On the afternoon of July 17, 2026, the hallway of the St. Louis County Courthouse’s third floor was mostly empty. The pre-trial hearing for 30-year-old youth minister and protester Elijah Gantt had ended 30 minutes ago, where just over a dozen members of his community support team had shown up. At one of his bond reduction hearings last year, a few of them wore “FREE ELIJAH” T-shirts.
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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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The violence and scale of the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and the communities they live in can be disorienting. In recent months, the terrain has shifted from roving spectacles of violence in blue cities to arrests increasingly embedded in the everyday harms of policing. Meanwhile, activists and community members have forced the administration to retreat from one of its most…
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Hundreds of people demonstrated in Madison, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night following the police killing of a Black man in a popular commercial and residential area. The Madison Police Department (MPD) has not yet identified the man, stating only that he was in his 30s. Local social justice organizations have identified the man who was killed as Madison resident Corey Ruiz.
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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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I met Tyrin “Ty” Johnson neither through a police report, nor through a press conference, nor through the carefully crafted statements of elected officials or the endless speculation that too often follows the death of a young Black man, but rather through the people who loved him most: his mother, his grandparents, his great-grandmother, his aunts, and the grief that filled the room where they…
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