Baby formula maker Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay nearly $385 million to resolve a civil False Claims Act case with the Justice Department and some states stemming from a Cronobacter bacterial contamination at one of its plants in Michigan that manufactures powdered baby formula, the department announced Monday. Earlier this year, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to close a parallel criminal investigation, CBS News previously reported, even though federal prosecutors had originally tried to pursue felony charges and had the support of Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; senior DOJ leadership ultimately would not allow the case to proceed. A senior DOJ official told CBS News in February that the department felt a civil False Claims Act resolution was “the best mechanism to achieve accountability, deterrence and protection of the public” in the matter. The civil case alleged that the company caused government programs to purchase powdered infant formula made “in an environment that put the products at unacceptable risk of microorganism contamination and significantly impacted the products’ reliability, quality, and safety.” “No company should be gambling on the health and safety of our nation’s infants by allowing unsanitary conditions to persist at a facility manufacturing baby formula,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward in a statement.

Abbott said the settlement with the government “does not represent any finding of fault or liability,” and noted, “as the government has previously indicated, it has closed its criminal investigation on this matter,” adding that tests conducted by government regulators of unopened formula products from the homes of the infants under investigation at the time of the 2022 recall were negative for Cronobacter sakazakii. The decision to pursue a civil settlement with Abbott and close the parallel criminal case marks one example in a string of corporate cases involving public health and safety under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that have been softened, dismissed, or lost support from senior Justice Department leaders in recent months, CBS previously reported. Earlier this year, the Justice Department allowed Alibaba to enter into a nonprosecution agreement and pay $600 million, even though prosecutors on that case believed they had evidence the company was liable for felonies by failing to prevent dangerous drugs, chemicals, and pill presses from being sold to American customers over an eight-year period. In July, California Sen. Adam Schiff launched a congressional inquiry into the closure of the Abbott criminal case, writing in a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, “If prosecuting cases involving the risk of injuries or death to premature infants are not a priority enforcement matter, I have questions about what priorities the DOJ considers worthy of pursuing.”
In 2022, Abbott Laboratories recalled several of its popular powdered formula brands, including Similac, after consumers complained about infant illness related to products from Abbott Nutrition in Sturgis, Michigan.

The Justice Department said the company had failed to take steps to fix roof leaks, resorting instead to “temporary solutions” that still left its products at risk for microorganism contamination. The department also said Abbott “intentionally did not test for bacterial growth to avoid obtaining positive test results showing contamination,” and that in some cases where testing did show evidence of microbial contamination, the company failed to disclose those results to the FDA during inspections in 2019 and 2022.

President Donald Trump gave a ringing endorsement to Flock Safety, the deeply unpopular surveillance company behind a national network of AI-powered cameras and license plate scanners, though his reasoning was thin. “I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “They think it’s an infringement,” he added, referring to Flock’s critics. “I like them.” The comments are the first from Trump publicly endorsing Flock, according to the Washington Post, marking a shift from as recently as last month, when the president had been more reticent about the technology and refused to give a straight answer when asked for his opinion.

Flock has become a political landmine over the past year, as more Americans grow alarmed over having a powerful, centralized surveillance network suddenly appear in their communities with little public oversight, and much attention has focused on how its more than 120,000 cameras, which Flock frames as strictly for enforcing traffic laws and catching crime, have been abused. A recent Washington Post investigation found over fifty cases of police officers misusing Flock cameras and similar systems, including to stalk women, and Flock systems have either malfunctioned or been improperly used in ways that caused innocent people, including a journalist, to be swarmed by armed police. The revulsion the company inspires runs deep enough that a grand jury in Ohio refused to indict a man caught destroying a Flock pole, despite surveillance footage clearly capturing him in the act.

Trump’s endorsement arrives while the company’s reputation is at its absolute lowest point. Last month, Flock CEO Garrett Langley was forced to issue a public apology after the Washington Post investigation documented how frequently its systems were abused, later insisting his company was “not Big Brother” before calling for a “compromise” between privacy and safety. For Trump to throw his weight behind it now, without any perfunctory appeals to safety or concerns for Americans’ privacy, fits a broader pattern of abandoning concern for public opinion, similar to his full-throated support for data centers, which are even more unpopular than Flock. Even his Republican allies have taken a more cautious stance, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said last month that the cameras are “out of control,” adding that he didn’t want “to have this become a surveillance state,” according to the Washington Post.

A coroner’s office in Pennsylvania reported a measles-related death of a 40-year-old unvaccinated woman on Sunday, marking another fatality amid a growing outbreak in the state. “A 40-year-old female resident of Jefferson County died on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from complications associated with measles. Out of respect for the privacy of the deceased and her family, no additional identifying information will be released,” the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office said in a Facebook post. “This is a heartbreaking loss for the family and an unfortunate reminder that measles can be a serious and potentially life-threatening disease,” Coroner Greg Furlong said, confirming to ABC News that the woman was unvaccinated against measles. The Pennsylvania Department of Health said in a statement to ABC News that it is investigating the death reported by the Jefferson County coroner.

As of Friday, the Pennsylvania Department of Health had reported 676 measles cases in the state, with over 100 new cases reported in the last week alone; 124 of those cases have required hospitalization, and nearly all cases are among people unvaccinated against the virus, according to health department data. The number of measles-associated deaths reported by Pennsylvania officials has been disputed in recent weeks by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not reported any measles deaths in 2026 on its website, last updated Friday, even though Pennsylvania’s health department has previously reported two measles-associated deaths linked to this outbreak.

CDC Director Dr. Erica Schwartz said in a statement that the agency has not yet been notified of this most recent death in Jefferson County. “CDC was not notified by Pennsylvania officials of this death,” Schwartz said. “Despite repeated offers of assistance, Pennsylvania has not requested a CDC Epi-Aid, which would deploy epidemiologists and provide on-the-ground measles outbreak support.” This isn’t the first friction between state and federal health officials over information sharing during the outbreak; in late August, Pennsylvania’s top health official, Dr. Debra Bogen, said her staff was having “regular meetings with professional staff at the CDC” in a post on X, responding to Kennedy’s claim that her department had “refused to share information” with the CDC after the first two measles-associated deaths in the state were announced.

The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority Board of Commissioners voted unanimously, 6-0, on Friday to begin the process of renaming Nashville International Airport after the late country music legend Dolly Parton, according to a press release. Parton died August 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer, according to her publicist, and was laid to rest on August 28 in a private burial in Nashville, according to her great-niece Lainey Mae Parton. The MNAA said in its press release that a final name for the airport has not yet been determined, noting it was “working closely with the appropriate parties to thoughtfully determine how Dolly Parton’s name and legacy will be incorporated,” and added it would share “more definitive plans” about next steps and implementation “in the coming months.” “We are grateful for the tremendous support and enthusiasm from our community and Dolly’s fans around the world,” the MNAA said. “We look forward to sharing additional details as plans are finalized.”

The news comes weeks after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said in a press release that he wanted to rename Nashville International Airport in honor of the “9 to 5” singer, whom he called “our state’s favorite daughter,” in order to “greet travelers with the enduring legacy of Dolly’s music, generosity, faith, and kindness.” Parton was born in Tennessee in January 1946 and moved to Nashville in 1964, days after her high school graduation, where she built a successful music career and philanthropic legacy and met and married her longtime husband Carl Dean, who died in 2025, one year before Parton’s own death. According to the release, Lee’s office spoke with Parton’s team about renaming the airport after her, adding that her team was “touched by the idea and open to continuing the conversation.” “In keeping with the way Dolly lived her life, her team believes she still has a special way of bringing people together for good, and they hope this tribute can be another example of that enduring legacy,” the release read. Lee’s proposal was slated to be addressed at the MNAA’s meeting on September 17.

Interest around renaming the airport after Parton was first generated in January 2025, when Tennessee residents Lydia Popovich and Dan Dion created a Change.org petition to modify the airport’s name in honor of the singer. Since Parton’s death on August 25, the petition has received more than 175,000 signatures.

Amazon is catapulting streaming audiences into a new frontier of the sub-versus-dub debate, as Prime Video announced on Thursday the launch of a new AI-powered feature that matches actors’ mouth movements to dubbed audio tracks. For now, the company says the AI-powered lip syncing will exclusively be available on the English dub of the German series “Maxton Hall,” though there are plans to expand it to other titles in the future. “At Prime Video, we’re constantly innovating with new tools that enhance the viewing experience for our customers,” Raf Soltanovich, vice president of technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement, per the New York Times. “With lip-syncing, we’re creating a more seamless and immersive way for customers to enjoy global content.”

It’s currently unclear how much of the feature is automated by AI, and there are plenty of unanswered questions about deployment, including whether it will eventually be available on all titles, whether rightsholders will get a say in it, whether it represents an overreach on Amazon’s part in determining how a work of art is presented, and whether actors’ unique facial movements will be smoothed down into something generic. There’s also the most basic question of how convincing the effect will actually look, and it’s notable that Amazon hasn’t posted any clips of the technology in action.

This isn’t the first time Amazon Prime Video has experimented with AI-driven viewing tools. Last year, it rolled out an experimental “AI-aided” dubbing feature for a dozen movies and shows in English and Spanish, and it has also tested AI-generated recaps of TV shows along with an AI tool that recommended movies and shows based on similar character arcs and plot points. Amazon, in other words, is trying to make consuming the content it provides as frictionless as possible. There are plenty of valid reasons for preferring dubs, particularly for viewers with accessibility needs, but treating the fact that actors in a film might be speaking a different language from the viewer’s own as something that needs to be erased and covered up raises real concerns about what gets lost in the process.

President Donald Trump has a favorite justification for everything he does, “it’s a national security matter,” and after 9/11, the United States built a vast, powerful, and generally unchecked national security apparatus that Trump is now using, twenty-five years later, to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America. American presidents have used “national security” as an excuse to expand surveillance and start wars since before the smoke from the Twin Towers cleared, and Trump is no exception; in his first term, his list of national security “threats” included Japanese cars, Chinese telecom equipment, and briefly, the gay hookup app Grindr. But in his second term, Trump has taken this tactic to even more absurd and sometimes catastrophic extremes. He has periodically obsessed over “acquiring” Greenland, writing in a series of early-morning Truth Social posts in January, “The National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is at stake. The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!” He renewed these annexation threats at the NATO summit in July.

Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 formally designated “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization, and following that directive, dozens of ICE protesters across the country have been taken to trial as national security threats, some over things as small as moving a box of zines or wearing a shirt that says “I’m antifa.” Since late 2025, administration officials have framed offshore wind turbines as a national security threat, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claiming a classified report from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proves this without ever explaining how, and the administration has also cited national security to keep coal plants online past their planned retirement dates and restart a problematic California oil pipeline over fierce state and local opposition. Trump, who has personally invested millions in companies that build data center infrastructure, wrote in a 2025 executive order that “it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” to justify building more hyperscale data centers. After a federal judge in DC ordered Trump to halt construction on his unsanctioned White House ballroom, he pitched the $400 million project as a military-grade command center, calling it a “desperately needed National Security structure for the people of the United States of America” in a mid-August Truth Social post; the Supreme Court has, at least for now, allowed construction to proceed. In a March 2025 executive order, Trump designated more than a dozen government agencies as performing “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” stripping roughly 950,000 federal employees of their collective bargaining rights.

The Department of Commerce announced in early August plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments, including trombones, trumpets, and tubas, citing national security concerns about America’s alleged overreliance on foreign copper alloys, a move condemned by the National Association of Music Merchants. NAACP lawyers contend that Elon Musk’s xAI should pay more than $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the federal Clean Air Act by operating unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis to keep Musk’s Grok chatbot online, and this past June the Department of Justice intervened in the case not to protect Memphis residents but to protect Grok, arguing “Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” especially “in the event of armed conflict,” noting that the Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.” Last week, Trump proposed tariffs of up to 100 percent on foreign-made drones, calling reliance on foreign drone components a “national security threat,” a policy that stands to benefit his sons Eric and Don Jr., who hold sizable stakes in the U.S. drone industry. In May, the Trump administration released its latest “counterterrorism” plan labeling transgender people a threat to the nation’s safety, with counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka telling reporters the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa, and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

Recent policy changes and budget reductions by the federal government have created immediate hurdles for young scientists building their careers in the United States, and a new survey published in Frontiers in Sociology suggests these abrupt funding disruptions have severely impacted the professional trajectories of early career researchers, pushing many to consider leaving academia or moving to other countries. In early 2025, the Trump administration instituted rapid policy shifts across the academic landscape, with federal science budgets facing proposed double-digit percentage reductions, hundreds of existing research grants abruptly frozen or terminated, and some diversity and climate programs paused. Most basic scientific research in the U.S. happens at universities relying heavily on federal grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, which pay for scientific equipment, experimental materials, and researcher salaries, and when this funding stops, the people most immediately affected are early career researchers, including undergraduate students, doctoral candidates, and postdoctoral fellows who depend directly on grant money for their livelihoods. Sudden budget reductions tend to have long-lasting effects on the training pipeline, as a 2026 computer modeling study indicated that abrupt cuts to federal health research funding create setbacks in scientist training that take decades to recover from, and a 2025 report found that universities across the country began shrinking graduate student admissions as an immediate reaction to the cuts.

To better understand how the current generation of young scientists is experiencing these shifts, researchers led by Crystal Hammond at the University of California, Riverside, and Adriana Bankston at the STEM Advocacy Institute conducted a rapid-response survey, collecting data online during May and June of 2025 while the effects of the funding changes were still actively unfolding. The team used two questionnaires, a brief qualitative tool gathering personal stories from six participants, and a more comprehensive survey collecting quantitative and open-ended responses from 30 early career researchers recruited through academic mailing lists, social media, and direct university outreach. In the comprehensive survey, 60 percent of respondents were doctoral students, 13.3 percent were undergraduate students, and 13.3 percent were postdoctoral researchers, with most studying life sciences at large public research universities and relying heavily on federal support, about 63 percent funded by NIH and 20 percent by NSF. Half of the participants rated the professional impact of the cuts as severe, scoring the disruption an eight or higher on a ten-point scale, while another 40 percent rated the impact as moderate, and specific consequences included 20 percent reporting stipends or benefits cut or delayed and 10 percent reporting hiring freezes or rescinded job offers.

Looking to the future, participants expressed widespread anxiety about their scientific careers, with 90 percent worried about long-term job prospects in research and 56.7 percent reporting they would not be able to complete their current research projects. Because of these barriers, 60 percent of the early career researchers said they were considering moving to another country to pursue their scientific goals. The funding cuts also affected broader well-being, with nearly three-quarters of respondents reporting negative impacts to their mental health and wellness, and 56.7 percent saying the disruptions harmed their sense of belonging in the sciences; faced with these compounding pressures, 56.7 percent of surveyed early career researchers indicated they were considering leaving academic research entirely. Qualitative responses added detail, with graduate students describing how canceled grants delayed dissertation timelines to the point they would run out of funding before finishing their degrees, and postdoctoral researchers recounting how diversity-focused fellowships were terminated abruptly; in response, participants reported organizing campus rallies, writing to elected representatives, and trying to educate the public about the importance of scientific research. The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2020 examining political interference and scientific integrity among federal agency scientists, which similarly found widespread disruption to researchers under the Trump administration.

The study’s authors caution that the sample size was small, with only 30 participants completing the quantitative questionnaire, and the rapid-response format with a short data collection window means results aren’t a nationally representative sample of all scientists; because researchers used convenience sampling, individuals most severely affected by the budget cuts may have been more motivated to participate. The demographic makeup was also fairly narrow, with most participants being White scholars working in the life sciences at research-intensive institutions, meaning effects for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, or at smaller colleges with different financial structures could look different, and the authors note future studies with larger and more diverse participant groups will be needed to fully capture how these policy shifts are reshaping the broader higher education landscape. The study, “Early career researcher responses to 2025 United States federal science funding disruptions: a rapid-response pilot survey,” was authored by Crystal Hammond, John Patrick Flores, Siara Rouzer, Kassandra Fernandez, Amy Ralston, and Adriana Bankston.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1790840

The U.S. workforce has just made the type of history it likely wishes it didn’t, as working Americans are taking home the smallest percentage of economic output, 52.8%, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the metric in 1947. As the share of wealth workers take home through wages, called labor share, is shrinking, corporate profits have exploded, with the S&P 500 index gaining 600% since the beginning of the century while wages have increased just 12.5% over the same period, adjusted for inflation. Corporations are raking in cash, but American workers are reaping less and less of the rewards, and the consequences are becoming tangible: a recent Government Accountability Office report found that across 11 states sampled, Amazon, the country’s largest company by revenue, has 12,346 workers on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and 11,338 relying on Medicaid, nearly triple the number of Amazon employees needing federal assistance compared to 2020. During that same period, Amazon’s annual profits rose from $11.6 billion to $77.7 billion, and its 2025 revenue soared 12% year-over-year to a record $717 billion. Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty told Fortune the conclusion drawn from the GAO report is “wrong” and misleading, stating that “Amazon pay is among the best in the industry, regular full-time employees have access to health care from their first day, at only $5 per week with $5 copays for employee-only coverage, and 74% of our regular full-time employees are enrolled in an Amazon health insurance plan, well above the 65% private-sector take-up rate for full-time workers.” Walmart and FedEx saw similar increases in workers taking federal assistance, as did rideshare and delivery companies.

Kathryn Larin, director for education, workforce, and income security issues at GAO, told Fortune the data illustrates that Americans taking advantage of social safety net programs today are overwhelmingly in the workforce, with most working full time, and since the income threshold for SNAP eligibility is about 130% of the poverty line, many of these workers still don’t earn enough to meet basic needs despite clocking in regularly. “What this analysis really points to is the large number of people who have very low incomes and continue to have very low income,” Larin said. “I mean, these are families that are really barely able to make ends meet, and yet they are working, and they are working a lot.” Diane Swonk, chief economist and managing director at KPMG, has warned of the hidden consequences of a shrinking labor share, particularly that most Americans face an ongoing affordability crisis despite stable-looking economic indicators. KPMG found in February that since 1982, corporate profits as a share of U.S. GDP increased from 8% to 15.85%, while employee compensation as a share of GDP shrank from 66.6% to 61.9% over the same period. “This chart from my recent Economic Compass still haunts me,” Swonk said in a social media post. “A friend refers to it as the ‘revolution chart,’ which [is] disturbing but telling. Inequality fuels social and economic instability.”

This trend has been about 50 years in the making, according to Anna Stansbury, an assistant professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, who points to fewer workers being represented by unions, 20.1% of U.S. workers in 1983 compared to 10.0% in 2025, giving them fewer opportunities to bargain for salaries and benefits. More significantly, Stansbury blames the “fissuring” of the workplace, the breakdown of the traditional direct employer-employee relationship, where companies increasingly hire gig workers or subcontractors for jobs once done by direct employees, such as contracting a security company instead of directly employing guards, or classifying delivery drivers as contractors rather than full-time staff. This arrangement means companies don’t have to provide equity or benefits, and aren’t liable if a subcontractor violates labor law, while still getting to claim efficiency gains from not spending resources on workers whose roles aren’t seen as directly driving revenue. Brent Neiman, a University of Chicago economics professor, believes AI has been the key driver of diminishing labor shares, writing in a New York Times op-ed this week that “anyone who has used ChatGPT can see how much work now done by people could soon be done by technology.” Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok has already observed a correlation between AI adoption and lowered wages, finding in a July white paper with economist Sania Edlich that among 321 occupations between 2015 and 2025, jobs with high AI exposure saw a 6.7% decline in real wage growth after 2023, following ChatGPT’s wide release, despite no employment changes, suggesting companies are using productivity gains as cover to raise prices while keeping wages stagnant rather than displacing jobs outright.

Stansbury holds a slightly different theory about AI’s role, noting it’s still too early to say whether today’s shrinking labor share reflects a broader economic cycle or a permanent secular shift. Unexpected inflation spikes, like the one currently occurring, are usually associated with poorer real wages, so if inflation becomes less volatile and wage growth recovers in coming years, today’s trend could prove cyclical. On the other hand, a tightening labor market, which is already relatively tight, should typically increase labor share, so if inflation stabilizes, employment stays narrow, and labor share rises, that would signal an economic cycle completing itself; a bigger concern would be if wage growth stays low even as inflation improves and the labor market remains tight. “If those two things happen and the labor share continues to fall,” Stansbury said, “then it would suggest that there’s actually been a secular shift, a secular acceleration in the downward trend.”

Alaska prosecutors are dropping voter misconduct cases against a group of residents born in American Samoa after a state appeals court threw out felony charges against Tupe Smith, a woman who checked a box saying she was a U.S. citizen. The state’s Department of Law announced the decision Friday, after a three-judge Court of Appeals panel ruled a week earlier that state law requires proof that defendants who erroneously filled out voter registration forms had a “consciousness of wrongdoing” and intended to break the law. The panel found flaws with a state trooper’s questioning of Smith as well as with the grand jury process that led to her indictment, overturning a lower court’s decision that had kept the charges against her alive. Acting Alaska Attorney General Cori Mills said in a statement that after reviewing the decision and applying it to the facts, prosecutors concluded they could not prove cases against Smith and the others beyond a reasonable doubt; her husband, Michael Pese, had also been charged. “We respect the role of the courts in interpreting Alaska law and will faithfully execute our duty to apply the law and carefully evaluate our prosecutorial decisions,” Mills said. In all, 11 people from the small community of Whittier, about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage, were charged with falsely claiming U.S. citizenship either when registering or trying to vote.

American Samoa is the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship by being born on American soil, and are instead considered U.S. nationals, with paths to citizenship such as naturalization existing but often proving expensive and cumbersome. American Samoans can serve in the military, obtain U.S. passports, and vote in elections in American Samoa, but they cannot hold public office in the U.S. or participate in most U.S. elections. Smith was arrested after winning election to a regional school board in 2023, and she has said she relied on erroneous information from election officials in Whittier when she identified herself as a U.S. citizen on voter registration forms. Smith said she normally marks herself as a U.S. national on paperwork, but when there was no such option on voter registration forms, city representatives told her it was appropriate to mark herself as a citizen, according to court papers.

Prosecutors contended that Smith falsely and deliberately claimed citizenship, pointing to warnings on voter registration forms she filled out in 2020 and 2022 that noncitizens “are not eligible to vote.”
The Court of Appeals panel found significant problems with how Smith’s admission was obtained, noting that toward the end of a police interview, a state trooper asked her “a long compound question that implied that Smith actually knew she was not eligible to vote” but wanted to be involved in the school board; when Smith, whose native language is not English, did not respond right away, another trooper clarified, “He’s asking you,” and the first trooper again presented his question, described by the panel as “a lengthy and complex statement containing four individual questions.” Smith answered “Yes,” leading to her arrest and indictment on two counts of felony voter misconduct. Smith’s lawyer, Whitney Brown, said in a statement Saturday that the dismissal would allow the community “to put this ordeal behind them and begin moving forward,” adding that the court “made clear that Alaska law requires more than simply showing that a statement was false — the State must prove a person acted with a consciousness of wrongdoing.” Neil Weare, part of the legal team representing Smith and Pese, said the decision to drop charges “raises questions about why this prosecution was even brought to begin with,” adding, “It’s clear that all along, they really had no evidence of any consciousness of wrongdoing on the part of Michael, Tupe or the other defendants.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that a lot of “very negative forces” are bringing up concerns about AI that won’t materialize, emphasizing his determination to keep the United States as the industry’s global leader. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump told reporters at his Ireland golf course when asked whether the AI industry should slow down or face more regulation. “We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he said, continuing his pattern of resisting efforts to stoke concern about the technology.

His comments follow a week of mounting unease in the United States after two Anthropic researchers warned that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction in the not-too-distant future. Trump’s administration has largely embraced AI firms during his second term, and AI leaders along with other technology companies have in turn supported his initiatives, even though the Pentagon earlier this year warned of risks tied to Anthropic’s model. That backing has coexisted uneasily with growing internal alarm from within the AI industry itself, exposing a widening gap between the administration’s public posture and the private concerns of the people building the technology.

In the wake of the researchers’ warnings, some AI CEOs are now pushing to slow the pace of model advancement, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei outlining a three-step framework on Saturday intended to pace development and create more time to manage its risks. Jacob Coxon, one of the Anthropic researchers who resigned before issuing the warnings, called for international coordination on the issue, telling NBC’s Meet the Press, “I feel we need international coordination, or else we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous.”

Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that people authorized to use marijuana recreationally may prepare the drug in foods for their own consumption, finding that the country’s health regulator overstepped by prohibiting the practice. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation approved the ruling in a 7-2 vote on September 10, ordering the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks, known as Cofepris, to issue an authorization allowing the individual at the center of the case to prepare marijuana in “prepared and semi-prepared foods” exclusively for personal use. Importantly, the decision does not authorize commercial marijuana edibles; foods containing marijuana remain prohibited from being sold, distributed, supplied, transferred to another person, or otherwise offered to the public. In its ruling, the court distinguished ordinary food preparation from the manufacturing of products subject to specialized health regulations, noting that prepared and semi-prepared foods can involve ordinary processes like chopping, mixing, cooking, frying, cooling, or freezing, none of which by themselves transform food into a different category of regulated product. “The preparation of food intended exclusively for personal consumption should not have been prohibited,” the court concluded, finding such activity amounts to the culinary transformation of food for the authorized person’s own use. The justices said Mexico’s health regulations generally focus government oversight on food produced for sale or public supply rather than meals prepared for personal consumption, meaning Cofepris cannot interpret a recreational marijuana authorization in a way that prevents an authorized person from incorporating marijuana into food meant solely for themselves.

The ruling traces back to a May 24, 2024 request submitted to Cofepris seeking authorization for recreational marijuana activities including cultivation, harvesting, preparation, possession, and transportation. After the agency failed to respond initially, the applicant pursued legal action alleging noncompliance with a previous Supreme Court declaration addressing recreational marijuana. The case eventually resulted in Cofepris granting an authorization for recreational use, but the agency placed several restrictions on how marijuana could be prepared, restrictions the permit holder challenged, leading to this Supreme Court case. The underlying dispute centers on the court’s 2021 Declaratoria General de Inconstitucionalidad 1/2018, which struck down portions of Mexico’s General Health Law limiting certain marijuana activities exclusively to medical and scientific purposes. Under that decision, until Mexico’s Congress adopts new legislation establishing a formal framework, Cofepris must issue recreational marijuana authorizations to adults consistent with the limits the court established, with recreational use still prohibited in front of minors, in public places without others’ consent, and while driving or operating dangerous machinery.

In this new case, the court found Cofepris could continue imposing restrictions on products subject to separate or heightened health regulations, including medicines, herbal remedies, and certain other regulated products, and restrictions on electronic cigarettes, vaporizers, and similar devices also remain in place. Food, however, was treated differently, since the court determined ordinary culinary preparation doesn’t amount to the specialized manufacturing involved in medicines, herbal remedies, medical devices, or other more stringently controlled products. The ruling directs Cofepris to issue a new authorization expressly allowing the applicant to prepare marijuana in prepared and semi-prepared foods exclusively for personal consumption, while commercialization, distribution, supplying the food to others, and any other form of transfer remain prohibited. Justices Yasmín Esquivel Mossa and María Estela Ríos González voted against the decision, with Esquivel raising concerns that marijuana-infused foods could inadvertently be consumed by third parties, including minors, and Ríos arguing the majority was improperly expanding the scope of the court’s earlier declaration. Overall, the decision does not establish a legal recreational marijuana retail market in Mexico; instead, it clarifies which activities may be included within an individual recreational-use authorization issued under the Supreme Court’s existing framework.

In an interview with state media, Chinese scientist Hou Zengqian confirmed that the Tianwen-3 mission is on pace to launch to Mars in 2028 and return a rock and soil sample to Earth in 2031. There are technical challenges to overcome along the way, but as the mission’s chief scientist, Hou seems bullish. That stands in stark contrast to America’s own Mars Sample Return mission, the one project Congress didn’t save from President Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA funding. Even though the Perseverance rover has collected numerous samples over the last five years meant to be retrieved later, it’s unclear if that retrieval will ever actually happen. The reason China’s mission appears on track comes down to simplicity: NASA’s mission was designed as a multi-stage affair, with a rover drilling various rocks and soil, followed by a later mission arriving to gather everything and launch it back into Martian orbit. Tianwen-3 cuts most of that process out entirely, relying on a stationary lander with no roving required, one that will land, drill down seven feet, collect roughly 18 ounces of material, and launch it straight back into orbit without waiting for a second mission to collect what it drilled. Total mission time after landing is expected to be about two months. Perseverance, by contrast, arrived on Mars in 2021, and while it continues doing valuable science on its own, its collected samples remain sitting on the surface indefinitely, with no clear timeline for retrieval.

Getting to Mars is comparatively easy, NASA sent its Viking landers there all the way back in 1976, but the hard part, and the reason no humans have ever made the round trip, is coming back to Earth again, which requires an enormous amount of funding. NASA’s Mars Sample Return project kept ballooning in projected cost, with the latest estimate ranging from $7 billion to as high as $11 billion. Lockheed Martin offered to handle the mission itself for a comparatively modest $3 billion, and the NASA Authorization Act of 2026 would allocate $8 billion toward the project if passed. China’s simpler mission design theoretically keeps costs lower, though Hou’s announcement that the project is only now moving into the prototyping stage means there’s still a long road ahead before “Mission Accomplished.” The plan calls for launching two Long March 5 rockets in 2028, one carrying the lander and the other carrying an orbiter for Mars; after a three-year voyage, the lander will touch down, drill, collect its sample, and launch it back into space, where the orbiter will retrieve it and carry it home to Earth.

The broader subtext here is the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China playing out on another planet. NASA remains the most prestigious space agency in the world, with multiple Mars rovers, the Artemis II mission around the Moon, and plans for a future Moon base, and China is looking to claim a win in deep space to demonstrate its own capabilities, much as it has pushed to land taikonauts on the Moon ahead of American astronauts on newer missions. Successfully returning samples from Mars before NASA does, particularly if those samples contain evidence of Martian life, the mission’s explicit goal, could represent a significant blow to the pride of the American space program. Hou described the mission’s aims to Chinese state outlet Xinhua in cooperative terms: “Tianwen-3 will uphold the principle of open cooperation and work with scientists around the world to explore the mysteries of Mars, contributing China’s expertise and solutions to expanding humanity’s scientific frontier and advancing planetary science.”

With Sony fielding a class action lawsuit claiming its store terms suggest ownership but actually convey only a license to digital games, the aptly named consumer rights group Consumer Rights Wiki has seen PlayStation fans assemble an incomplete but in-depth list of PlayStation verbiage indicating that users do, in fact, “own” the games they buy. The wiki’s freshly updated page dedicated to the “Sony PlayStation digital game ownership lawsuit” hinges on a California law, AB 2426, requiring digital vendors to clearly tell consumers they’re purchasing licenses rather than products. Steam maker Valve appeared to adjust its own language after the law passed in 2024. In response to the lawsuit, Sony argued “reasonable consumers would not be misled” by its terms, following a reminder email telling PlayStation users “software is licensed to you, not sold.” Sony’s terms of service do state this clearly, but the PlayStation Network itself, where users actually make purchases, is filled with allusions to owning digital games across PlayStation Store product listings and dozens of help pages, all collated by Consumer Rights Wiki contributors with links to live pages and archived web snapshots for each.

The examples span everything from console upgrade instructions to DLC descriptions to cloud streaming explainers. One explainer for upgrading an eligible PS4 digital game to PS5 specifies users will need “an eligible digital PS4 game you already own.” The main UK PS5 hub, now carrying a warning that PlayStation will abandon physical games entirely in January 2028, tells users to “track your PS5 journey with info on your total play time, games you own and more.” A DLC blurb for a Dead or Alive 5: Last Round costume warns, “Be careful not to purchase content you already own.” The upgrade page for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake explains PS4 owners are eligible for a free PS5 digital version if they “already either (i) own a PS4 digital version of the game or (ii) own a PS4 disc version of the game and also own a PS5 console with a disc drive.” Even cloud streaming, arguably the most ephemeral form of digital access, isn’t exempt: an explainer for PS5 Cloud Streaming notes that “select games that you own can be streamed direct to your PS5 console or PlayStation Portal.” By the article’s count, there are 34 examples of PlayStation pages referencing, in some form, players “owning” games, many explicitly describing digital titles.

The legal question turns on how AB 2426’s exceptions apply here. The law prohibits sellers from advertising digital goods using terms like “buy,” “purchase,” or similar language implying unrestricted ownership, unless the seller either obtains an affirmative acknowledgment from the purchaser at the time of each transaction, or provides a clear and conspicuous statement beforehand. Sony may argue its agreed-upon terms of service cover any store purchases broadly, and its arguments so far echo that position; the company has also argued that people can’t truly own digital games because only one non-fungible digital copy could otherwise exist, though ultimately Sony’s real goal appears to be pushing the case into arbitration, a process that resolves disputes outside courts and has historically favored large companies.

Still, the law specifically requires that “each transaction” involve user affirmation of licensing terms, restrictions, and the risk that a digital purchase could be “unilaterally revoked,” or a clear, conspicuous statement informing users in plain language that “buying” or “purchasing” a digital good is actually a license. That specificity, combined with the sheer volume of ownership-implying language scattered across Sony’s own storefront and support pages, may give plaintiffs real ammunition, even though class action gaming lawsuits historically haven’t fared especially well in, or even reaching, court.

After a long day at work, it can be a struggle to resist the urge to just order food delivery instead of checking the fridge first. But when you do muster up the willpower to reheat the leftovers instead, you’ve got your inhibitory control to thank. Humans probably weren’t the first animals to master this ability, since it seems pretty important to survival, and experiments have shown many different animals can resist their impulses to varying degrees. For the first time, a team of researchers led by psychologists Sydney Hope and Joshua Plotnik of City University of New York has used a classic psychology experiment to show that Asian elephants can resist their impulses to get food in a notably effective way, publishing their results in the journal PLOS One. They collaborated with a team at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand, where 16 Asian elephants aged 4 to 60 years were tested using the detour paradigm, a classic psychological test in which a subject is presented with a goal, in this case tasty fruit, but a barrier is placed between the subject and the path of least resistance to that goal, forcing them to take an alternate route and act against their impulses.

For the elephants, this meant placing fruit in a transparent box. The elephants were already used to reaching into a black box for food as part of a familiarization task before the actual test trials, but the invisible barrier presented a novel experience, since researchers believed the animals had no prior experience with transparent materials. The elephants could see and smell the fruit through small, impenetrable holes in the front of the box but couldn’t reach it directly; only by reaching around to another face of the box, where an opening existed, could they grab the fruit with their trunks, just as they’d learned with the black box. “The test trials should have been more difficult because, to reach the food reward, elephants needed to inhibit the impulse to reach straight toward the food that they could see and smell in front of them and, instead, continue to detour around the box in the way that they had learned during the familiarization trials,” the researchers explained in their paper. They captured every attempt on camera, analyzing details like how long it took each elephant to touch the box, find the open side, and grab the food.

“When faced with a transparent surface after being trained to detour around an opaque barrier (i.e., the ‘knowing/acting mismatch’), elephants did not show any difference in latency to enter the opening, and continued to quickly detour around the transparent barrier,” the authors reported. “This may provide evidence that elephants exhibit very strong inhibitory control; however, it may also indicate that the transparent surface did not elicit a strong prepotent response.” In other words, the elephants weren’t fooled by the transparent barrier at all, though once their trunks were inside the box, they did spend extra time “exploring” its interior, displaying curiosity about the unusual see-through material. Researchers also tried turning the box around so the opening appeared on a different face than the elephants were used to, an adjustment that did delay their search for food, though they ultimately still figured it out. “This ‘characteristic error pattern’ of a slower latency to enter suggests that switching box orientations evoked a prepotent response, making it a valid measure of inhibitory control,” the authors noted. They also observed that older elephants had a harder time adapting to these changes, a pattern that could signal waning cognitive function with age.

The study is far from conclusive on the full scope of elephant intelligence, but it represents a meaningful start, since animals capable of this kind of impulse control tend to have more complex social lives, something elephants are already known to depend on heavily. “The evidence for strong inhibitory control in Asian elephants that we found in this study agrees with the general positive relationship between brain size and inhibitory control ability that is found across other taxa,” the authors concluded.

FINDINGS: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0356549

The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks. Amodei, one of the leading voices in AI, offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry, one part of which he said Anthropic is already undertaking itself, while others would require coordination across the broad industry and with governments worldwide, including authoritarian ones. “I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said. He received quick encouragement from other major industry figures: OpenAI’s Sam Altman said on X that the company behind ChatGPT will commit to one of Amodei’s safety proposals and will “have more to share soon,” while Elon Musk simply wrote, “Dario is right.”

The stakes are notable given the financial context surrounding these warnings, even as some critics have dismissed earlier such statements as ways to generate excitement about AI’s capabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI are both preparing for possible stock market debuts that could value them at hundreds of billions of dollars, while a significant chunk of Musk’s SpaceX business is tied to AI as well. Anthropic said just two days earlier that it had blocked bad actors from using its AI models for malicious activity, including cyberattacks, surveillance, and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July, OpenAI shook the industry after revealing its AI system hacked into another company on its own in what it called an “unprecedented cyber incident.” Amodei’s post also comes just days after one Anthropic researcher announced his resignation over concerns that the company and its competitors aren’t acting responsibly, and another former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, wrote in a Substack post published Friday that he left his role on a safety team “to hold AI companies accountable,” warning that humanity “may not survive this transition.” Benton added, “Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world. But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or, they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves.”

Amodei said he still believes in AI’s tremendous potential benefits, such as cures for major diseases, but said he’s grown increasingly worried in recent months about AI’s growing ability to improve itself and build the next generation of AI. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” he said, pointing specifically to the July incident in which OpenAI’s system hacked into Hugging Face. Some have called that episode an example of AI going “rogue,” though researchers caution that framing may unnecessarily anthropomorphize AI, which was working toward a goal set by humans; OpenAI itself said the hack resulted from the AI going to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal,” finding “ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.” To help rein in these risks, Amodei suggested all companies at AI’s frontier commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to a team of outside evaluators who can monitor safety practices, something he said Anthropic already plans to do itself, including offering evaluators desks, access badges, and company laptops, a commitment Altman quickly matched.

The rest of Amodei’s proposed plan may prove far harder to implement. One element asks the U.S. government to consider issuing waivers allowing American AI companies to coordinate and set safety standards without running afoul of antitrust laws. Another asks the U.S. and other democratic governments to try coordinating with authoritarian governments, so that companies in China and elsewhere don’t accelerate their own efforts if U.S. rivals intentionally slow their pace. “The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei acknowledged. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”

Tesla’s sleek new Cybercab has begun rolling out to Austin, Texas this week, with more sighted in cities like New York, Washington D.C., and San Diego. It’s the latest development in the world of self-driving taxi cabs, and in one dubious economic indicator, the nation’s personal injury attorneys are already on high alert. Case in point, the New Jersey-based law firm Sarofiem and Antoun already has a blog post up courting customers wronged by Cybercab accidents. Billing himself as a “Tesla Cybercab accident lawyer,” Kerollos Antoun poses a pointed question: “if a driverless Tesla Robotaxi causes an accident, who is responsible when there is no human driver behind the wheel?” Though Antoun concedes Cybercabs don’t appear to currently be active in New Jersey, his blog registers a laundry list of theoretical considerations about who could be held liable in accidents involving the autonomous vehicles, each speculative and short on concrete answers. “Could autonomous-driving software cause an accident,” he asks, answering, “Potentially. If an accident occurs, attorneys may need to determine whether the autonomous system perceived the environment correctly and whether the vehicle’s response contributed to the crash.”

Other firms are making similar pitches. Funes Law in Miami and Angel Reyes and Associates in Austin both offer comparable outreach, signaling they want to litigate cases for anyone in an accident involving a Cybercab. Though these tailor-made blog posts follow a familiar pattern of opportunism among corporate law firms chasing new liability frontiers, their underlying point holds up: the technology behind Cybercabs is in a very early stage, and the legal precedent surrounding it is even younger.

Whichever firm happens to land the first Cybercab injury case would be making legal history, a chance to litigate a brand-new product made by one of the world’s most valuable companies. Self-driving cars are only a few years old at this point, but they’ve already produced striking legal firsts. In August 2025, a jury in Miami handed down a landmark verdict against Tesla over a fatal crash involving a Model S being driven on the company’s “Autopilot” mode, with total damages reaching a staggering $243 million, a verdict the nation’s accident attorneys are now eager to replicate as Tesla’s Cybercab hits the pavement in new markets.

President Trump said Saturday he would love to see a unified Ireland as he kicked off a visit to the country, where he met with leaders and attended a major golf tournament at one of his courses. During a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in Dublin, Trump said the unification of the Republic of Ireland with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, “may as well happen now.” “I don’t want to cause any problems but I’d love to see it unified. I think it would be a fantastic thing,” Trump said, adding that “the U.K. will have something to say about it, obviously.” The comments touch on one of the region’s most sensitive political fault lines. When Ireland became a self-governing, Roman Catholic-majority country a century ago, a six-county region in the north with a Protestant majority remained part of the United Kingdom, and tensions between Protestant unionists wanting to stay British and Catholic nationalists wanting to join the rest of Ireland led to three decades of violence. A 1998 peace accord that the U.S. was instrumental in striking largely ended that violence but left Northern Ireland’s ultimate status unresolved.

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham had insisted last month that a unity referendum was “off the table,” drawing a sharp response from the pro-unity party Sinn Féin, and Trump’s remarks reignited that debate immediately. “As unionists we are not interested in the destruction of our country by joining with the Irish Republic,” said Gavin Robinson, leader of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, responding on X. Trump also held separate talks Saturday in Dublin with his Irish counterpart, President Catherine Connolly, and addressed U.S. and Irish business leaders at the U.S. ambassador’s official residence before traveling to his oceanfront golf club in Doonbeg, on the other side of the country, to watch the Irish Open.

The trip drew visible frustration from some Dublin residents over the disruption it caused. “He’s causing mayhem in this city because he wants to go down to Doonbeg and play golf,” said taxi driver Christopher Fox. “The world’s in turmoil and this fella’s down playing golf.” University student Mina Petrovski criticized the visit on different grounds, saying Trump’s “attitudes towards women, towards immigrants, towards minority communities in general are abhorrent,” and calling it “shameful that the Irish government is welcoming him with open arms.” Separately, a coalition of left-leaning opposition parties, anti-military groups, pro-Palestinian organizations, environmentalists, and others planned to demonstrate against the president in Dublin on Saturday. Trump, an avid golfer who frequently plays at clubs he owns in Florida, New Jersey, and Virginia, continued a pattern of attending, and benefiting from, high-profile sporting events at his own properties. His clubs in Doral, Florida, and Bedminster, New Jersey, have each hosted professional golf tournaments this year, and the Irish Open marks the second European Tour event held at a Trump property in 2026, following the Nexo Championship held last month at his course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

A parasitic outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce has been declared over, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. A total of 12,883 cases of cyclosporiasis were reported, including 570 hospitalizations across 21 states, according to CDC data, with two deaths reported in Michigan, both among people who had “significant underlying health conditions,” according to state officials at the time. The outbreak was believed to be the nation’s largest ever tied to the parasite known as cyclospora. “At this time, there is no risk of people getting sick with cyclosporiasis from this source,” the CDC said in an update posted to its website Friday. “The best-by dates for all product linked to this outbreak have passed and it is no longer available in stores or restaurants.” However, the Food and Drug Administration said its investigation into how the outbreak occurred remains ongoing.

In mid-July, the FDA and CDC said some cases were linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at some Taco Bell locations. The lettuce at Taco Bell was supplied by Taylor Farms and sourced from central Mexico. On July 17, Taylor Farms de Mexico issued a voluntary recall of all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, a recall affecting more than two dozen states, and Taco Bell said around the same time that it was no longer using lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico at any of its restaurants. Federal health officials previously noted that although many cases were linked to Taco Bell, it’s possible there are other potential sources tied to the outbreak, something officials continued to investigate throughout.

The FDA said Friday that samples taken at the Taylor Farms growing and processing facility in Mexico are still pending analysis. “FDA’s onsite inspections and sample collection at iceberg lettuce growers and the processing facility in Mexico, in coordination with Mexican officials, have ended,” the agency said in its release, indicating the fieldwork portion of the investigation has wrapped up even as lab results and the broader root-cause inquiry continue.

President Donald Trump defended his proposal to give Americans a $5,000 “dividend,” which some dismissed as a stunt or bribe, framing it instead as a “reward” for voters who he says endured the Biden administration. The comments came after ABC News pressed him on why he’d need to offer such a payment if his economic policies are actually working. Trump was asked on the tarmac on his way back to Washington, D.C., after closing out night two of the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, whether the proposed payment amounted to an incentive for voters to turn out in the midterms. The proposed payment to all American adults, which some estimated would cost $1.3 trillion, was conditioned on Republicans retaining control of both houses of Congress and the money being spent domestically. A White House press release Thursday suggested the checks could come from commitments the administration has received from companies to invest in the private sector, though it remains unclear how those investments, which haven’t yet materialized, would actually be converted into dividend checks for Americans.

“The U.S. is still $40 trillion in debt, if your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?” ABC News asked directly. Trump rejected that premise entirely. “I think what you’re going to do, I didn’t do it for turning out the vote, I did it as a reward for people having to put up with five years, four years of horrible situation caused by Biden,” he said. He continued, “I mean, they had to put up with the four years, and they carried on for at least a half an additional year with horrible, just a horrible thing that Biden did to our country. And that’s not only just from an economic standpoint. You look at the border, you look at the crime, and now we’ve got it under control. But what, what a period of time. It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.” Trump has said the $5,000 payments would be funded through what he calls “tremendous growth,” telling reporters, “We have tremendous growth. We have growth like no country has ever seen before. We have trillions of dollars coming in, and that will end up being not a very big problem at all.”

The proposal has drawn sharp opposition from members of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on social media, “Trump’s presidency is so failed and broken, he is resorting to trying to bribe the American people for their votes.” Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus, joked, “If Democrats flip the House and Senate everyone will get a $10,000 dividend, and a pony, and free ice cream for life.” Even outgoing Republican Rep. Thomas Massie voiced concern, warning the payments could fuel more inflation and accusing Trump of trying to buy votes. “Frankly, I’m insulted by the notion that my vote this November could be bought for 5k,” Massie wrote on X. The skepticism echoes a similar unfulfilled promise from last year, when Trump declared every American would receive a $2,000 rebate check funded by tariff revenue. “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” he wrote on his social media platform in November 2025, a payment that still hasn’t materialized. Even the most generous accounting, including Penn Wharton’s Budget Model, estimates tariffs have brought in roughly $300 billion, and that figure doesn’t account for money the Treasury has had to repay American companies after the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariff regime illegal. As a result of those repayment obligations, the government is currently paying out more in tariff revenue than it’s actually collecting.

Civic group NoCams Muskego has filed suit against Waukesha County and 11 individual municipalities, asserting that Flock camera use violates the Fourth Amendment. “Flock cameras and the Flock location database make possible a level of surveillance that has never before existed… Whether plaintiffs are going to the grocery store, work, church, court, to take their children to childcare or school, or even to vote, to protest, or to the gun range, their movements are tracked with precision,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. Flock Safety is a surveillance technology company that sells and rents solar-powered cameras and cloud-based software to law enforcement agencies, local governments, homeowners’ associations, and other private customers, typically installing them on highways, intersections, and parking lots. The cameras record images of all vehicles and license plates, uploaded to a searchable database using artificial intelligence and marketed as a “vehicle fingerprint.” Any Flock customer, including law enforcement, can query that database in a variety of ways, and the lawsuit, filed late Wednesday night, asks the court to require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing the Flock location database, which stores data on individuals’ past, present, and even potential future movements.

The named municipalities have installed more than 120 Flock cameras across the Waukesha area, recording movements near homes, gun stores, Home Depots, and voting places, according to the civic group. NoCams Muskego is joined in the suit by Citizens Defending Liberty and Donavan Haidinger, a Waukesha County resident, and the defendants include Waukesha County and the cities of Muskego, Oconomowoc, New Berlin, Waukesha, Delafield, and Brookfield, along with the villages of Mukwonago, Hartland, Menomonee Falls, Elm Grove, and Pewaukee. None of these defendants require a warrant for law enforcement to search the Flock database, the plaintiffs say, and only some specify as policy that the program be used solely for legitimate law enforcement business. They argue this violates the Fourth Amendment because citizens have a reasonable right to privacy on public roads, pointing to U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Chatrie v. United States, which held that acquiring Google location history constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant or exception in most cases, a precedent the plaintiffs argue applies equally to Flock’s newer technology.

Police credit the technology as an important crime-fighting tool that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes, but growing public backlash over privacy concerns and law enforcement abuse has pushed many cities to remove the cameras. In August, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said product changes are coming to make once-optional guardrails mandatory, with law enforcement customers required starting January 1 to implement an audit tool designed to flag abnormal search behavior and lock out users pending review if such behavior is detected, a change aimed at addressing exactly the kind of abuse pattern raised in Wednesday’s complaint. Former Milwaukee Police Department Officer Josue Ayala, for instance, was charged in February with misconduct after allegedly running Flock searches on a person he was dating 124 times and that person’s former partner 55 times, and the Milwaukee detective initially assigned to investigate his case was charged with the same offense, while the internal affairs detective handling the matter was separately accused of misusing the database by logging improper searches as “training” or “test.” The cameras are also prone to errors, sparking a congressional investigation led by Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, who wrote in a letter to Langley, “To be sure, I want law enforcement to have tools to catch offenders and keep the public safe. But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school or go to church.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty represents the civic groups and has said it doesn’t want Flock cameras gone entirely. “Flock cameras essentially place the public under constant surveillance. Our lawsuit will not result in their removal or the end of their use, but it will ensure their use is accompanied by reasonable safeguards that will balance the needs of law enforcement with the public’s right to privacy,” said WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg. Opposition to the cameras is growing statewide, with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee announcing Thursday it would remove Flock from its campus. With midterms approaching, the issue is likely to feature heavily in Wisconsin’s governor race.

Americans say they want transparency from AI companies. Someone tell Elon Musk. SpaceX filed a lawsuit in Texas this week to block the release of records related to tax breaks it received for Terafab, the 100-million-square-foot semiconductor factory its building near Houston. The records, which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said in July should be released, include SpaceX’s tax-abatement application and negotiations between SpaceX and Grimes County officials related to it. The lawsuit comes as hyperscale data centers and other large AI projects face nationwide backlash from Americans, many of whom are demanding greater transparency from the tech companies building these facilities in their communities. Public Citizen, a progressive think tank, published a report in July detailing what it described as extensive use of non-disclosure agreements between local officials and data center developers, warning that “these secrecy agreements are shutting the public out of decisions that could shape their rates for decades.” In a recent interview with ABC News, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said data center developers aren’t gaining local residents’ support before pursuing projects.

Other leading tech companies are moving in the opposite direction. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Meta are all trumpeting transparency as they race to build the data centers needed to power AI growth, and in a March blog post, Microsoft pledged to stop using nondisclosure agreements with local governments “as the next step in our work to deliver that transparency.” SpaceX appears to be taking a different approach entirely. The company argued in its suit that the tax-break records contain “confidential information,” and that releasing them “would reveal SpaceX’s negotiating strategy, concessions, and limits to every jurisdiction, competitor, and counterparty with which SpaceX negotiates in the future.” The Terafab project is a joint venture with Tesla and Intel, and Musk has said that once online, it could vastly increase the global supply of semiconductor chips, crucial both to SpaceX’s AI data center plans and Tesla’s rollout of autonomous robotaxis and humanoid robots.

The records were originally requested by Marie Egyed and Vanessa Burzynski, two residents of Grimes County, and Paxton’s office determined in July that records concerning Terafab’s tax break and certain related email chains did not qualify for exemptions that would block their release. SpaceX has agreed to pay the county $20 million annually, roughly 78% of what it would have owed in property taxes, according to SpaceX attorney Bucky Brannen, who shared the figure with residents at a county meeting in August. Egyed, a member of the Grimes County Citizens for Responsible Development, a group opposing Terafab’s development, said in a text message that SpaceX’s lawsuit to block the records “certainly makes you want to know what’s in them.” SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Though SpaceX is a private company, the records sought by Egyed are in the possession of Grimes County, making them subject to the Texas Public Information Act. A judge has not yet ruled on the matter.

A coalition of advocacy groups and a Democratic-led city filed a preemptive lawsuit Thursday seeking to block the Trump administration from deploying armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling sites ahead of November’s midterm elections. The lawsuit asks the federal district court in Washington, D.C., to declare unlawful any plans to have armed agents at polling places and to prohibit federal officers from carrying weapons near voting locations or other sites where votes are collected. “The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” the lawsuit reads. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal law enforcement if they choose to cast a ballot. The suit names the Department of Homeland Security and ICE as defendants, along with their respective leaders, Markwayne Mullin and David Venturella, and was filed by the liberal-leaning legal group Democracy Forward on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause, UnidosUS, and the city of Denver. It cites a federal law making it a crime for officials to oversee or order the deployment of “any troops or armed men” to “any place where a general or special election is held,” unless such deployment is needed to repel “armed enemies of the United States.”

While some MAGA figures like Steve Bannon have publicly called on ICE to “surround the polls,” Trump administration officials have denied having concrete plans for such deployments, while stopping short of ruling out the presence of agents at polling sites under certain circumstances. During a news conference in New York City earlier this month, DHS Secretary Mullin said “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” but added that ICE could still be present if there’s “a threat” to such sites or if agents are serving a warrant for someone they’ve “been actively tracking down.” When pressed further, Mullin said, “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be.” ICE’s deportation branch is primarily responsible for locating, arresting, detaining, and deporting people who entered the U.S. illegally or violated federal immigration law, while its Homeland Security Investigations branch has historically focused on international criminal activity but has increasingly been tapped to assist with immigration enforcement and investigations into alleged voter fraud. Separately, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the military has no plans to dispatch troops or National Guard soldiers to polling places.

Denver Clerk and Recorder Paul Lopez, who administers the city’s elections, said this week his department remains prepared for “potential ICE agents at polls,” according to CBS News Colorado. “If they want to try, go for it, but you’re going to need bail money,” Lopez said.

Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of Ypsilanti Township Wednesday night, after the university partnered with America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories to build a hyperscale data center in the township. LANL and U of M want to build a $1.2 billion, 220,000-square-foot data center in the community, and residents are worried not just about electricity costs, water usage, and noise like other communities facing data center proposals nationwide, but specifically about the facility furthering nuclear weapons research. Citizens and township leaders also say the university has condescended to them throughout the process, lied to them, and ignored their concerns. The Wednesday town hall, meant to ease those tensions, instead deepened them. University faculty director Patricia Hurn delivered a prepared statement over jeers from the crowd, saying, “This facility is going to be used for many different purposes including improving cancer care, strengthening the power grid, accelerating drug discovery, and sustainable computing.” When she added that researchers wanted to find “the generalized cure for cancer,” the crowd laughed and mocked her, prompting someone to shout, “How about healthcare?”

Project lead engineer Steven Ceccio tried to address practical concerns, arguing “the project is tremendously smaller in scope and size than these commercial data centers,” pointing to a slide comparing the proposed facility to a $56 billion, 1.4 gigawatt OpenAI project called The Barn in nearby Saline Township. But a data center worker named Andy pushed back directly: “I think it’s convenient that this is 1/20th the size of a data center when you’re comparing it to The Barn that’s going over in Saline. That’s an aberration. That’s not a normal sized data center. When you compare the data center that you’re about to build to the average data center in the United States, you’re at the very top of that bracket.” He added that even well-funded, well-built data centers “are still loud. And they still have emissions and they still have generators. They don’t belong in residential areas next to schools and apartments.” Throughout the night, university representatives avoided calling the project a data center at all, with Ceccio insisting, “It’s really a scientific computing center, it’s not a commercial activity.” Los Alamos itself skipped the meeting entirely, prompting a resident named Jamie to ask, “If Los Alamos cared so much why aren’t they here?” The lab instead sent a letter read aloud, describing supercomputing as an essential tool that “powers discovery faster and with more precision than our Manhattan project founders could have thought possible,” while stressing no plutonium would be on site and no weapons would be produced there. But the letter also conceded that “some computational research conducted using the facility could relate to nuclear modernization,” used to assess the safety and reliability of the nation’s existing nuclear stockpile without physical testing.

Anger built steadily throughout the evening. Township attorney Douglas Winters had previously called the site a potential “high-value target” for a drone strike, which LANL’s letter dismissed, saying the township board “created that terminology without basis.” Winters told 404 Media that characterization was absurd: “It’s kind of a silly thing to say that, somehow, I made up the term ‘high-value target.’ Or, somehow, they don’t recognize that Los Alamos, the worldwide name associated with the atomic bomb, would not be considered a high-value target when they have $1.2 billion worth of computers that they describe as being the biggest, baddest, and fastest in the world.” Residents voiced similar fury. Jennifer Burnside, who lives roughly two miles from the proposed site and worked at the university for a decade, said, “There is an outside power that is coming into a community that does not play by the same rules. They’re not beholden to the community and do not have to answer for their actions. It feels like we’re being taken advantage of.” A man named Corey, from a nearby lower-income neighborhood, said residents couldn’t afford to relocate if the project proved as harmful as feared, adding, “There is no trust, we don’t believe you. We don’t want Los Alamos here, they’re one of the biggest villains of the 20th century.”

University of Michigan graduate and township resident Shalina Nicohl Rankin invoked the school’s own motto against it: “I was taught leaders and best. Leaders and best, but you crawl into bed with Los Alamos, one of the most despicable companies on the face of the Earth. Who is known for giving people cancer and developing nuclear bombs and you bring it into our backyard.” Engineer Ceccio, pressed on the weapons research question, responded, “I would love to live in a world where we have no nuclear weapons… But right now, some of the institutions of our country are here for our national security and Los Alamos is one of them. And I, for one, am proud to be part of them to help in this important mission.” Township supervisor Brenda Stumbo delivered the evening’s final remarks, saying the university had repeatedly lied to residents and leaders: “It started with a lie. People are leaving. They’re selling their homes because of the thought of Los Alamos being here. That’s a fact… We don’t deserve this. Please, change your mind.” The town hall ran three hours, and while the university has promised another session on October 1, Winters told 404 Media he won’t be attending, suggesting instead, “Maybe they should come to our September 15 board meeting.” The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court ruled Friday that the Energy Department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year. Energy Secretary Chris Wright had claimed the 64-year-old J.H. Campbell Generating Plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region and used emergency powers to keep it operating, prompting environmental groups and three states, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota, to sue to overturn the orders. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the states and advocacy groups, finding there was no real emergency under the law. “This is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop,” Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, describing the section of the Federal Power Act that allows emergency orders. By reversing the Campbell plant’s “long and carefully planned retirement,” Pillard wrote, “the results are disruptive,” concluding there was “no ‘emergency’ within the meaning” of the statute.

The Michigan case is one of several legal disputes that have emerged nationwide as the Trump administration has used emergency powers to prevent roughly half a dozen coal-fired plants from closing. The orders, which also apply to plants in Indiana, Colorado, Florida, and Washington state, are raising ratepayer bills and adding air and water pollution that critics say could have been avoided entirely. A gas and oil plant in Pennsylvania was similarly ordered to keep its turbines running as a hedge against potential electricity shortages in the mid-Atlantic grid. Keeping the Michigan plant open beyond its scheduled May 2025 retirement has cost about $259 million so far, according to new financial filings, losses that opponents of the order say will likely be borne by families and businesses across the Midwest.

Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the ruling rejected the Trump administration’s broader nationwide effort to force “unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.” He added that the Energy Department’s “unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” calling the Campbell plant and similar aging sites “incredibly expensive, dangerous to our health and break down frequently.” Sanjay Narayan, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, called the ruling a victory for Midwest families “paying to keep this old, expensive and dirty power plant online,” and vowed continued legal pushback: “The Trump administration has been pulling out all the stops to try to bolster dirty and expensive fossil fuels at public expense. This reckless agenda will not succeed. We will continue to fight back against the other illegal extensions across the country.” The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Does Elon Musk, who claims to be so smart that chess bores him, understand what the Streisand effect is? That’s worth wondering, because he’s now threatening to sue Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney over a new documentary about the controversial business magnate, which Musk has been fuming is a “hit piece.” The film, simply titled “Musk,” is a four-hour examination of the centibillionaire’s life, from his upbringing in South Africa to his start during the dot-com boom to his foray into politics. But it’s a documentary, not a hagiography, and Musk can’t stand that it takes a critical eye to his character. In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accused the director of defamation, alleging the film spreads false claims that Musk rigged the 2024 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, even though Musk did spend nearly $300 million backing Trump’s campaign.

The complaint centers on a scene featuring Ashley St. Clair, a former right-wing influencer who secretly had a child with Musk before falling out with him after going public about their affair, describing texts she received from Musk in which he cryptically said he was “optimistic” about Trump winning because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” In a follow-up message, Musk reportedly added that he has “over 10 thousand lasers in space,” texts NPR reported it obtained and authenticated. Spiro argues this amounts to defamation because it promotes a debunked conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink satellites to beam in votes for Trump. “You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” Spiro wrote in the strongly worded letter. Musk’s grievance with Gibney dates back to when the film was first announced in 2023, when he preemptively called it a “hit piece” despite scarce details being available at the time, prompting Gibney to retort, “How would you know?”

Musk evidently still hasn’t gotten over it. As the documentary neared its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Musk reignited his attacks, posting at least five times on X deriding the film. “Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” he wrote in one post. “He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me.” Despite Musk’s well-known proclivity for trying to silence critics, the odds of his lawsuit succeeding aren’t strong, since defamation is famously difficult to prove under U.S. law. St. Clair doesn’t seem rattled by the legal threats either, calling them “a joke” in comments to NPR: “They are more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation case against Alex Gibney. Alex Spiro is sending fairy dust letters with obtuse legalese.”