The Paramount-Warner merger challenge looks odd, but that's only because all the other cops are bought off. Here are the arguments for and against the deal, and the process going forward.

Yesterday, 12 states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed a complaint asking a Federal judge to stop the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, which would otherwise be the largest combination of Hollywood studios in history. The states alleged this deal would put too much power in the hands of the billionaire Ellison family.

Then today, another shoe dropped. The Writer’s Guild East and the Writer’s Guild West filed another case opposing the deal, this one on grounds that it would give the Ellison’s too much power over workers in Hollywood. The complaint from the writers unions included statements from well-known creative power players in the tv and movie business, the people behind The Office, Spiderman, Stepbrothers, and so forth. And that’s not all. The states also filed for an emergency injunction to pause the deal, with the first hearing on Friday morning at 10am. More action could be coming.

In this piece, I’m going to explain what is happening, the arguments involved, and next steps. But make no mistake, this legal case is the most significant fight over corporate power and media we may see in this Trump term.

A telecom executive urges Congress not to block FCC review of a spectrum proposal meant to give America a backup to GPS.

Commercial pilots flying near conflict zones watched their instruments report positions miles from where they knew their airplanes actually were, while also navigating ground proximity alarms triggering unexpectedly. In parts of the Middle East, consumers are struggling with food delivery, ride-sharing, and countless other apps that depend on accurate location data. In Finland, soldiers are relearning how to navigate with paper maps.

The culprit is Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming and spoofing, a disruption of the satellite signals that are foundational to modern life. Except this threat isn’t just confined to far-off war zones. Airports in Dallas, Denver, and New Jersey have each experienced high-profile GPS disruptions. Solar storms have impacted GPS signals, affecting farming from Minnesota to Nebraska at the height of planting season. In America, GPS underpins everything from emergency response and critical infrastructure to finance, energy, logistics, and the smartphones we carry every day, and we are incredibly reliant on it.

DERBY — Derby and Holland are the latest Northeast Kingdom communities to gain access to high-speed fiber internet and home telephone service through NEK Broadband.

The eastern portion of Derby now has service, with additional areas under construction. In Holland, where residents have lacked telephone and internet upgrades for decades, 75 percent of addresses now have access to speeds up to 2 gigabits per second for both uploads and downloads through NEK Broadband’s Ultra service tier.

Abbott previously outlined a broad regulatory framework around data centers amid backlash from rural communities around their impact on residential neighborhoods.

Gov. Greg Abbott called for blocking new data center development in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas on Tuesday.

“We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott said at the Bullard event, which primarily discussed his plan to cut property taxes, adding that this issue “dovetails right into fighting for East Texas values.”

Abbott’s push for a prohibition in rural neighborhoods appears to go further than a sweeping regulatory framework he unveiled earlier this month, which called for data centers to add new power generation to the grid, pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their own water and implement measures such as setbacks, among other proposals aimed at limiting their impact on residential communities.

Twenty-three years ago, a scandal emerged on Wall Street. Henry Blodget, an equity research analyst who’d become well-known for his bullish coverage of some of the world’s hottest internet stocks during the dot-com boom, turned out to be privately bearish. In emails to colleagues Blodget described many of the stocks he’d publicly recommended as “crap,” “dogs,” and “POS.” After the bubble popped and valuations tanked, Blodget was charged with securities fraud, and the SEC banned him from the securities industry for life.

Blodget was the posterchild, but he wasn’t alone. At Salomon Smith Barney, another analyst who’d publicly rated one company as a “buy” was discovered to have called that same company a “pig” in private. Another analyst at Lehman Brothers admitted in an email that “ratings and price targets are fairly meaningless anyway,” and that the “little guy” might get misled. “Such is the nature of my business,” he wrote. It was an epidemic: By the year 2000, three-quarters of all stocks carried buy recommendations, and only two percent carried sell recommendations. I don’t need to tell you what happened next.

Why would Wall Street analysts recommend stocks they knew to be junk? One word: incentives. Since IPOs and equity offerings are important sources of revenue for investment banks, analysts are incentivized to publish glowing research about companies in order to win deals and generate fees. This conflict of interest was summarized well by a Merrill Lynch employee in 2002, who lamented to a colleague that “John and Mary Smith are losing their retirement because we don’t want [an investment banking client] to be mad at us.”

After the bubble popped, the SEC realized it’d better do something about this.

12 states sued to block the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros., arguing the combination would mean lower revenues for theater owners and cable distributors, and therefore higher prices for moviegoers and cable subscribers.

The case, filed in the Northern District of California by the state’s attorney general Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general across the country, went for the easiest and most explicable theory of harm: The combined studio would have the leverage to force higher splits with theaters for the biggest films, and the highest fees from cable companies for carriage of their networks.

The order will pause state permitting for new large data centers and direct state regulators to create standards that address environmental impacts, energy demand, water usage and other factors, the governor’s office said.

The Iranian government exploited well-known flaws in cellphone networks to locate and then strike U.S. military personnel in the build-up and beginning of the war.

Optimism comes from those with the most to gain, in the rising economies and inside the labs; doubts rise from those with the most to lose or the most to fear.

Attitudes towards AI differ by country, gender, profession, age, and political affiliation.  A few of those gaps are startling. This article is chock-full of stats. Read it for the surprises, or glance at the bar graph below for a quick overview.

Let’s start with geography, the widest split of all. Ask people in China whether they trust AI and, Edelman finds, nearly nine in 10 say yes; ask Americans and barely a third do. The same chasm shows up, in the Stanford AI Index, on the larger question of whether AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, where most Chinese say it’s good stuff and most Americans have their doubts. 

A look at the science behind Elon Musk's goal of a million-person city on Mars, and why planetary scientists say terraforming the planet to make it habitable would take centuries, if it's possible at all. The revenue Musk says will pay for the Mars effort comes from Starlink, the satellite network SpaceX designs and builds in Redmond.

Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a single idea: Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars. Everything the company does is geared to that foundational goal.

Two years ago, Musk posted on X that there could be a city on Mars within 20 years, “but for sure in 30.”

“Civilization secured,” he added, implying that even if our troubled lives here on Earth come to some catastrophic end in the coming decades, don’t worry, humans will endure on Mars.

Minnesota Daily reports…

A halt on the construction of data centers in Minneapolis took effect in July after the Minneapolis City Council discussed the need for more time to understand the facilities’ potential environmental impacts.

The Council approved the halt through November by an 8-5 vote in May. Members said the halt allows time to 

July 14, 2026 - The lead official at the FCC is one of several policy officials and lawmakers expected to participate in the one-day summit .

The summit, scheduled for Wednesday in Washington, will feature interviews and panel discussions with members of President Donald Trump’s administration, congressional leaders from both parties and senior government officials.

July 13, 2026 (DENVER) – Attorney General Phil Weiser today joined a coalition of 12 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit challenging the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. by Paramount Skydance Corporation. The proposed merger would combine two of Hollywood’s five major film distributors and two of the five major basic cable companies.

The combined company would eliminate competition between Paramount and Warner Bros., and inflict substantial harm on movie theaters, basic cable distributors and, ultimately, audiences nationwide. In the U.S. alone, if allowed to merge, the combined titan would control nearly one-third of theatrical motion pictures, and nearly one-third of basic cable programming. The coalition has asked Warner Bros. and Paramount not to close the merger until after the judicial process concludes, and if they do not agree, the coalition will request that the court issue a temporary restraining order.

“More concentration in motion picture production and in the cable network sectors threatens harm to consumers and to a robust marketplace of ideas,” said Attorney General Weiser. “As Colorado welcomes the Sundance Film Festival next year, we are acutely aware that preserving competition in the motion picture industry will help ensure the distribution of a wide variety of the best films to movie theatres. And as reflected by our challenge to the Nexstar/Tegna merger, we are also committed to ensuring that cable and satellite platforms can offer consumers the best possible packages of basic service by preserving competition in the basic cable TV environment.”

The FCC has granted AT&T approval to shut down copper services to about 184,000 customers in California by next year. That decision is part of a multi-step process linked to AT&T's copper shutdown plans in the state.

That process targets a subset of AT&T customers who are still using copper-based services in the state. Under the plan, those customers can keep their existing service until it is discontinued on or after June 1, 2027. AT&T has developed a POTS (plain old telephone service) alternative called AT&T Phone–Advanced that can run on fiber or wireless connections and support legacy phones, fax machines, home security systems and medical monitoring devices.

Following Governor Kathy Hochul’s executive order today creating the nation’s first statewide pause on new hyperscale data center development, the American Economic Liberties Project issued the following statement:

“New York is taking an essential step to make sure the rapid growth of data centers does not come at the expense of families and communities,” said Pat Garofalo, Director of State & Local Policy at American Economic Liberties Project. “For years, Big Tech companies have negotiated data center deals behind closed doors, securing enormous public benefits while leaving residents high and dry to absorb the costs, including higher energy demand, pressure on local infrastructure, and increased strain on natural resources. Before more projects move forward, communities deserve a clear picture of what these facilities will cost and who will pay.”

“This moratorium creates an opportunity to build rules that put the public interest first,” Garofalo continued.

A number of social media posts claim that GPT-5.6 Sol deleted files and data without warning. OpenAI had basically disclosed the problem in June.

 Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says enterprises increasingly want open models, due to cost, accessibility, and ownership. Do frontier models still matter if most production AI ends up running on open models?

For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to them. But while everyone was watching the frontier, developers kept building — and they weren’t waiting around for permission from the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world.

The FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking titled Build America: Eliminating Barriers to Wireline Deployments. The stated purpose of the proposed new rules is “to cut red tape and excessive fees imposed by some state and local governments in the public rights-of-way for wireline deployments”. There are several important provisions in the new rules.

First, the FCC proposes a 120-day shot clock for local governments to approve a request for rights-of-way.

TL;DR

• Sam Kirchner, 27, co-founder of Oakland-based Stop AI, has been missing since November 21, 2025 after allegedly threatening OpenAI employees.
• Stop AI expelled Kirchner and alerted police after he allegedly punched a fellow organizer who refused to release group funds for a weapon.
• Kirchner co-founded Stop AI in 2024 with 45-year-old Guido Reichstadter after both split from the more restrained Pause AI over tactics.

The anti-superintelligence movement's radical wing just had its first widely-reported radicalization incident, and frontier-lab security teams now have a named case to justify bigger physical-security budgets around the San Francisco footprint.

The anti-AI movement is having a moment nobody in it wanted. In late November 2025, Sam Kirchner, the 27-year-old co-founder of Oakland-based Stop AI, went missing after allegedly threatening to go to OpenAI's San Francisco offices and, according to callers who notified police that day, "murder people." The Wall Street Journal profiles the fallout, and The San Francisco Standard reported that OpenAI and local police locked down offices in response. Kirchner's apartment in West Oakland was found unlocked, with his laptop and phone left behind and his bicycle and camping gear gone.

Hometown Source reports on view of data centers in Lonsdale…

Data centers have become one of the most contentious issues across the nation, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raising concerns about water use, energy consumption and transparency as more projects are proposed across southern Minnesota.

Sen. Bill Lieske (R-Lonsdale) said data centers are “definitely right up there next to the fraud discussion and the affordability discussion” among the issues he hears about from constituents.