News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Body camera footage from a police officer who responded to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last month in Pennsylvania shows the intra-cop quarrels in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Video footage from body cameras on Butler Township Police Department officers, obtained by The Intercept, shed light on the chaos among law enforcement officials responding to the assassination attempt. The videos confirm previous reporting that a lack of communication and coordination between federal, state, and local police led to confusion at the rally and reflected insufficient preparation. Additional body camera footage shows one officer telling his colleagues minutes after the shooting that he warned the Secret Service well ahead of the rally to post agents at the building used by the shooter. One Butler Township police officer started to help other law enforcement teams climb onto a plastic shed to access the roof. As police teams scattered around the building debriefed on what happened, two Butler officers and the Secret Service agent stood looking at the storage shed. "Is that how he got up?" one police officer asked. "I have no idea," the other said. "I fucking told them they need to post the guys fucking over here," the first officer said to his colleague. "I told them that – the Secret Service – I told them that fucking Tuesday. I told them to post fucking guys over here." "I thought you guys were on the roof?" the other cop responded.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on assassinations and government corruption from reliable major media sources.
A US federal appeals court ruled last week that so-called geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Geofence warrants allow police to demand that companies such as Google turn over a list of every device that appeared at a certain location at a certain time. The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on August 9 that geofence warrants are "categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment" because "they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search." In other words, they're the unconstitutional fishing expedition that privacy and civil liberties advocates have long asserted they are. Google ... is the most frequent target of geofence warrants, vowed late last year that it was changing how it stores location data in such a way that geofence warrants may no longer return the data they once did. Legally, however, the issue is far from settled: The Fifth Circuit decision applies only to law enforcement activity in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Plus, because of weak US privacy laws, police can simply purchase the data and skip the pesky warrant process altogether. As for the appellants in the case heard by the Fifth Circuit, well, they're no better off: The court found that the police used the geofence warrant in "good faith" when it was issued in 2018, so they can still use the evidence they obtained.
Note: Read more about the rise of geofence warrants and its threat to privacy rights. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
A wave of local democracy is sweeping across Europe. On the streets of Hull ... democracy is coming to life through people's assemblies. Assemblies are public meetings where local people get together to discuss and decide on a specific issue, without political interference or hidden agendas. These assemblies can help us fundamentally rethink how we make decisions in our society, and create strong, active communities in the process. To survive ecological breakdown and the collapse of our failing economy, we need both, urgently. The culture war has gained a lot of ground. Overcoming these divisions is one of our biggest, most pressing challenges. Through assemblies, it's possible to form self-organising communities where we lift each other out of the conditions that these ideologies prey on. Where we are forced to work alongside people we disagree with or even dislike, and organise positive initiatives that feed us, lower our energy bills, give us purpose and contribute to a stronger community spirit. Our assembly ground rules ask us to look for what we have in common, and there is a wealth of agreement to be found if you care to look for it. Cooperation Hull is holding Neighbourhood Assemblies across the city, and in each one we are learning what happens when a room full of strangers upend social norms to break bread, hold hands (an ice-breaker) and voice their honest opinions on the most important questions of our time. Soon we will launch the first citywide assembly: hundreds of people weighing in on a big issue, then attempting to make practical changes with the help of local organisations – and there are groups like us popping up from Cornwall to Glasgow, and Italy and Germany, too. The potential of assemblies is nothing short of revolutionary. It is the potential to change everything.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Mr. Chen Si, known as the Angel of Nanjing, has volunteered to patrol the Yangtze Bridge every day, and over a 21-year career, he has saved 469 people from committing suicide. One of the most famous bridges in the country, it is also the world's most popular location to commit suicide. Almost daily there are people lingering alone or wandering aimlessly along its sidewalk, and Chen engages them in conversation to test whether or not they are prospective jumpers. It started for Chen back in 2000, when he saw a desperate-looking girl wandering on the bridge. He was worried something might happen to her so he brought lunch for them to share and started to chat with her. He eventually paid for a bus ticket for her to go home, but realized that this was something that must happen all the time. For the past 21 years, he's crossed the bridge 10 times a day on his electric scooter wearing his red jacket with the words "cherish all life" written across the back, he's charismatic, he's determined, he can be almost rude, in a certain Chinese way, in his efforts saving people's life, and he's become an expert. "People with an extreme internal struggle don't have relaxed body movements, their bodies look heavy," Chen [said]. He's caught suicidal people who've been cheated on by their spouses, those who can't afford school, and many other reasons. He has spare rooms in his house to keep those he pulls off the bridge in a safe environment.
Note: Watch the trailer for a 2015 documentary about Chen. Explore more positive human interest stories focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Ms. Gatto is Green-Wood [Cemetery's] resident death educator. She coordinates programs that include financial end-of-life planning seminars and the Mortality & Me book club. For much of human history, the issues of death and dying have been predominantly handled though religion and rites of organized faith. But as the United States became more secular, the loss of customs left a void. "Many people are raised with different ideas about fear connected to death. People end up carrying this stuff with them throughout their whole lives ... It's creating these more positive outlets for processing these kinds of feelings with community. I get to see what people are yearning for, and then create events and programs around it – and make it, dare I say, a little fun, right?" [Gatto] says. The goal of today's death education, says Anita Hannig, an anthropologist and author who studies death, is to find ways to address mortality without taking on the baggage that often accompanies it. "We're trying to create a safe container for us to have those conversations and not be labeled as morbid, suicidal, or weird and obsessed with death," she says. Some people's first encounter might be a death cafe. The unstructuredness of death cafes means participants can steer the conversation to larger topics, like questions of an afterlife, legacy, or a bucket list. But they can also find it helpful to dig into more functional topics, like funeral planning, wills, and burial methods. These gatherings numbering in the thousands have taken place across 90 countries. The rules of death cafes are simple: They are respectful and confidential. They shouldn't have any particular agenda. They shouldn't be held with the intention of leading participants to any particular conclusion. And they should, ideally, involve cake.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Kamala Harris' campaign team's decision to doctor headlines on Google that tout the Democratic presidential candidate has sparked "significant ethical concern" over possibly "misleading" the public. The vice president's team launched the sponsored posts on the search giant that linked to real news stories from various unsuspecting publishers such as CNN, USA Today, The Guardian and the Associated Press – but featured headlines and descriptions that were edited by her team. Google called the practice "common" and said the ads did not violate its policies because they were clearly labeled as "sponsored." However, Rich Hanley, Quinnipiac University associate professor of journalism emeritus, called the marketing move "troubling" and "exploitative." Hanley, who teaches a class in disinformation, said the Harris campaign is "exploiting a vulnerability in the information ecosystem" which is dangerous in this "climate of disinformation and misinformation." "What they are actually doing is manipulating someone else's content by changing headlines," he said. "There should be a clear and bright line when it comes to news organizations." The altered headlines ... were changed without the news outlets' knowledge. For instance, one sponsored ad that links to NPR's website features the headline "Harris will Lower Health Costs" while another that links to the Associated Press reads "VP Harris's Economic Vision – Lower Costs and Higher Wages."
Note: Both parties engage in sophisticated media manipulation to influence voter behavior, as with the Hilary Clinton campaign and DNC conspiracy to keep Bernie Sanders from getting the party nomination in 2016 and Cambridge Analytica's role in targeting voters with personalized ads in the UK on behalf of the political right. For more along these lines, explore summaries of revealing news articles on elections corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace – the company's controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 – a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database – to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Automated fast food restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy, in Pasadena, Calif., opened in January to considerable hype due to its robot burger makers, but the restaurant launched with another, less heralded innovation: the ability to pay for your meal with your face. CaliExpress uses a payment system from facial ID tech company PopID. It's not the only fast-food chain to employ the technology. Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success – 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. As stores implement biometric technology for a variety of purposes, from payments to broader anti-theft systems, consumer blowback, and lawsuits, are rising. In March, an Illinois woman sued retailer Target for allegedly illegally collecting and storing her and other customers' biometric data via facial recognition technology without their consent. Amazon and T-Mobile are also facing legal actions related to biometric technology. In other countries ... biometric payment systems are comparatively mature. Visitors to McDonald's in China ... use facial recognition technology to pay for their orders.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Peregrine ... is essentially a super-powered Google for police data. Enter a name or address into its web-based app, and Peregrine quickly scans court records, arrest reports, police interviews, body cam footage transcripts – any police dataset imaginable – for a match. It's taken data siloed across an array of older, slower systems, and made it accessible in a simple, speedy app that can be operated from a web browser. To date, Peregrine has scored 57 contracts across a wide range of police and public safety agencies in the U.S., from Atlanta to L.A. Revenue tripled in 2023, from $3 million to $10 million. [That will] triple again to $30 million this year, bolstered by $60 million in funding from the likes of Friends & Family Capital and Founders Fund. Privacy advocates [are] concerned about indiscriminate surveillance. "We see a lot of police departments of a lot of different sizes getting access to Real Time Crime Centers now, and it's definitely facilitating a lot more general access to surveillance feeds for some of these smaller departments that would have previously found it cost prohibitive," said Beryl Lipton ... at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "These types of companies are inherently going to have a hard time protecting privacy, because everything that they're built on is basically privacy damaging." Peregrine technology can also enable "predictive policing," long criticized for unfairly targeting poorer, non-white neighborhoods.
Note: Learn more about Palantir's involvement in domestic surveillance and controversial military technologies. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
If you rent your home, there's a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it's something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the "supreme evil" of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine. Property owners feed RealPage's "property management software" their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm–which also knows what competitors are charging–spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed. Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it. In more than 40 housing markets across the United States, 30 to 60 percent of multifamily-building units are priced using RealPage. The plaintiffs suing RealPage, including the Arizona and Washington, D.C., attorneys general, argue that this has enabled a critical mass of landlords to raise rents in concert, making an existing housing-affordability crisis even worse. The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with its pricing suggestions.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
Once upon a time, you could have yourself a nice little Saturday of stocking up at Costco (using your sister's membership card, naturally), before hitting up a museum (free admission with your 15-year-old expired student ID) or settling into a reality TV binge sesh (streaming on your college roommate's ex-boyfriend's Netflix login). Thanks to the fine-tuning of the tech that Corporate America uses to police subscriptions, those freeloading days are over. Costco and Disney this month took a page from the Netflix playbook and announced they are cracking down on account sharers. Want to put on "Frozen" for the kids so you can have two hours to do literally anything else? You're going to need a Disney+ login associated with your household. The tech that tracks your IP address and can read your face has gotten more sophisticated. Retailers and streaming services are increasingly turning to status-verification tech that make it harder for folks to claim student discounts on services like Amazon Prime or Spotify beyond graduation. Cracking down on sharing was hugely successful for Netflix. For years, the streaming giant turned a blind eye to password sharing because doing so allowed more people to experience the product and, crucially, come to rely on it. Netflix kept growing and growing until 2022, when [it] cashed in on its brand loyalty, betting that it had made itself indispensable to enough viewers that they'd be willing to cough up $7-$15 a month to keep their access.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
For more than a decade, the U.S. had a significant counterterrorism partnership with Niger, with nearly 1,000 American troops stationed at two airbases: one near the capital in the populated south of the country, and another, on the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert. That partnership came to a sudden end this past March 16, when a spokesperson for the country's ruling junta took to national television to announce that the government was unceremoniously kicking the U.S. military out. "The government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees," Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane said. "The United States is proud of the past security cooperation between U.S. forces and Nigerien forces, a partnership which effectively contributed to stability in Niger and the region," a State Department official [said]. But statistics supplied by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies ... show that terrorist violence in West Africa spiked while that partnership was in effect. Fatalities from attacks by militant Islamist groups in the Sahel, for example, have jumped more than 5,200 percent since 2016. As violence has spiraled, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror.
Note: Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. Since 2008, the US military has been connected to coups in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Gambia, Chad, and Guinea. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing. This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act – a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs – found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future. That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue. Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating "use them or lose them" weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation.
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
Honduras's former president Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed in the US for drug trafficking. But the narco-state he ran was a product of US foreign policy and of the US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya's left-wing government. By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as "El Tigre" and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States. Bonilla had been a "highly trusted" torpedo loyal to the Hernández tribe. According to a Justice Department press release, the president and his brother had "El Tigre" shielding their drug shipments while also conducting "special assignments, including murder" of a rival trafficker. In heading the Honduran police, Bonilla also organized the return of death squads, tasked with "socially cleansing" Honduras of environmental activists, indigenous spokespersons, and investigative reporters. Hernández began his second term in 2017 atop a heap of killed and tear-gased protesters. [Honduras] was, according to Honduras scholar Dana Frank, "the first domino that the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America." After Honduras, a parliamentary coup took place against Paraguay's progressive president Fernando Lugo in 2012, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2015, and Brazil's current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a now-annulled prison sentence in 2017. Obama, hailed as the US president of "hope" and "change," oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements.
Note: Bonilla was trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Moore, Georgia (now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), which graduated more than 500 human rights abusers all over the world. For more along these lines, watch our latest Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
Justified by the Monroe Doctrine – the United States' claim to unchallenged dominance over the Western Hemisphere – the United States has criminalized asylum seekers, militarized the southern border, and intervened directly in Latin America. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis ... is a harrowing indictment of the United States' criminal role in Latin America, a region in which it has sown crisis for over a century with scant regard for the lives of millions. Ronald Reagan ... was keen on avoiding another nation falling into the sphere of influence of Cuba and the Soviet Union. To prevent a drift away from the United States' orbit, he pumped military aid to El Salvador's caudillismo military. The result was carnage and mass displacement. In 1992, three million Salvadoreans were living in Los Angeles, a tenfold growth. [Guatemala's] General Fernando Romeo Lucas GarcĂa adopted El Salvador's El Mozote strategy of "cleansing" ... indigenous Mayans. By 1984 around 1.5 million people were internally displaced. Thousands would flee to the United States. Two hundred thousand civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 93 percent of the crimes involved the US-funded and -trained military. The Reagan administration "transformed Honduras from a banana republic where the United Fruit Company picked the country presidents . . . into a virtual US military base." By the 1990s, the states of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were heavily militarized. The armed forces acted with impunity, civil organizations had been hollowed out or were nonexistent, and gross inequality and racism were rampant. The CIA decided that the cocaine and heroin coming through Central America could be trafficked by various local military forces. The Northern Triangle countries [El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras] were used by the CIA to generate illicit earnings that financed the Contras – right-wing militias of Nicaragua – and Iran during its war against Iraq, an episode that came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair.
Note: This article also goes into how Reagan's war on drugs and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles fueled rampant gang violence, creating conditions that formed the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang. Watch our Mindful News Brief videos on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border and who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
[Captain Emada] Tingirides, 50, is only the second Black female officer in Los Angeles to reach the position of Deputy Chief. Since September 1, 2020, she has been in charge of the Department's new Community Safety Partnership Bureau (CSP). "It's about trust," Tingirides says when asked to describe CSP. "The community has to hold law enforcement accountable, and law enforcement has to hold communities accountable. We ask the communities what they expect from us, and we take their goals seriously." CSP represents a major shift in L.A.'s notoriously hardline approach to policing. But there's reason to believe it could stick – independent studies have shown that the CSP has increased trust in police, reduced violent crime and saved the city millions of dollars. Under the CSP concept, police officers are stationed in an area for at least five years. They become part of the community, attend neighborhood meetings, organize soccer tournaments, hand out "Donuts for Dads," and "Muffins for Moms." They work closely with gang intervention workers, social workers, non-profits and, most important, neighborhood residents. "I thought all cops were bad," a nine-year old boy admits. But now, he says, he loves Community Officer Jeff Joyce, who started "Nicks Kids," a soccer club for youths. "Our methods are unconventional, and we are adaptable," Tingirides says. "Each neighborhood is different."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on repairing criminal justice.
Many sweeping attempts to reform policing have faltered. But one proposal that has taken hold across the country, and continues to spread, is launching alternative first response units that send unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, to some emergencies. In Dayton, Ohio, trained mediators are dispatched to neighbor disputes and trespassing calls. In Los Angeles, outreach workers who have lived through homelessness, incarceration or addiction respond to 911 calls concerning people living on the street. In Anchorage, Alaska, trained clinicians and paramedics are showing up to mental health crises. Researchers have tracked over 100 alternative crisis response units operating across the U.S. Some distinguish between mobile crisis teams, which exclusively send clinicians to mental health emergencies, and community responder programs, which send civilians to a wider range of calls. The key tenets are that they can be the first response to an emergency situation and that they arrive without armed officers. There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job. Eventually, a large portion of current police work could be handed off to alternative responders. A 2020 review of 911 calls ... estimates that up to 68% of calls "could be handled without sending an armed officer," according to a report by the Center for American Progress and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on repairing criminal justice.
Not long after Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Oksana Sokhan found herself in an evacuation minibus, wedged between two stricken soldiers in the dark, as the vehicle tried to safely get away from the front line. She began singing Ukrainian lullabies to the wounded fighters, and stroking them as a mother would. Their anxiety eased. If she stopped the soothing singing for a moment, she saw their anxiety surge again. "I was surprised myself that it worked – surely it worked on a subconscious level for both of them," recalls the nurse. Ms. Sokhan still laughs about that moment of serendipitous support with the lullabies in the minibus, and about how – after they had all arrived safely at the hospital – a nurse came out to report that one of the men was convinced his mother had been with him during the evacuation. Ms. Sokhan may be just one senior nurse, but she is emblematic of the legions of Ukrainian military medics devoted to preserving the lives of the country's outnumbered forces. For years a member of the 128th Separate Transcarpathian Mountain Assault Brigade, she has seen a whirlwind of casualties at different points along the front line since Russia's all-out invasion. "We want to save everyone," she says. "Of course, it's very important to see the results of your work, because when they come here" the soldiers are traumatized, in pain, "and when they leave ... they are already waving sometimes."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing the war machine.
More than half of Americans believe the First Amendment can go too far in the rights it guarantees, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment–focused nonprofit. The survey, released on Thursday, asked 1,000 American adults a range of questions about the First Amendment, free speech, and the security of those rights. Fifty-three percent of respondents agreed with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" to at least some degree, with 28 percent reporting that it "mostly" or "completely" describes their thoughts. Americans were further divided along partisan lines. Over 60 percent of Democrats thought the First Amendment could go too far, compared to 52 percent of Republicans. "Evidently, one out of every two Americans wishes they had fewer civil liberties," Sean Stevens, FIRE's chief research adviser, said. "Many of them reject the right to assemble, to have a free press, and to petition the government. This is a dictator's fantasy." Further, 1 in 5 respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" worried about losing their job if someone complains about something they said. Eighty-three percent reported self-censoring in the past month, with 23 percent doing so "fairly" or "very" often. Just 22 percent of respondents said they believed the right to free speech was "very" or "completely" secure.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
In 2017, hundreds of artificial intelligence experts signed the Asilomar AI Principles for how to govern artificial intelligence. I was one of them. So was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The signatories committed to avoiding an arms race on the grounds that "teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards." The stated goal of OpenAI is to create artificial general intelligence, a system that is as good as expert humans at most tasks. It could have significant benefits. It could also threaten millions of lives and livelihoods if not developed in a provably safe way. It could be used to commit bioterrorism, run massive cyberattacks or escalate nuclear conflict. Given these dangers, a global arms race to unleash artificial general intelligence AGI serves no one's interests. The true power of AI lies ... in its potential to bridge divides. AI might help us identify fundamental patterns in global conflicts and human behavior, leading to more profound solutions. AI's ability to process vast amounts of data could help identify patterns in global conflicts by suggesting novel approaches to resolution that human negotiators might overlook. Advanced natural language processing could break down communication barriers, allowing for more nuanced dialogue between nations and cultures. Predictive AI models could identify early signs of potential conflicts, allowing for preemptive diplomatic interventions.
Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI from reliable major media sources.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.