President Donald Trump's top economic adviser was slammed online after claiming in a Fox News interview Friday that towns with data centers thrive.Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, told the conservative outlet that data centers benefit municipalities, despite reports showing they can harm communities."Data centers are very good for towns, because they create so many jobs and bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses and stuff like that," Hassett said. "So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't really seen much in the last 30 years and put a data center there, then there are gonna be a whole bunch of happy residents in that town."Critics on social media argued against Hassett's comments."The people who disrupted the president’s event in Michigan the other day seemed pretty unhappy about them," New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers wrote on X."Hassett’s hometown is Greenfield, Mass. He should ask the people of @GreenfieldMA if they want a data center," journalist Nancy Levine Stearns wrote on X."Nothing revitalizes a sleepy town like 900 acres of humming boxes and three employees named Kyle," wrote SundaeDivine, an X political commentary account with more than 129,000 followers."Maybe Hassett can sell his house and move to a small town next to one to set a proper example for the peasants," MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski wrote on X.The people who disrupted the president’s event in Michigan the other day seemed pretty unhappy about them https://t.co/WX650EQk59— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) July 31, 2026
Last summer, we often watched ICE raids unfold live, captured by news helicopters and eyewitness video, as—almost exactly one year ago—agents descended on day laborers, street vendors, garment workers, and farm workers in southern California. Frequently, the raids were preceded by warnings vetted by community-based groups and passed around on Instagram reels, and followed by reports from local outlets, such as L.A. TACO’s accounting of daily arrests. For weeks, for months, we watched as people turned out across cities and surrounding communities. The kinds of resistance now synonymous with cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—residents putting themselves between immigration agents and their neighbors, chasing agents from the hotels where they tried to sleep and from the gas stations where they stocked up for their sick road trips—defined the administration’s first year of what it called “mass deportations.” In truth, what we witnessed were just some of the thousands and thousands of violent abductions carried out by federal agents, all in service of a white nationalist agenda eagerly articulated by regime leaders like the White House’s Stephen Miller and lackeys like Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino.Compared to the open battle the agency engaged in last year, ICE appears now to be attempting to maintain a lower profile. And yet the agency has also arrested and detained more people in recent months than at any time since Trump returned to office. Recent data released by ICE shows that in June, it hit a high—1,300 arrests on average each day. That record was then topped in July, which saw 1,474 average daily arrests over just the first 11 days of the month. “This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined,” observed Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash.” There is a difference between a change in ICE tactics and a change in the number of people whom ICE has detained and deported, and understanding the reason for the latter requires us to look beyond ICE for answers. ICE’s purported shift was remarked upon over the winter, when Bovino was benched after immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. More recently, when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine within days of each other, ICE was briefly suspended from traffic stops. But immigration agents themselves have long known—or at least, some of those whose words have made it into the legal record have known—that despite public outcry over ICE operations, not much beyond appearances has really changed. “They just changed the name,” one agent said in a deposition, when questioned about “Operation At Large,” the high-profile nationwide operation last year. “We’re doing the same thing just with a different name.” In addition to proceeding as usual under a slightly altered brand, ICE is now working in even closer collaboration with other federal agencies in order to increase arrests: arresting people who allegedly overstayed visas at airports, with the help of TSA data; and arresting people whose children were previously in migrant shelters, based on tips shared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But ICE has been able to arrest and detain more people not only through these kinds of agreements with other federal agencies and offices. Its reach has also been broadened by local, county, and state law enforcement, a network of collaboration that goes back to the agency’s founding, and which has become only more sprawling since ICE was formed. Today, ICE’s partnership with the criminal legal system is fully activated in service of the mass deportations agenda. The sight of singular terrifying raids can sometimes conceal the more fearsome routine violence of anti-immigration law enforcement. This winter, at the height of ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities, about 3000 immigration agents were on the streets. “At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period,” said Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, in an interview this month with Kelly Hayes of Truthout. The Miami ICE field office continues to make the most arrests in the country, averaging about 120 each day.
Reports that OpenAI’s rogue AI agent compromised a second company’s environment after the recent Hugging Face cyber incident underscore the growing national security and public safety implications of frontier AI systems. According to reporting from Reuters and Axios, the AI agent, which reportedly escaped containment during internal safety testing before conducting a multi-stage cyberattack against Hugging Face, also exploited a vulnerability within a customer environment hosted through Modal Labs. While Modal stated that its own infrastructure was not compromised, the incident demonstrates that the consequences of the attack extended beyond a single organization and affected additional real-world systems.“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in Washington this week and he should not be allowed to leave D.C. without Congress seeking to understand, from him, publicly how one of the company’s most advanced AI systems escaped its intended testing environment and reportedly carried out offensive cyber operations affecting multiple companies,” said J.B. Branch, Director of Federal AI Governance at Public Citizen. “Voluntary disclosures after the fact are not a substitute for congressional oversight. The American people deserve a full accounting of what happened, why existing safeguards failed, and what concrete steps are being taken to prevent it from happening again. Most importantly, Congress must act, not rely on voluntary action by Big Tech companies. AI systems are creating real-world consequences. Congress should treat this with the urgency it deserves.”“The federal government must develop emergency authorities and response capabilities for advanced AI systems. If a frontier model demonstrates dangerous autonomous behavior, the government cannot be left relying solely on private companies to decide when — or whether — to pause, contain, or disable it. A credible national emergency preparedness framework is now an essential component of AI governance.”Public Citizen urges Congress to hold immediate oversight hearings, obtain all relevant incident reports and technical findings, and evaluate whether additional statutory safeguards — including mandatory incident reporting, independent safety evaluations, cybersecurity standards for frontier AI systems, and pre-deployment oversight for exceptionally capable models — are necessary to protect the public.
A two-year investigation identified 47 adults accused of sexual misconduct against students at a Michigan arts institution with deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein, drawing on more than 70 firsthand accounts of abuse dating back to the 1950s, MLive reported Tuesday night.Epstein has a well-documented history with Interlochen Center of the Arts, having attended the institution in 1967 when he was around 14 years old. In the 1990s, Epstein became a major donor to the institution, and previous reporting has revealed how he and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell used the center to target young girls. Recent reports also revealed that Epstein had set up his own lodge at the institution, and was accused by the mother of soap opera actress Nadia Bjorlin of trying to groom her daughter when she was 13.Carried out by Sanghavi Law Office at the behest of the institution, the new investigation revealed that the scope of abuse was far greater than previously known, including new allegations of abuse by Epstein himself.“The information gathered during this investigation is, simply, devastating,” reads Sanghavi Law Office’s report. “Despite the deep and positive connections that many individuals expressed to the investigative team regarding Interlochen, some of these same individuals detailed the significant negative impact of the conduct that they reported.”The law office’s investigative team forwarded the names of the alleged abuser to the Grand Traverse County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, though a significant number of accused adults are now deceased, per the report. Having conducted around 180 interviews, the law office also uncovered a previously unreported allegation against Epstein.“One alum said that when she met Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen, they offered to pay for her tuition, which they did. She noted that they withdrew financial support for subsequent schooling after she did not engage in requested conduct,” the law office’s report reads. “This alum said that during the time she interacted with Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen, they asked her to Epstein’s lodge on campus, and that while there, Epstein engaged in sexual conduct with her, brushing against her body over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental.”The same alum told investigators that she visited Epstein at his home in New York on three occasions while a student at Interlochen, during which Epstein would make unwanted sexual physical contact, and that she “did not tell anyone about Epstein’s conduct towards her until decades later.”In another new revelation, investigators discovered that a male faculty member at the institution had allegedly made unwanted physical advances and contact with a female student. That student told investigators that she confronted the faculty member and read aloud a letter to him: “Can you promise me that you won’t do this to anyone else?”The faculty member, according to the student, “told her that this was part of how he expressed love, and that he could not promise he would not do it again with anyone else,” the law office’s report reads.Per the report, the student informed leadership at the institution of the alleged unwanted physical contact. Within days of informing leadership, the male faculty member accused of abuse received a letter of recommendation from an institution administrator, and a second letter of recommendation from another administrator a month later.
Mr. Clayton, who shed Democratic support after he refused to clearly say Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election, will take over the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from Bill Pulte.
A Kansas high school teacher was arrested and dragged out of a contentious city zoning meeting for continuously clapping in opposition to a proposed data center.
