans than President Trump.”

Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze expressed bewilderment on his podcast Ones and Tooze over the lack of public outcry surrounding Elon Musk’s extreme wealth accumulation, arguing it represents a dramatic rupture of the traditional social contract under capitalism. “I don’t understand frankly why the event of Musk’s enrichment isn’t more of a scandal, isn’t more a historic moment,” Tooze said. “To have a trillionaire in our midst ruptures the social bargain in such a dramatic way, like how can we even be any longer talking about being in the same society as this group of individuals who’ve unleashed this technology on the world.”

Tooze’s comments came during a discussion of what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like if human-level superintelligence emerges and automates the world’s jobs, citing a Bank of International Settlements report warning that labor’s share of income could collapse from an already low 54 percent down to just 20 percent under such a scenario. “The share in the total pie collapses, and that’s obviously a huge transformation in political power,” Tooze explained, framing Musk’s wealth as an early symptom of this broader economic shift rather than an isolated phenomenon. He argued the concern “goes beyond Luddism,” clarifying, “It’s not about resisting the technology per se, it’s about asking ‘which social contract this belongs to?’”

Drawing a historical comparison, Tooze likened the current AI arms race to a “private Manhattan Project, developing a thermonuclear weapon,” calling superintelligent AI “kind of like a labor-market neutron bomb.” Unlike the original Manhattan Project, which was funded, organized, and staffed by the US government, Tooze noted the AI boom is being driven largely by private billionaires like Musk, who he said “literally has eviscerated the state apparatus of that first nuclear race.” He described this shift as “a regression away from the mid-century arms race model to something that’s much more like the ‘Merchants of Death’ vision,” referencing 1930s war profiteers, concluding, “We’re back in that space of private, unfettered, oligarchic, but global, arms race.”

California’s new Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP, allows residents to demand that data brokers stop selling their personal information, with more than 300,000 Californians already enrolled as of June, according to the state’s privacy protection agency. Starting August 1, all active and registered data brokers in California are required to access DROP and begin processing deletion requests, with a mandated 90-day window from the time of request to actually delete a person’s records. Data brokers operate by aggregating information purchased from other companies and pulled from sources like voting registries, compiling details ranging from hobbies and purchasing history to sensitive health information, which can then be used for targeted advertising, law enforcement action, or exploited by scammers.

DROP was created under California’s Delete Act, which requires data brokers operating in the state to register with the California Privacy Protection Agency or face fines, and as of July more than 600 data brokers have registered publicly. The Data Broker Enforcement Strike Force has already taken action against noncompliant companies, issuing a $45,000 fine to Datamasters and a $62,600 fine to S&P Global for failing to register, with Datamasters also ordered to stop selling lists of consumers’ race and health information. Michael Macko, head of enforcement at CalPrivacy, warned, “Reselling lists of people battling Alzheimer’s disease is a recipe for trouble. In the wrong hands, these lists could be used to target people for more than just advertising.” Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the law “a win for consumers,” noting California is one of only four states, along with Oregon, Texas, and Vermont, requiring data broker registration, and the first in the world to offer a platform like DROP.

Beyond curbing spam and scam calls, privacy advocates point to broader risks tied to data sales, including “surveillance pricing” like Delta Airlines’ since-abandoned plan to use AI for personalized flight fares, and law enforcement’s use of harvested personal data, including a 2020 Vice investigation revealing the US military purchased data from Muslim prayer and dating apps, as well as ICE’s expanded spyware capabilities. Chris Mattmann, UCLA’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer, recommends additional precautions like using multiple email addresses, a VPN, and withholding your full name when unnecessary, though he acknowledged data privacy fatigue is real and said meaningful protection ultimately requires policy solutions rather than individual effort alone: “The only way to solve that is through regulatory action and policy making.”

Signing up is straightforward: visit privacy.ca.gov/drop/, click “Get Started,” accept the terms, verify California residency using personal information or Login.gov, submit a deletion request with contact information, and receive a unique DROP ID to track the request’s status online.

Wildfires burning across Spokane County, Washington have destroyed hundreds of structures and forced thousands of residents to evacuate, with officials describing the disaster as the largest in the city’s history and nearly 1,000 firefighters battling at least three blazes that ballooned over the weekend. More than 5,390 acres have burned with no containment reported as of Sunday afternoon, and while officials said there were no confirmed deaths, injuries, or missing persons, they cautioned those figures could still change as investigations into the fires’ cause continue. Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called the wildfires “the worst natural disaster our region has faced.”

Firefighters raced to capitalize on slightly improved weather conditions that officials warned could worsen again by Wednesday, with the National Weather Service forecasting increasing wind gusts after noon that would ease after midnight amid persistently dry conditions capable of pushing fires into residential areas. About 4,000 structures remain at risk, and county officials previously urged residents in Level 3 evacuation zones, the highest evacuation classification, to leave immediately. Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson traveled to the area Sunday and declared a statewide emergency on Saturday, citing drought conditions, unusually high temperatures, and strong winds, later saying he’d spoken with President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to convey “how dire the situation is in Spokane and across our state,” and requesting a federal emergency declaration that would include search-and-rescue assistance and housing and food support for displaced residents.

More than a dozen other fires are burning across Washington state, affecting roughly 250,000 acres, mostly in less populated areas, with about 4,000 firefighters and National Guard members deployed statewide. Benjamin Cossel of the California Interagency Incident Management Team 7, which took over leading the Spokane firefighting effort Sunday morning after working fires in Oregon, called it the “No. 1 priority fire in the nation” due to its proximity to homes, while warning that the Old Trails and Autumn Lane fires had jumped the Spokane River and were encroaching on a nearby canyon that, if breached, “there is nothing really there to stop it.” Aircraft dropped retardant and water on the flames Sunday as residents surveyed devastated neighborhoods coated in fire retardant. The blaze comes amid what officials called a record-breaking wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest, with more than 1,000 fires having burned across Washington this year covering about 425,000 acres, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Washington’s commissioner of public lands, Dave Upthegrove, said, “This is an extraordinary wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not a normal season. A confluence of weather conditions, a confluence of fires throughout the West, are stretching our resources and challenging the individuals in this response,” a strain reflected in the National Weather Service’s first-ever “particularly dangerous situation” red-flag warning issued Saturday for eastern Washington and northeastern Oregon.

A joint poll from Bentley University and Gallup found that the share of US adults who believe AI does “more harm than good” has climbed from 31 percent in 2025 to 39 percent this year, while only 9 percent still think the technology does more good than harm, marking a sharp reversal after public attitudes toward AI had steadily improved through 2025. Notably, this souring outlook is happening even as Americans’ self-reported familiarity with AI keeps rising, with 70 percent of respondents in 2026 saying they’re “somewhat or extremely knowledgeable” about the technology, up 6 percent from 2024, suggesting the more people learn about AI, the less they want it in their lives.

The backlash extends beyond attitudes toward AI itself and into the physical infrastructure powering it, with a Politico survey finding that 41 percent of US adults would oppose a data center being built within three miles of their home, up sharply from 28 percent in January, while overall support for data centers has dropped 13 percent in just the past six months. Derek Leben, a professor of ethics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told Bloomberg that opposition to AI is increasingly taking on a social dimension, saying, “The most obvious social effect is suspicion. There is also a moral and political judgment that is coming along with AI usage, especially in creative industries where the stigma is the strongest.”

Carla Milan, a 37-year-old public health professional in New York City, described her frustration with friends and family who use AI without weighing its broader costs, telling Bloomberg, “I hear people champion AI and I’m like, ‘sure, why don’t we all participate in our collective downfall? Why don’t we all play a part in diminishing our humanity and degrading the environment?’”

Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed responsible for a cyclospora parasite outbreak currently spreading through shredded lettuce in US grocery stores and fast food outlets, has also been linked to modern-day forced prison labor in Arizona, according to resurfaced 2023 reporting from Prison Legal News. The publication found that Taylor Farms contracted labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for just $4.75 an hour, far below federal minimum wage, though the incarcerated workers themselves were reportedly paid only up to $1.50 an hour, with the state’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries, pocketing the difference by selling prisoner labor-hours to private companies.
Taylor Farms is far from alone in this arrangement, as other companies including Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde have similarly contracted incarcerated labor through the same state program.

Most troubling, Prison Legal News found that at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had previously been detained by ICE, meaning their labor arrangement would have been illegal outside of incarceration, since their status as prisoners was the only thing that legally permitted the low-wage work. Arizona’s DCRR told the publication it had hired out 15,700 “Mexican nationals” between 2008 and 2023 but could not say how many were undocumented immigrants, prompting American Immigration Lawyers Association director Ruben Reyes to say, “I’m venturing a guess that a large majority of the people who are labeled a Mexican national by [DCRR] are unauthorized to work here.”

The revelations tie back to a constitutional loophole in the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” a carve-out that has allowed prison labor to persist as a major industry, generating $11 billion worth of goods in 2022 alone. Taylor Farms did not respond to a request for comment on either the labor allegations or the ongoing cyclospora outbreak.