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  Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes claimed Arizonans can shoot at ICE agents under the state’s self-defense laws. Mayes gave the green light on the shooting of federal law enforcement during an exclusive interview with 12News on Tuesday. The attorney general said she would protect Arizonans, and that they would have a reasonable defense for not recognizing federal law enforcement. “[W]e have a Stand Your Ground law that says that if you reasonably believe your life is in danger and you’re in...

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  Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of Finland without concluding the necessary environmental assessments. Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-accused-illegally-killing-fore...

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  Six Nobel-winning economists released a letter supporting the California Billionaire's Tax. The laureates point out that California billionaires are worth an estimated $2.3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion — up from $700 billion, an increase of more than 220% in one decade. They can afford it #prop40 #billionairetax https://fortune.com/2026/09/19/california-billionaire-wealth-tax-prop-40-movement-more-states-federal-government-other-countries/

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  Now, it seems ICE is trying to add to the arsenal of dystopian techno-gadgetry, through the procurement of AI-integrated robot dogs. That’s according to ABC News, which viewed a federal procurement notice showing ICE is planning to spend up to $2 million to procure a number of SPOT robots from Boston Dynamics. Equipped with extendable arms and 360-degree cameras, the mechanical canines will supposedly help “support public safety and law enforcement operations by providing a remotely operated r...

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  Even as Americans come forward in record numbers to demand their elected representatives stop green-lighting perpetually buzzing, polluting, and power grid-straining data centers into their communities, a group of contrarian nerds has emerged to claim that data centers rock. Such was the theme of last night’s "Data After Dark: A Pro-Data Center Party" held at what Axios calls the “crypto-bro clubhouse” Pubkey in Washington DC. “In light of the bipartisan psychosis over AI data center...

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  Election experts have warned Donald Trump’s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November’s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting. With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election “counting window” is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials. While the US president’s bid to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-...

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  Trump administration considers building baseball park in Grand Teton National Park Major League Baseball approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday. 
The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter 
Grand Teton is the country’s eighth-most visited national park and is famous for its...

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  Trump turns on Salazar after Florida Republican challenges his immigration crackdown Donald Trump on Saturday escalated his criticism of Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), amplifying a series of social media posts attacking the Florida Republican and, in multiple instances, calling for her replacement ahead of her election in just over a month. Trump reposted more than a dozen messages criticizing Salazar on Truth Social, the president’s social media platform, including one user’s postthat...

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  Save the date for the No Kings: Vote Early Santa Barbara event on 10/17 at Alameda Park from 12 - 2 pm. Rally at Alameda begins PROMPTLY at noon. Followed by a march down Anacapa St to De La Guerra Plaza and a Party to the Polls at the ballot drop box at SB City Hall. Celebrate our Right to Vote! -- @indivisiblesb

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  TikTok will pay Alabama at least $100 million in a settlement tied to allegations that the short-form video platform misled users about safety and was designed to addict children. The case was scheduled to go to trial on Monday. According to the Alabama attorney general’s office, TikTok could end up paying the state a total of $300 million depending on “certain conditions.” The company also agreed to introduce a two-hour daily time limit for underage users, with additional parental contro...

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  Anthropic is seeking shareholder approval for a new corporate structure that would give CEO Dario Amodei and his six fellow co-founders a combined 50.1% of voting power Modeled on the founder-control setup used by Palantir, the plan would create a special class of shares for the co-founders, handing them joint voting control over most corporate decisions. The arrangement would remain in effect only as long as at least three of the seven co-founders hold on to a minimum number of shares, accor...

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  As reading and math scores fall to their lowest point in the past quarter-century, the US now has fewer tools to understand and develop interventions for this troubling trend. When the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the Department of Education last year, -- firing nearly half of its workers and allowing the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cancel nearly $900m in contracts, -- a little-known agency called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCE...

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  Common Cause condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the federal government to continue using the flawed SAVE system to reject registered voters. Statement from Common Cause President & CEO Virginia Kase Solomón:    “The Supreme Court’s decision to allow DHS and states to use an error-ridden system is completely unacceptable and didn’t need to happen this close to the election. This DHS system, which the federal government itself admits is flawed, has always been part of the Tru...

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  A Mississippi detective testified Friday that the hanging death of Tasia Fortune, a Black woman whose body was found suspended from a tree in Jackson in August, was a "staged" lynching tied to a drug dispute. During a preliminary hearing, Jackson Police Detective Samuel Dukes testified that investigators believe Fortune was killed before her body was hung behind an abandoned home, citing findings from the state medical examiner. Two Black men have been charged with murder in the...

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  UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors’ judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients. This has resulted in patients being kicked out of rehabilitation programs and care facilities far too early, forcing them to drain their life savings to obtain needed care that should be covered under their government-funded Medicare Advantage Plan. That’s all according to a lawsuit...

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  Saudi Arabia is in serious trouble. Its global influence primarily comes from its leading position as an oil producer and the money resulting from that role, but now the Middle East is on fire. Today, Saudi tankers are blocked in the Persian Gulf and under threat in the Red Sea, and the country’s biggest oil pipeline had to shut down after a drone attack. Yet Saudi Arabia’s biggest long-term problem may be that its longtime security guarantor, the United States, is unable to put out the fi...

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  Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist overwhelmingly favored in the race for a House seat representing part of New York City, was arrested Thursday while protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations. Avila Chevalier, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D) in a June primary, had been among hundreds of people who rallied outside the U.N. headquarters and blocked traffic with a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups. “I refuse to allow a...

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  Outside of the United Nations, on the corner of First Avenue and 39th Street in New York City, Benjamin Netanyahu was nowhere to be seen.  “Ne-tan-ya-hu, you can’t hide!” the protesters chanted. “You are wanted for gen-o-cide!” Inside, the Israeli prime minister was preparing to speak to the United Nations, the international body that had, at least on paper, agrees with the protesters’ claims, with a 2025 commission finding that the nation is committing genocide in its ongoing war in the Ga...

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  As Trump continues to test the extent of his power, systematically going after the most vulnerable population in our country, and those who defend them, he is now pushing the limits to attorney ethics. This flippant abuse of power and attacks to decades of precedent is putting bar licenses and more importantly the lives of children at risk. Unaccompanied migrant children arrive at our border alone, fleeing dangerous situations, and remain one of the most isolated and vulnerable groups of...

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  The world has known for decades that the RSA cryptosystem’s days are numbered. Once quantum computing becomes practical (estimates for that range from 3 to 20 or more years), the foundational security it provides will crumble. New research has revealed a novel method that uses classical computing to reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold. The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys too...

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  As gas prices soar across California, the sign at the Fuel Depot gas station on Storke Road in Goleta flashed $3.00 per gallon for 87 grade gas on Tuesday morning. Candidate Steve Hilton, running as a Republican to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom, was at the station pumping gas for constituents in an illegal attempt to sway their vote. His campaign paid the difference in price — 87 grade fuel was priced at $5.86 per gallon at the station — for 150 cars, providing up to 12 gallons of...

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  If Republicans want to cut our earned benefits, the American people deserve for them to tell us that to our faces, rather than weaseling around the job they were elected to do, and for which they earn a handsome salary. This Monday, House Republicans held a hearing focused on creating a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare. The hearing was for an audience of one: billionaire donor Harlan Crow. That’s the same Harlan Crow who infamously treated Supreme Court Justice Clar...

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  The White House is being accused of violating federal law after it aired an ad glorifying Presidential nominee Donald Trump, which it explicitly said was “paid for by the US government.” The ad was first reported by CBS News Miami investigative reporter Jim DeFede, who saw it airing on Fox News Wednesday night. The 30-second spot features numerous videos and images of Trump, set to the song “Love Me” by JMSN. It includes voiceovers by the president railing against “communism,” a label he’s re...

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  ‘Is nothing sacred?!’ Bronze Jesus is sawed off at the ankles, carted away Metal theft has been an intractable problem in Southern California for years, with bandits pulling copper wire from streetlights — plunging neighborhoods into darkness — and from rail lines, pilfering pipes from construction sites and vacant buildings, and sawing catalytic converters off cars for scrap. The 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles epitomizes the problem with rampant metal theft. Famously hailed as a “r...

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  President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday warned that Russia’s “ridiculous and never-ending war” on his country could soon spread to other parts of Europe and called for increased economic pressure on Moscow to force a peace agreement before the fighting enters another deadly winter. Diplomatic impasses and the global economic fallout from armed conflicts have dominated discussions during the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. In his speech to the body...

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  If elected, Brandon Herrera, "the AK guy", would represent the town of Uvalde where, in May 2022, an 18-year-old former student killed 19 children and two teachers. Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been a target of Herrera’s aggressive use of social media. Should he win, she says, there could be long-lasting consequences. “His idea that somehow we should be grateful that firearms are being used in mass killings is a very cynical ploy to nu...

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  Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian addresses UN General Assembly Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian is speaking now. “The US president described us as terrorists. We have been the victims of terrorism,” he says. He says the US “bombed a school” and “children perished under bombs with weapons used by the US and Israel.” He says Iran “did not bow our head … and responded, but we did not hit civilian populations,” but “only defended ourselves – we are not terrorists.” As he goes on, the US delegation walks out of...

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  At least 15 states have reported increased calls this year, as drought and population growth drive bears in search of food closer to people https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/09/22/bear-encounters-are-rising-across-united-states-heres-why/

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  Motorists buying a secondhand car with a lot of miles on the clock are likely to find an electric vehicle (EV) ultimately more reliable than a petrol vehicle, according to a study. An analysis of 47.4m MOT tests found that after cars were driven 90,000 to 120,000 miles, EVs were about 25% less likely to fail than petrol models of the same age (based on a failure rate of 16.5% versus 22.1%). Beyond 120,000 miles, 16% of EVs failed, compared with 23.5% of petrol cars. The study found relati...

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  Last year, I reported on Blaze Foley, a country musician who was murdered in 1989, but whose Spotify page was suddenly featuring new, AI-generated music under his name. I’ve recently reviewed dozens of examples of other dead musicians who are also apparently publishing AI-generated music under their names on Spotify. In some cases, album covers for dead, Black jazz musicians feature white, AI generated artists instead.  https://archive.ph/2026.09.17-135026/https://www.404media.co/spotify-a...