With losses in cases involving Ticketmaster, Nexstar-TEGNA, and Amazon this week, plus a data center ban in Maine and taxes on $5M+ apartments in NYC, the superrich are starting to face obstacles.

As backlash against AI increases, it has also turned violent, unveiling a deep mistrust of a system that would benefit from guardrails, say experts.

Last Monday, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama was charged with attempted murder and arson after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares with his husband and one-year-old. Authorities say that after launching the explosive device, the Texas man then traveled to OpenAI’s offices and threw a chair at the building’s glass doors, threatening to burn the building down and kill anyone inside. He was arrested while holding a jug of kerosene. According to court documents, he’d written about AI’s existential risk to humanity’s “impending extinction,” and authorities say they found a document on him listing other AI companies as targets. (His attorney has said he was experiencing a mental health crisis.)

Two days later, two suspects were arrested after allegedly firing a gun near the CEO’s property. Earlier this month, someone fired 13 shots at the front door of an Indiana councilman, and left behind a note that read “No Data Centers” on his doorstep. 

Dunstan Allison-Hope and Iain Levine argue that human rights commitments are essential for all companies selling their products to governments worldwide.

Much has transpired since Anthropic and the United States Department of Defense went public in February with their dispute over whether the US government should be able to require AI companies to permit “all lawful use” of their technologies by the government. While the “all lawful use” framing may seem reasonable at first glance, its adoption as a universal principle for government use of AI risks widespread violations of international human rights law (IHRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL).

Anthropic and the DOD failed to reach an agreement over two particular questions: mass surveillance of US citizens and the development of lethal autonomous weapons operating without human control. The government designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which the company is challenging in court.

In recent weeks, as the international community and human rights activists have reacted to the US and Israeli offensive against Iran and Lebanon, even more serious concerns have been raised about AI-supported decision-making by humans and its impact on the failure to protect civilians as defined by the laws of war.

A conversation with Fordham Law School's Chinmayi Sharma and Sam Adler, authors of a new law review article, "Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries."

Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.

The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.

Musk faces questions as part of a year-long probe in France into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives.

The U.S. Justice Department has told French law enforcement it will not assist with efforts to investigate tech billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing a letter from the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs, dated Friday.

In February, Paris prosecutors raided X’s French offices and ordered Musk to face questions in a widening investigation as part of a year-long probe into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives.

Town officials in South Bristol, NY, are launching a new public forum series aimed at tackling some of the community’s most pressing challenges, starting with broadband access.

The first event, titled “How Can South Bristol Expand Broadband Access?”, is scheduled for Monday, April 20 at 7 p.m. at South Bristol Town Hall on West Gannett Hill Road. The session is free and open to the public.

Three big updates from the Ookla Research team this week: 1️⃣ U.S.

1️⃣ U.S. Mobile Performance: Xfinity and Spectrum Mobile are outpacing the industry average, thanks to savvy Wi-Fi offloading strategies. Too see how cable's speeds are climbing, see this article.

House Speaker Johnson’s late-night attempt to ‘scare up’ an extension of the government’s spying authority falls short in Congress.

Like a thief in the night, pro-surveillance members of Congress in the House of Representatives tried to force a vote on a powerful surveillance authority at midnight.

Early Friday morning, the House rejected Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempts to call a vote to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or “FISA”) for 18 months without any critical reforms to protect Americans’ privacy. 

This victory over Speaker Johnson’s, President Trump’s, and Stephen Miller’s schemes came after House Republicans offered a smokescreen compromise that would have renewed Section 702 of FISA for five years while still allowing “backdoor” searches of the data of people in the United States who are caught up in a 702 database that’s supposed to be about collecting foreign intelligence. The fake reforms offered overnight, and voted down after 1 a.m. in a marathon House session, would have made it even easier for the government to use 702 data to prosecute Americans without getting a real warrant. 

The Speaker attempted to use the cover of night to take away people’s constitutionally protected rights and enhance the president’s ability to further weaponize the government against his perceived “enemies.” These actions ran counter to democratic principles.

Rest of World News: Finland is slowly making a name for itself as an innovator, albeit a low-key one, regarding wireless electricity transmission, which aims to transmit power via the airwaves without having to use cables, sockets, or connectors.

The US Navy has had multiple high-stakes drone tests thwarted by spotty and unreliable connectivity to Starlink satellites.

Two dozen unmanned surface vessels — autonomous boat drones, basically — were left floating in the Pacific ocean after a massive outage of SpaceX’s Starlink internet service left them adrift. That event, first reported by Reuters, left the experimental robots disconnected and bobbing in the ocean for nearly an hour off the coast of California.

It was one of several Pentagon experiments disrupted by the Starlink blackout, according to Reuters. That global outage left millions of Starlink customers in the dark back in August of 2025, dealing a blow to the company’s image as an always-on satellite internet provider. While service was eventually restored, the incident left customers frustrated and analysts concerned.

According to the company website, Starlink offers “high-speed, low-latency internet with more than 99.9 percent average uptime and reliable connectivity around the globe.”

When we first began to chronicle the rise of the American oligarchy, Donald Trump was a private citizen, the future of the internet was the Metaverse, and Elon Musk was—well, if we’re being honest, he’s really always been like this.

But in Trump’s second presidential term, that consolidation of wealth that helped make his presidency possible has shifted into a new gear. The world’s richest men joined forces with the world’s most powerful man in pursuit of a technological breakthrough that would reorder society and make them unfathomably rich—or bring us all down with them. 

For our May + June 2026 issue, Mother Jones explores the roots and reach of Silicon Valley’s biggest merger ever and the implications of Big Tech’s quest for an AI revolution, which is already upending our world.

The data work industry, which collects information to train AI systems for tech companies, is often shrouded in secrecy, Tatiana Dias writes.

Right now, somewhere in the world someone is selling selfies of themselves. Or photos of random children. Or putting on a mounted camera and recording their daily routine, all to sell images of their home's interior and their own personal space. Some are even photographing their own sensitive identification documents to turn a profit.

Who's buying? Often, it's a mystery.

All of these paid tasks are real projects for those in the data work industry — which monetizes the collection, production, labeling and cleaning of data used to train artificial intelligence systems.

These tasks power third-party data work platforms that act as intermediaries between Big Tech companies, which own AI technologies that require vast amounts of data, and the human beings that produce this data – often called “ghost” workers.

The European Commission has adopted industry-drafted language shielding data center emissions data from public view, report Nico Schmidt and Ella Joyner.

The White House has said it has had a "productive and constructive" meeting with the head of artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, which is suing the US Department of Defense.

The meeting comes a week after the firm released its Claude Mythos preview, an AI tool that the company claims can outperform humans at some hacking and cyber-security tasks.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, Axios reports.

China is set to complete the core area of Beijing's Satellite Town by the second half of 2026, giving the country's booming commercial space industry a dedicated home. With over 60 per cent of all launches now commercial, China's trillion-yuan space market is rapidly taking shape.

The era of badly-automated homogenized engagement slop is upon us. I desperately want to believe there's a renaissance for authenticity on the other end.

I've always been fascinated by America's obsession with artifice.

Our "top engineers" can't engineer. Our journalists can't tell the truth. Our wealthiest innovators can't innovate. Our leaders can't lead. Our most "insightful" and popular podcasters have heads full of cottage cheese and pebbles.

The walls of our chain restaurants are plastered with fake Americana, our kitchens are full of French bistro prints from Target so we can pretend we're well traveled, and when authoritarianism came knocking, American exceptionalism proved as hollow as a Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.

Donald Trump, and his tacky gold spray painted bullshit, is perfectly representative of a culture being devoured by its obsession with artifice. Trump exposes how many Americans can't tell the difference between authenticity and the laziest bullshit imaginable, and I find that equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

April 17, 2026 (AP) – A federal judge has blocked a $6.2 billion merger of local television giants Nexstar Media Group and rival Tegna until an antitrust lawsuit is resolved.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy L. Nunley in Sacramento, California, made the ruling late Friday afternoon, finding that eight attorneys general and DirecTV were likely to prevail in their legal bid to stop the merger. The attorneys general, all Democrats, and DirecTV contend the merger will lead to higher prices for consumers, stifle local journalism and that the deal runs afoul of federal laws designed to protect against monopolies.

The following are topics I found to be interesting but which didn't justify an entire blog:

Update on the Telecom Act? Congressman Brett Guthrie (KY-02), Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Congressman Richard Hudson (NC-09), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, announced a hearing titled The Telecommunications Act of 1996: 30 Years Later. The stated purpose of the hearing is to examine the lessons learned from an examination of the Act. The hearing announcement suggests that Congress will see “how Congress can build on those lessons to modernize our laws to promote innovation, strengthen competition, and drive investment in modern communications networks.”

It’s obvious to anybody who follows telecom regulations that a lot of the changes made in the Act were quickly obsolete when broadband products became the predominant products of the telecom industry. Every reform effort has to start somewhere, and maybe this is the first step towards real discussions on updating telecom regulation. But in an industry dominated by regulatory capture from carriers, it seems highly unlikely that Congress has the appetite to take a fresh look at regulating the large carriers.

Will Starlink Bail on BEAD?