Give cities their money back

Climate change is like El Niño’s hype man, making everything wetter, but also drier, and more chaotic. (The New York Times)

AEP, a major US utility, is essentially threatening to quit two of America’s biggest power grids unless they speed up connecting AI data centers to the electricity supply. (Bloomberg)

🌏 Extreme heat is threatening democracy in India, with vulnerable voters disproportionately being forced to stay home on election day. (The Xylom)

🌏 Australia doubled its battery capacity in a year, and the results include gas generation hitting its lowest level since 1999, wholesale power prices dropping 12%, and batteries setting electricity prices more than any other source for the first time ever. (Bloomberg)

🌏 Lobbyists and industry pressure have gotten the EU to carve leather out of its landmark deforestation law. (Mongabay)

Medical AI is caught in a bizarre reversal where image-based AI with years of proven, rigorous evidence sits largely unused while patients and doctors eagerly embrace AI chatbots that have almost no real-world evidence they improve health outcomes. (Ground Truths)

ICE hasn’t paid for detainee medical care since October 2025, and the death rate in custody has jumped to more than five times the historical average. (Popular Information)

Health misinformation now runs on autopilot, with the same network of influencers and conspiracy accounts that pushed ivermectin during COVID already recycling the entire playbook onto hantavirus within hours. (STAT)

A new radiotracer scan successfully detected endometriosis without surgery in 16 of 19 trial patients, a potentially huge deal for a condition that currently takes nearly a decade to get diagnosed. (The Guardian)

In 50 years, IVF has gone from a last-resort infertility treatment with a 12% success rate to a sophisticated toolkit for reproductive planning. (MIT Technology Review)

The Tijuana River has gotten so toxic that a coalition is now begging California’s governor to declare it a public health emergency, budget deficit be damned. (The LA Times)

Roundup transformed farming, but over 170,000 people have sued claiming it gave them cancer, and the Supreme Court is deciding whether a federal pesticide law can shut all those lawsuits down before the deeper question of whether it actually causes cancer ever gets properly answered. (wbur)

With the Colorado River’s reservoirs sinking toward critically low levels and seven-state negotiations deadlocked, California, Arizona, and Nevada have broken ranks to announce their own emergency two-year water-cutting plan. (The LA Times)

As water scarcity intensifies globally, a wave of desalination startups is rethinking the traditional coastal mega-plant model, with alternative approaches ranging from underwater pods that use ocean pressure to cut energy costs, to a cooler-sized portable unit any household can use. (HEATMAP)

After DOGE gutted the FDA, the agency is now scrambling to rehire, but has so far only managed to bring back about 350 of the 3200 positions it’s trying to fill, and former regulators are speaking out about the institutional knowledge that left with them. (STAT)

A bipartisan bill backed by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft would funnel NSF grants into teaching “AI literacy” in K-12 schools. Is this forward-thinking education policy or the tech industry writing its own curriculum? That depends on your current level of cynicism. (404 Media)

Because AI is already being rolled into classrooms at lightning speed. It’s being pre-installed on school Chromebooks, embedded in reading apps recording kids’ voices, and backed by billions in corporate funding. (The New Yorker)

AI’s appetite for storage is creating a hard drive shortage that’s hitting the Internet Archive, Wikimedia, and academic archivists hardest. (404 Media)

🌎 Governments and their consultants keep getting caught publishing AI-hallucinated citations as official fact, because speed and convenience takes precedence over anyone actually checking if the sources exist. (Rest of World)

🌏 A journalist got his hands on a Chinese real-time deepfake software built for scammers that can swap you face onto anyone else’s during a live Zoom or Teams call. (404 Media)