Congress is grappling with the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the controversial program that allows the U.S. government to surveil foreigners and the individuals that correspond with them, including Americans. Its proponents say it’s vital to national security, but civil liberties advocates say it’s unconstitutional. Section 702 expired on June 12…
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Like me, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi attended West Seattle High School. In September 2024, days before leaving to do advocacy work in the West Bank, she celebrated her birthday at Alki Beach — a local favorite spot for Seattleites. Not long after, Eygi was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while observing a weekly protest against Israel’s illegal settlements. Congress is now considering…
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Earlier this year, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans whether they would support an AI data center being built in their local area. Seventy-one percent opposed it, 48 percent of them strongly. Opposition to living near a nuclear power plant was markedly lower, at 53 percent. Republicans, Democrats and independents all rejected data centers. Asked why, respondents most often pointed to…
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Across the United States, and increasingly in other democracies under siege, higher education faces a coordinated assault unlike anything witnessed in generations. State governments are prohibiting the teaching of histories that confront slavery, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, structural racism, and widening inequality. Books are disappearing from classrooms and libraries. Diversity…
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Sam Altman, the embattled CEO of the AI technology company OpenAI, vacillates between warning of a labor market doom loop due to the technology his company developed and promising a new golden era for humanity just around the corner. In an essay posted to his X account this July, he claimed that “by safely stewarding AGI [artificial general intelligence] into the world, we can enter a new…
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This summer, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage’s bubble is very publicly bursting in the U.K. in the face of an extraordinary financial scandal. In April, the media reported that Farage, a member of parliament since 2024 for the east English constituency in the town of Clacton, had over the past years accepted a “gift” of 5 million pounds (roughly $7 million) from a cryptocurrency billionaire…
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