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Today, The Atlantic published a new investigation by contributing writer Karen Hao detailing Microsoft’s recent engagements with the oil and gas industries.
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Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.
When the Department of Justice indicted two employees of Russia’s state-backed media outlet RT last week, it didn’t just reveal a covert influence operation—it also offered a clear picture of how the tactics used to spread propaganda are changing.
This particular operation allegedly exploited popular U.S. right-wing influencers, who amplified pro-Russian positions on Ukraine and other divisive issues in exchange for large payments.
We speak with V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, about “How We Do Freedom: Rising Against Fascism,” a daylong educational event to be held at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church on Saturday. V is the founder of the global activist movements V-Day and One Billion Rising that is organizing the event. “The rise of fascism, from India to Italy, from Afghanistan to U.S., [is] the most pressing concern everywhere,” says V, who ties the crisis to growing loneliness and isolation.
A federal jury in Florida has found members of the pan-Africanist group African People’s Socialist Party guilty of conspiring with the Russian government to “sow discord” and “interfere” in U.S. elections. They face up to five years in federal prison. In a major victory for the activists, however, the jury acquitted them of the more serious charge of acting as foreign agents.
Supporters of Leonard Peltier are calling on President Biden to grant clemency to the Indigenous leader and activist, who marked his 80th birthday behind bars on Thursday after nearly a half-century in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. The ailing Peltier, who uses a walker and has serious health conditions, including diabetes, has always maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
In Sudan, a recent United Nations fact-finding mission documented “harrowing” human rights violations committed by both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, schools, hospitals, water and power supplies. Civilians have also been subjected to torture, arbitrary detention and gruesome sexual violence. Over 20,000 people have been killed and 13 million displaced over the past 16 months.
Even host Jesse Watters seemed a little lost.
David Muir and Linsey Davis were ready.
A smoke-filled room sets off the alarm in Washington.
“Every huge thing is composed of a lot of very small things.
Can Gen Zs even write checks? Felix says no. Emily says yes. They both wish checks would go away.
A plan to expand access to the drug treatment is hung up on fears of a black market, despite bipartisan support.
The state lost millions in federal funding because it refused to offer patients a national hotline number for information about abortion.
While the risk of hospitalization and death is nowhere near what it was in 2021, there is still a danger, particularly for the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump want to provide relief, though they disagree on the details.
The former top U.S. infectious disease expert is expected to make a full recovery.
Across the U.S. in November, voters will weigh proposals on election policies, minimum wage increases and marijuana legalization.
Trump arrived in New York amid growing concerns among some investors about his economic plans as Harris casts his agenda as a financially calamitous wishlist.
The vice president looks to beef up her economic plans ahead of next week’s debate.
This summer’s conventions featured strongly diverging visions of the future — and the present.
Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump focused heavily on abortion rights and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump repeated his false claim that Democrats support infanticide, and claimed that allowing individual states to set their own laws on abortion was an improvement. Harris highlighted the risk to pregnant people now navigating a patchwork of laws and restrictions in the U.S.
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“HOLY COW!!!!!” read the subject line of a fundraising email just after the debate on Tuesday evening. Democrats and their allies were quick to use Kamala Harris’s strong performance to ask voters to chip in.
After weeks of speculation about a new and more powerful AI product in the works, OpenAI today announced its first “reasoning model.” The program, known as o1, may in many respects be OpenAI’s most powerful AI offering yet, with problem-solving capacities that resemble those of a human mind more than any software before. Or, at least, that’s how the company is selling it.
As with most OpenAI research and product announcements, o1 is, for now, somewhat of a tease.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
The last time The Atlantic put a modern pop star on its cover was 2008, when Britney Spears, clad in oversize sunglasses, occupied a piece of media real estate usually devoted to probing the fate of democracy. Her appearance shocked many readers.
When the tobacco industry was accused of marketing harmful products to teens, its leaders denied the charge but knew it was true. Even worse, the industry had claimed that smoking made people healthier—by reducing anxiety, say, or slimming waistlines.
The social-media industry is using a similar technique today. Instead of acknowledging the damage their products have done to teens, tech giants insist that they are blameless and that their products are mostly harmless.
We’re joined by award-winning Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle, whose new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, has just been released. By taking a look at the more than a century-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, Nagle investigates the development and future of tribal law since the beginning of colonial relations between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, from the Trail of Tears to the “war on terror.
As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, wealthy governments in the West are clamping down on climate protest. According to a new report from Climate Rights International, demonstrators around the world are being arrested, charged, prosecuted and silenced, simply for using their rights to free expression.
At least 196 environmental defenders were killed last year, most of them Indigenous or Afro-descendant. The deadliest country was Colombia, where at least 79 land, water and climate defenders were killed.
In July of this year, a U.S.-based company called CrowdStrike released an update for its widely used cybersecurity software, inadvertently triggering a massive system crash. In the hours that followed, what has since been described as the “largest outage in history” affected nearly every facet of our global society. On X, the phrase Leave the world behind went viral.