Right now, a potential peril is at hand: the end of truth. The appointment of Bari Weiss, the former opinion writer who started the heterodox website, to lead venerable CBS News set the media world in a tizzy. Since she had no experience in television broadcast news operations, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, must have selected her for ideological and editorial reasons. Weiss had positioned herself as the scourge of supposedly woke and DEI-driven liberal media, presumably a stance that appealed to Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter who put up much of the money that financed his son's recent takeover of Paramount. Weiss' first days at the network yielded worrisome signs.

Countries have fallen behind on emissions goals, but Hannah Ritchie looks at the numbers and sees real gains. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. It has been 10 years since countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, and emissions and temperatures continue to reach new highs, fueling unprecedented weather disasters around the globe. Meanwhile, the shift to clean energy is facing powerful headwinds in the United States, where climate policies are being reversed and support for clean energy is withdrawn. Yet, while the headlines paint a dismal picture of efforts to rein in climate change, the numbers often tell a different story. That is the assessment of data scientist Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of the publication .

Age and gender biases are baked into what we see online, a large new study confirms. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In the 1970s, when researchers asked children to draw a scientist, 99 percent of them drew a man . As this experiment was repeated over 50 years, the number of women drawn increased, and within the past decade, more than half of girls will draw a woman when asked what a scientist looks like. Today, Google search results tend to agree with these children's drawings.

Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.

Susan Horton cuts open ice pops for her daughters at home in Cotati, California, in July 2024. Pregnant with her fifth child, Susan Horton had a lot of confidence in her parenting abilities. Then she ate a salad from Costco: an "everything" chopped salad kit with poppy seeds. When she went to the hospital to give birth the next day, she tested positive for opiates. Horton told doctors that it must have been the poppy seeds, but she couldn't convince them it was true.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Chemical pollution is "a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change" but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned. The industrial economy has created more than 100 million "novel entities," or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer. "I suppose that's the biggest surprise for some people," Harry Macpherson, senior climate associate at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which carried out the research, told the Guardian.

The below article first appeared in David Corn's newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just 5 a month--but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. There are only a few potential existential threats to human society, as far as we know. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious.

President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."

Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, 2025, in Washington.Evan Vucci/ AP The Pentagon will start using Elon Musk's AI-powered chatbot, Grok, days after ito published a string of antisemitic posts, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced on Monday. The move is a part of a larger rollout of Musk's company, xAI, for a new program called "Grok for Government," which describes itself a as a "suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers." The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and "the white man." It also referred to itself as "MechaHitler." The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.

On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk's xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users' questions, referring to itself as "MechaHitler," praising Hitler and "the white man," and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok's default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having "improved Grok significantly," tweeting that "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." "We must build our own AI…without the constraints of liberal propaganda." There was a difference indeed: besides the antisemitism and the Erdogan stuff, Grok responded to X users' questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. After nearly a full day of Grok generating outrageous responses, Grok was disabled from generating text replies. Grok's own X account said that xAI had "taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."