by Brad Reed | Apr 13, 2026 | AI, Catholic Church, Donald Trump, News, Pete Hegseth, Pope Leo, Religion, Trump Administration
Pope Leo XIV on Monday said he would not back off his criticism of President Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran after the president targeted him with an unhinged late-night social media rant. In a Sunday Truth Social post, Trump accused Pope Leo of being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” even though dealing with crime and running U.S. foreign policy are not part of the pope’…
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by Earle J. Fisher | Apr 11, 2026 | AI, data centers, Elon Musk, Environmental Racism, Op-Ed, Tennessee
In Memphis, Tennessee, questions about AI data centers are rising nearly as quickly as their price tags. Recent reporting shows that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI now has properties in Memphis appraised at roughly $3.4 billion, a staggering valuation that will shape how much the company contributes in property taxes and how local officials frame its economic impact.
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by Madyson Fitzgerald | Mar 27, 2026 | affordability, AI, AI surveillance, Algorithms, Food Prices, grocery costs, Instacart, News, Personal Data, Surveillance
One online grocery shopper got charged $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins, while another — buying from the same store at the same time — got charged $4.89. A consumer watchdog detected this price discrepancy during an investigation last September in Seattle. The grocery app Instacart used an artificial intelligence-powered algorithm that charged customers differently for each item by as much as…
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by Jake Johnson | Mar 26, 2026 | AI, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, big tech, data centers, News
Two of the leading progressives in the US Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced legislation on Wednesday that would impose a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new artificial intelligence data centers amid mounting concerns over their insatiable consumption of power and water resources, impacts on the climate, and other harms. Sanders’ (I-Vt.)…
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by Mike Ludwig | Mar 24, 2026 | AI, aridification, Arizona, Big Oil, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Colorado River, data centers, Drought, Fires, Fossil Fuel Industry, Fossil Fuels, Heat Dome, Heat Wave, Heat Waves, News, Rainfall, southwest, US Southwest, Water
Tucson, Arizona — Deadly heat waves have become the summertime norm in Arizona and much of the Southwest in recent years. But this year, those heat waves are coming months before the height of summer. As an atmospheric “heat dome” planted itself over much of the U.S. West, temperatures outside Phoenix reached 101 degrees on the first day of spring, making Arizona the hottest place on Earth.
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by Nolan Higdon | Mar 22, 2026 | AI, big tech, iran war, Israel, News Analysis, Social Media, Synthetic Media, White House
“Tel Aviv, stripped of illusion, as you have never witnessed it,” read the caption above a viral March 2026 video showing missiles hammering the Israeli city as explosions burst across the night sky. To the casual scroller, it appeared to be a harrowing document of modern conflict. The problem, however, was that the video was a deepfake. Deepfakes are synthetic media edited or generated using…
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