The interception of a Chinese vessel accused of illegal fishing highlights the technical lengths many use to remain undetected across millions of square kilometres of open ocean.
Tuvalu Police operating on a Sea Shepherd patrol boat boarded and arrested a Chinese longliner, the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 138, on July 9 for allegedly illegally operating within the small South Pacific nation’s waters.
The vessel was allegedly running with its navigation light turned off and transmitting false data showing it to be in different area – an increasingly common practice known as “spoofing.”
After boarding the ship, officers found it did not hold a valid permit to fish the area, detaining the vessel and escorting it to the Port of Funafuti for further investigation.
Sea Shepherd Australia Chair Peter Hammarstedt said illegal fishers were increasingly “going dark” by switching off their automatic identification systems, or using them to broadcast false information.
“It’s very common practice, especially in the Pacific Ocean, for Chinese fishing vessels to transmit false positions,” Hammarstedt told AAP.
“If you go onto some vessel tracking software websites, you’ll see some Chinese fishing vessels appear on land, like in the Mongolian desert, for example.
“Obviously the fishing vessel isn’t there, but is operating elsewhere and simply inputting false data to mislead investigators.”
In the case of the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 138, it was allegedly transmitting a location that put it squarely on the equator at 0 degrees, raising the suspicions of investigators.
Sea Shepherd has partnered with Tuvalu Police for the past two years, since the nation’s only operational patrol boat was damaged in a cyclone.
The small island nation monitors a marine domain covering roughly 750,000 square kilometres, with limited assets to keep an eye on such a large area, meaning most illegal fishing operations go undetected.
“The fishing vessels that do this kind of behaviour operate under the expectation that they’re just not going to get caught,” Mr Hammarstedt said.
Australia and Pacific nations have recently ramped up efforts to clamp down on illegal fishing under the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency Fishing Authorisation.
“The Tuvaluans live by the sea, with the sea, and have done so for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Hammarstedt said.
“When I see illegal fishing on an industrial scale happening in the Tuvaluan waters, I see this as theft from the Tuvaluans.”
India’s Nuclear Push Further Strains The Massive Uranium Supply Gap
Prime Minister Modi secured another major uranium supply line. During his visit to Australia this month, the two sides finalized the administrative arrangements needed to move Australian uranium to India under the previous 2014 nuclear cooperation agreement. The fuel must stay under IAEA safeguards for exclusively peaceful use.
Australia holds roughly 28% of global uranium reserves. New Delhi has eyed those reserves for years, and now the yellowcake spigot can open.
This follows the March deal with Canada’s Cameco. That contract covers nearly 22 million pounds of U3O8 from 2027 through 2035 at market-related pricing, worth around C$2.6 billion.
India already buys from Russia and Uzbekistan, and holds some domestic production. The message is consistent: a country targeting 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047 cannot rely on thin indigenous resources alone.
Current operable capacity sits near 8 GW. The gap requires sustained annual additions measured in gigawatts, not megawatts.
Cumulative net deficits keep expanding as reactor builds in China and Russia outpace primary supply response. Goldman models have only recently started taking into account the significant expansion in the SMR space as well, resulting in some relatively alarming supply gaps in the years ahead.
The Cameco agreement already reflected this reality. CEO Tim Gitzel noted that sovereign buyers are locking up volumes in a window where available supply grows more uncertain. Kazakhstan has also moved to build its own strategic reserve.
Couple these data points with Goldman’s estimate of the ongoing lack of long-term uranium supply contracting by the existing global fleet…
We’ve been pointing to the uranium upside trade for several years now. We laid out a longer form of our thesis for the anticipated continued rise of the price of uranium just a few months ago. The idea is incredibly straightforward. There’s not enough mines, and the demand is exploding faster than people can keep track of.
China’s Moonshot Eyes IPO After Sparking Another “DeepSeek Moment” For US AI Stocks
Chinese startup Moonshot AI sparked another DeepSeek-like momentfor US AI stocks and hyperscalers last week. David Sacks, the former White House AI and cryptocurrency czar, warned that this is “very concerning.”
Moonshot AI debuted Kimi K3, which ranks number three on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, trailing only OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Fable 5. This only shows the continued trend of open-weight models toward the AI frontier.
Kimi K3 has emerged as a top challenger across reasoning and coding workloads, highlighting the rapid pace of innovation and the increasing competitive pressure on models in terms of capabilities and downward trend in pricing. This only sparked weakness in sentiment toward AI US stocks and hyperscalers last week due to their massive capex binges to build out data centers.
It serves as a reminder for companies amid the ‘tokenmaxxing‘ woes that there are lower-cost alternatives for end users besides expensive frontier Anthropic and OpenAI.
Now, Moonshot AI is leveraging last week’s momentum and preparing for an initial public offering in Hong Kong within six months. Kimi K3 has strengthened investor confidence, positioning the startup to enter public markets.
Bloomberg reports that Moonshot is in the process of concluding a funding round that values the three-year-old startup at $30 billion.
Annual revenues topped $300 million in June, up from $200 million in April, supported by chatbot subscriptions and enterprise services.
The startup has held talks with CICC and Goldman Sachs about the offering and is dismantling its red-chip structure to facilitate an overseas listing.
Meanwhile…
We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
Here is the latest institutional commentary on Moonshot AI:
Jefferies analyst Roger Song
Moonnshot AI triggered another Deepseek-like moment + semi/ memory lost momentum, both potentially benefiting biopharma rotation. While still waiting for FDA leadership renewal, we started to see more potential policy reversals (while maintaining good ones, nice to see CRL release back for now) along with swift industry reactions. Open clinical trial prediction betting – will that be a distraction/ noise or another actionable datapoint for real investment? We shall all see.
Wolfe Research analyst Alex Zukin
China’s Moonshot Unveils Kimi K3, Autonomously Designed Functional Chip in 48 Hours – Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1-million-token context window and native text, image, and video support, positioned as the first open 3T-class frontier model with full weights releasing July 27, 2026 and API pricing at $3/$15 per million input/output tokens. The model autonomously designed a functional 4mm² chip in a single 48-hour run with zero human intervention, handling design, optimization, verification, and simulation, achieving over 8,700 tokens/second decoding throughput, while also building a custom GPU compiler called MiniTriton from scratch that reportedly matches parts of Nvidia’s official Triton compiler. Kimi K3 scored 88.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, trailing but competitive with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, while lagging flagship closed models like Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 in broader evaluations, with the model available today via the Kimi app, Kimi Code, and OpenRouter
Canaccord Genuity analyst Martin Roberge
Meanwhile, sentiment toward AI stocks and hyperscalers’ capex binge keeps weakening and today’s release of a new AI model by Chinese company Moonshot, capable of competing with AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, serves as a reminder that there are lower-cost alternatives for end users.
The race among AI startups to go public has China-based DeepSeek targeting a 2027 IPO, while US rival Anthropic could list as early as late 2026 and OpenAI increasingly appears headed for a 2027 debut. Both US firms have confidentially submitted IPO paperwork.
Taiwan’s President Ratchets Anti-China Rhetoric In Party Speech: Must Resist ‘Red Terror’ Of Beijing
President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday that Taiwan must renew efforts to protect its democracy and never become part of China. He urged members of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to oppose the “red terror” coming from Beijing.
The ruling DPP champions Taiwan’s separate identity from China, and is working to combat what Lai called China’s “legal warfare”.
“I also expect comrades within the party to stand on the front lines, unite as one, and jointly oppose the threat posed by China’s ‘red terror’ to Taiwanese society,” Lai added, speaking in Taiwanese, rather than the main language of government, Mandarin.
“We must work together to protect our democratic and free way of life, and absolutely never allow ‘democratic Taiwan’ to turn back and become ‘China’s Taiwan’,” he said.
“Regardless of ethnic group, regardless of who came earlier or later, anyone who identifies with Taiwan is a master of the country. Taiwan’s future must be decided jointly by the 23 million people of Taiwan,” he said.
One establishment US publication has held up a prime example of Beijing’s “legal warfare” against an autonomous Taiwan in the following:
On March 12, China’s legislature adopted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Chinese; English translation), a sweeping new statute that codifies Beijing’s approach toward China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. Substantively, the law enshrines a decades-long shift towards aggressive assimilationist policies. Structurally, it reflects a deepening merger of Party ideology and state law that is becoming increasingly prevalent under Xi Jinping.
This new law is the culmination of a policy trajectory that has been building for over a decade, dating back to the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference. Under Xi, Beijing is steering away from the post-1949 legal framework of nominal ethnic autonomy (albeit under tight Party control) imported from the Soviet Union. In its place, officials have steadily been pivoting towards what scholars have termed “second-generation ethnic policies”—an aggressive assimilationist approach that emphasizes a common Chinese national identity over accommodation of ethnic differences. Provincial and municipal authorities across China have enacted a wave of local “ethnic unity and progress” regulations in recent years, such as those in Xinjiang (2015) or Inner Mongolia (2021). The new national legislation elevates this approach to the level of a national statute governing all of China.
The new law’s core concept is captured in the term zhulao – to “forge” or “cast” metal – and its instruction that “forging the communal consciousness of the Chinese nation” is core to the Party’s ethnic policies. As James Leibold has pointed out, this phrasing reflects a hardening of Beijing’s political line under Xi Jinping – explicitly written into the Party’s Charter at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 – aimed at “melting” subnational and ethnic identities into a shared collective one.
Meanwhile, on a global stage Beijing has continued to present itself as the only peace guarantor and as a force for stability and is seeking ‘Taiwan’s willing participation’ – at a moment the Middle East is on fire largely as a result of American policy and quickness to result to force and surprise attacks.
President Donald Trump suggests the United States might not come to Taiwan’s aid if China attacks, arguing that Taiwan “took” America’s advanced semiconductor business and should therefore pay more for its own protection. — @atrupar (July 2023)pic.twitter.com/WNMUZe6IUf
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) July 19, 2026
And yet, President Trump has of late publicly touted his personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping as “amazing”. Planned weapons deal with Taiwan have been indefinitely put on hold as Washington tries to repair relations with Beijing.
A federal judge ruled on July 15 that a race-based provision of the Digital Equity Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2021 to close digital gaps, was unconstitutional.
The Digital Equity Act was part of Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which appropriated $2.75 billion to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to establish grant programs to expand high-speed internet access for minority groups and communities in rural areas.
After taking office for a second term last year, President Donald Trump halted the competitive grant program authorized under the Digital Equity Act, saying it was unconstitutional because it allocated federal funding based on race.
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a recipient of the competitive grant program, later filed a lawsuit in October 2025 seeking to reinstate the program.
In a 35-page order, U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that the Digital Equity Act’s provision authorizing the use of race in awarding federal funds was unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that struck down race-based preferences in higher education admissions.
Bates said that while the Digital Equity Act aims to address the digital divide among minority groups and other covered populations, the Supreme Court precedent showed that remedying general social disparities alone does not justify the use of race in government action.
“Addressing that gap is a laudable goal, but the Supreme Court has admonished that ameliorating general societal inequalities – as opposed to specific instances of past discrimination – ‘does not constitute a compelling interest that justifies race-based state action,'” the judge stated.
“Otherwise, Congress could deploy racial classifications when confronted with any situation of an uneven resource distribution.”
Bates said the grant program could be reinstated without the race-based provision, and the government had committed to restoring it upon a judicial determination that the provision was unconstitutional.
Trump welcomed the ruling in a Truth Social post, calling it a “big win” for the American people.
“The so-called ‘Digital Equity Act,’ a Biden DEI law, was ruled exactly what I said it was last year – A RACIST and UNCONSTITUTIONAL giveaway that never should have become Law,” he wrote.
The decision to end the Digital Equity Act comes amid the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from federal agencies and government initiatives.
Trump stated in a Jan. 20, 2025, executive order that the previous administration had forced “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” across virtually “all aspects of the federal government” through DEI initiatives.
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, credited the National Digital Inclusion Alliance with helping to secure the program’s restoration.
“Yesterday’s ruling on the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is, on balance, a victory,” Mitchell said in a statement. “The only real question now is how quickly NTIA moves to actually implement it.”
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance did not return a request for comment by publication time.
NBA Boss Calls Caitlin Clark A “Political Football” Over Racism Controversy
The WNBA has been the butt of jokes for decades. The women’s league is a perpetual money pit, with annual losses of around $40 million per year, all subsidized by the men’s league. The level of play is often tedious, the pace is much slower and the athleticism is lacking compared to the men’s game.
It’s the reason why the WNBA has far less viewers, makes no profit and why the women athletes are paid far less. It’s not sexism ad many of the players claim, it’s just basic math.
One would think that any player that doubles (in some cases triples) the viewership of league games by her mere presence would be widely celebrated by all the people involved including the commission, but sadly, this has not been the case with Caitlin Clark. Clark’s expertise and superior ability on the court has brought new life to a floundering sport; the problem is, she’s relatively new to the league and, she’s white.
This combination triggered many of the minority players, leading to public back-biting on sports talk shows and flagrant fouls on the court. The audience and social media started to take notice. In fact, one could argue that it was all the clips of jealous WNBA athletes attacking Clark on the court that made her more popular than ever. Not to mention, it seems as if most of the fouls are committed by black players.
The latest flagrant foul involved Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, who appeared to knee Clark in the groin area and then press her closed fist into Clark’s throat while she was on the ground. No foul was called.
🔥Hold up…A closer look at the dirty play by Alyssa Thomas last night w/ a new angle — Wait for the freeze + zoom on each.
– Knee to the groin
– Pinches her underarm
– Fist to the throat
– Attempt to stomp on her (she moved)
Clark suffered a back injury from the incident and has to sit out multiple games. This is a regular occurrence with Clark; she stands near the top of the list for most fouls and flagrant fouls in the WNBA. In many cases involving flagrant fouls, referees do not make the call, leading to anger and social media backlash among fans.
Some of the dirtiest tricks in basketball are on display regularly in WNBA games, and the attacks on Clark look practiced and organized.
It’s not always black players that go for the cheap shots, but there is a clear pattern emerging. It could be envy over Clark’s far larger fan following despite being a newer player (female cattiness), but suspicions are hanging in the air that her treatment is largely race motivated. By far, Clark’s most vocal critics in sports media are black.
The WNBA and the NBA are not happy with the political undertones of the Clark controversy. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently called Clark a “political football” in interviews as he attempted to dismiss the WNBA’s numerous problems with officiating fouls. He seems to outright dismiss any concerns about race-based targeting of Clark.
Speaking as part of a panel at an event in New York, Silver said the debates surrounding Clark had become about broader political and cultural issues in the United States rather than basketball alone. He specifically referenced the foul by Alyssa Thomas that led to Clark’s injuries.
“That particular incident is not about whether a foul should have been called at the time of the game or whether that was ultimately a flagrant non-review….I’ve come to know Caitlin really well. She’s an incredible player and also an incredible person. “And she wants to focus on being the best player she can. And she’s become a bit of a political football in this country, and I think it’s incredibly unfair to her.”
Speaking of unfair, Clark was snubbed by the WNBA in a 30th Anniversary commemorative poster (she was strangely absent from the roster), and she was snubbed by the 2024 Olympic “Dream Team” despite being a top star and #1 draft pick.
Emmanuel Acho, a former NFL player and sports analyst (who is also coincidentally black), asserted on the Speakeasy podcast in June that Clark has “become a distraction” and that the WNBA would be better off without her. He argued that Clark got audiences to watch the games, and now the WNBA can throw her away.
🚨🚨WORST TAKE OF ALL-TIME🚨🚨
Ex-#NFL LB Emmanuel Acho says the WNBA would be better off without Caitlin Clark because she is a distraction.
“The WNBA would be better without Caitlin Clark, because she is a bigger distraction than she is an additive” pic.twitter.com/MVwHoWRS8u
They hate Clark and her popularity with a passion, but they like the idea of stealing her audience for themselves. It’s rather pathetic, but we’re talking about the WNBA. They have lived in the gutter for so long they can’t imagine climbing out of it. Of course, Acho is delusional if he thinks all the “eyes” Clark brings to the WNBA won’t leave with her if she exits the league.
The bottom line is this: Clark puts butts in seats. No other WNBA player comes close. Yet, the league and many of its commentators treat her like a pariah because they can’t make their crow’s nest of minority players behave. They are the cause of the controversy. They made Clark into a “political football” by remaining apathetic and dismissive.
Trump Endorses Graham’s Sister For Full Term, Shattering Expectations Of Short Stay
Following the sudden July 11 death of Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster triggered eye-rolling across America when he appointed Graham’s sister Darline Nordone to take over the seat. At the time, the appointment of the unqualified sibling was widely understood as a mere interim honor, with Nordone serving as a placeholder pending the outcome of a special primary election to choose a Republican candidate for November’s previously-scheduled election for the seat. Now, President Trump has asked Nordone to run in that primary race and pursue the full 6-year term that will start in January.
“During her visit, I asked Darline, for the Good of our Nation, to run for the U.S. Senate in the Special Republican Primary on Tuesday, August 11, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I hope Darline does this, in that there would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey. Darline…comes from an absolutely incredible family [and] has been a WINNER all of her life…RUN, DARLINE, RUN!”
While Nordone herself hasn’t announced that intention, there are reports that she’s “considering” it, and it’s highly unlikely Trump would have bothered with a lengthy public endorsement unless Nordone was on the verge of jumping in the abbreviated primary race that already has less than a month left in it.
At the press conference announcing her interim appointment, Nordone’s language reinforced universal expectations of a short stay in the Senate:
“It is such a privilege to get to finish some of [my brother’s] important work, and I promise to work hard over the next several months to support the president and carry forward the efforts of my brother on behalf of the citizens of South Carolina and the United States.”
Nordone has never held an elected office. She’s a commissioner on the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, and previously held a communications role in the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation Department. Trump said he personally pitched Nordone on going after the seat on a permanent basis when she visited him in the Oval Office on Thursday.
So far, three people have officially announced they’re running for the seat: businessman Mark Lynch, who was trounced by Graham in the June GOP primary; Ralph Norman, a 73-year-old US House member; and Duke Buckner, a lawyer who has previously run for the state’s heavily-Democratic 6th Congressional District seat. Shortly after Graham died, Norman asked Trump for an endorsement. The president was said to have replied, “Give me a week.” In the meantime, Norman has been endorsed by Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Utah Sen. Mike Lee.
Following Lord Lindsey’s passing, Darline, Duchess of Charleston, ascended the High Chamber: crowned Baroness of the Palmetto Seat. Her brother’s fiefdom and noble lineage are preserved. Long live the House of Graham and DEI! Aristocrats celebrate in Alexandria and Tel-Aviv. https://t.co/y5JGzSwz5v
The candidate list had been expected to grow, but Trump’s preemptive endorsement of Nordone could have a chilling effect. Rep. Nancy Mace, who’s poised to hand over her House seat in January — having foregone reelection for a failed bid for governor — teased at a run on social media within hours of Graham’s death. On Friday, Axios reported she’s still actively considering it. Rep. Russell Fry and Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette are among others whose names have circulated. An Emerson College poll found that a Trump endorsement would likely sway 41% of South Carolina GOP voters, but an equal percent claimed it wouldn’t have an effect. If no candidate scores not just a plurality but a majority of the votes on Aug. 11, the top two vote-getters will advance to a runoff election on Aug. 25.
Graham was a chief champion of the West’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and a zealous collaborator with Israel in promoting American warfare against Iran. To the extent that Nordone would attempt to pick up those torches and run with them, she’s sure to garner the backing of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby. That said, it’s far from clear how effective she would be, given her utter lack of experience in Washington politics.
The Data-Center Revolt Goes National: Tea Party Veteran Leads 142 Rallies Across 42 States
The backlash against the AI data-center build-out – which we’ve been tracking since it was a smattering of county fights across 28 states – staged its first coordinated day of action on Saturday: 142 protests across 42 states, from Wasilla, Alaska to Naples, Florida, organized by Humans First, the nonprofit that Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer co-founded and chairs. The crowds spanned both sides of the aisle…uniting a MAGA stalwart in a ‘faith, family, freedom’ T-shirt in New Jersey, a first-time activist in Texas, and a left-leaning organizer in California’s Imperial Valley.
The fight looked like Kenilworth, New Jersey. Residents of the 8,500-person borough gathered outside the municipal court at mid-morning with drums, plastic horns, and sidewalk chalk to protest the $1.8 billion CoreWeave AI data center their planning board approved in May 2025 on the former Merck campus – a project that has since drawn more than 12,000 petition signatures against it, several thousand more names than the town has people. The woman in the “faith, family, freedom” T-shirt marched beside neighbors holding “Build community, not data centers” signs. When heavy rain arrived later in the day, they pulled on ponchos, shared umbrellas, and kept marching. One sign, caught by Business Insider’s photographer on the scene: “You think this is pressure? Wait ’til there’s no water pressure.”
Texas, the country’s hottest data-center market, hosted the most rallies – 18 – with Georgia at 11, California at eight, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana at seven apiece. In Imperial Valley, where a proposed facility could pull 260 million gallons a year from the Colorado River, Ivan DelSol, 54, told Reuters that around 50 people turned out in 100-degree heat. “It’s dystopian that you would use this much fresh water for AI,” he said. Organizers released no headcounts; turnout ran below expectations in some rural areas and in Atlanta, where about a dozen showed – most of them, a volunteer there said, driving in from the smaller Georgia towns where the biggest data centers are going up.
Kremer is a founding figure of the Tea Party movement who went on to found Women for Trump, and an organizer of the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the Capitol riot (she neither planned nor took part in the riot itself). She has spent months calling data centers the defining fight of her lifetime, warning the technology could threaten humanity itself, and she is open about running the old playbook: grassroots pressure, town by town, aimed at both parties.
Today was incredible!
142 protests. 42 states. One message: ONE NATION UNITED AGAINST DATA CENTERS!
Communities across America showed up today for a National Day of Protest Against AI Data Centers to say that We The People deserve a voice before massive data centers are… pic.twitter.com/TwE7oRjR6V
— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) July 18, 2026
Her crowds bear that out. One of Saturday’s Texas rallies, in Tyler, was organized by Eva Cardona, a 31-year-old self-described political nomad and first-time activist who told Reuters she wanted something more hands-on than posting on Facebook; about a dozen people came. And in Imperial Valley, the man who helped lead the rally leans left. The polling explains why a coalition that broad holds. A June Reuters/Ipsos survey found only 14 percent of Americans would support a data center in their own community.Gallup polling fielded in March found 71 percent oppose building an AI data center in their area – 48 percent strongly – a worse number than a local nuclear plant gets. And Morgan Stanley told clients in a July 14 note that support for local data-center bans runs strongest among Republican, higher-income, and urban voters, while Morning Consult’s national tracker crossed a line of its own in May: “stop building” (about 45 percent) overtook “keep building while expanding energy supply” (about 38 percent) for the first time since last October.
Several democratic candidates, including candidate for Texas Governor Gina Hinajosa, stopped in Lubbock to discuss campaign topics including data centers. A data center protest was also held to collect signatures to pause building hyperscale data centers in the Lubbock area. pic.twitter.com/wh3mdGNcu4
For all the movement’s reputation, Kremer’s demands stop well short of a shutdown. She opposes a national moratorium and statewide moratoriums alike, telling Business Insider that each community should choose what gets built inside it, and that too many of those choices are made behind closed doors. Humans First’s platform runs to transparent approval processes, environmental review before permits are granted, union construction jobs, and binding developer commitments of the kind lawyers call community benefits agreements. She has aimed as much fire at her own side, accusing Republicans of giving Big Tech a free pass and predicting the industry will cozy up to Democrats the moment the majority flips. The fix, she argues, belongs to Congress.
The organization is a narrower thing than the crowds it convened. Humans First announced in April that its non-conservative team members would spin off into a separate group, with Kremer promising “a topflight team of conservatives” to fight Big AI and its lobbyists. The banner over Saturday’s rallies, in other words, was a conservative one – which makes the mix of people who marched beneath it all the more striking.
Official Backlash
The rallies capped a fast-moving week. On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers – an immediate pause of up to a year on state environmental permits for projects of 50 megawatts or more while regulators draft standards covering energy demand, water use, and air quality. Her office promised localities community-benefit guidance within 60 days, and Hochul will pursue repeal of the state’s sales-tax exemptions for massive data centers. A tougher bill passed by the legislature, with a 20-megawatt threshold, remains unsigned on her desk; her office has called it complicated, and Hochul said the state wants to be “the first to get it right.”
New York was not alone. Virginia’s new tax on data-center electricity – 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour – took effect July 1. Pennsylvania’s House passed a ban on non-disclosure agreements in data-center deals by a 171-31 vote, and separately voted 197-5 to repeal the industry’s sales-tax exemption, a break worth roughly $517 million a year by 2030. Arizona’s governor signed a three-year moratorium on new data-center tax breaks in June. Legislators have filed more than 300 data-center bills this year; local pauses have passed at the county, city, and tribal level in at least 15 states.
Meanwhile In China
Nothing comparable is happening on the other side of the Pacific. Two days before the marches, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter system billed as the largest open-weight model ever built and claimed to perform level with America’s best frontier models. Bloomberg has reported that Beijing plans to spend roughly $295 billion over five years on a nationwide network of AI computing hubs – and none of it will face a zoning board. Under the state’s “Eastern Data, Western Computing” program, the buildout is steered into the arid, sparsely populated west; provincial governments compete to attract data centers with tax holidays, cheap land, and compute vouchers, and the state absorbs up to half of operators’ energy costs, so the strain never shows up on a household bill. No Chinese county has passed a moratorium, because no Chinese county gets a vote.
The financial toll is no longer hypothetical. Third-party trackers cited by Morgan Stanley in its July 14 note put the value of cancelled or delayed projects at roughly $156 billion in 2025 and another $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone – about $286 billion in all – set against the bank’s own estimate of $877 billion in AI capital spending this year. The underlying quarterly count comes from Data Center Watch, a tracker run by 10a Labs, an intelligence firm whose client list includes AI companies, which logged at least 75 projects blocked or delayed from January through March – matching in one quarter the number of projects derailed in all of 2025 – as active opposition groups more than doubled from 396 to 833 and spread to 49 states.
Saturday itself stayed peaceful – chalk, chants, drums, umbrellas – though the wider fight has had harder edges: developers of the Piedmont transmission line into Northern Virginia’s data-center corridor asked a federal court last summer for U.S. Marshals to escort survey crews after landowners threatened workers, an episode we covered at the time.
The industry answered forcefully. The Data Center Coalition warned that New York’s moratorium tells investors the state is “closed for business” and will push jobs and tax revenue to neighboring states. Seven major AI and cloud companies – Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI – point to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge they signed at the White House in March, a voluntary commitment to cover the grid costs their facilities create. And White House AI czar David Sacks went after Hochul’s case point by point on the All-In podcast, calling data centers “the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI.” His answer to the utility-bill complaint: let developers build their own generation behind the meter instead of competing with households for grid power.
David Sacks: Everything Kathy Hochul Said About Datacenters Was a False Accusation@DavidSacks: “These data centers become the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI.
Everything she’s saying there is a false accusation on datacenters. So let’s just go one by… pic.twitter.com/gAxesw3fRD
Some industry allies go further, pointing to OpenAI’s June disclosure that it banned a China-linked network using ChatGPT to mass-produce comics and comments blaming data centers for rising power bills. OpenAI itself found the operation gained almost no authentic traction – and the crowds in Kenilworth and Imperial County were unambiguously homegrown.
Kremer spent Saturday evening thanking volunteers and looking past the weekend. “America is not for sale, and our communities are not collateral,” she wrote on X. She expects data centers on the ballot in November, and again in 2028. The midterms are less than four months away.
A federal judge on July 14 rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to obtain the private personal data of every registered voter in New Mexico, adding to the overall number of cases the DOJ has lost in which it has sought similar information.
U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera dismissed the latest voter roll lawsuit, ruling that the department’s demand letter lacked facts, proof of a pattern of violations, and explanations of necessity.
The court found that “the DOJ’s Demand Letter fails because it altogether lacks an identifiable ‘basis.’ Nowhere does the DOJ articulate any factual suggestion that New Mexico has violated the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] or HAVA [Help America Vote Act], indicate the State has a pattern or practice of noncompliance with the same, nor does it explain how the unredacted PII is necessary to evaluate compliance with the NVRA and HAVA.”
The DOJ did not immediately return a request for comment.
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver approved of the court’s decision.
“I am pleased with the court’s decision to dismiss this case. Federal and state legal guardrails on social security numbers and dates of birth exist for the identity protection of every voter in our state,” she said.
She doubled down on the security practices deployed under her leadership.
“I absolutely will not risk any disclosure of voters’ private data, as it could carry very real and severe consequences for the personal lives of New Mexicans participating in our democratic process,” she said.
The Justice Department has now been barred in 14 similar cases nationwide, failing to obtain unredacted voter files via these lawsuits from states that declined its requests, according to Oliver.
A federal judge on June 29 threw out the Justice Department’s lawsuit against New Hampshire. The state refused to disclose its unredacted statewide voter registration lists.
In a 26-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante stated that those state-generated voter records fall outside those documents the federal government can demand under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
In April, judges dismissed similar cases in Arizona and Massachusetts. In February, a judge rejected a DOJ request for similar information in Michigan.
In January, a federal judge in Oregon ruled along similar lines. U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai dismissed the Justice Department’s suit requesting Oregon’s list of registered voters. During a videoconference hearing, he granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case.
The department alleged that Oregon’s refusal violated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
The Justice Department filed lawsuits against six states in December 2025.
Mamdani’s New York: West Side Homeless Camp Stretching 12 Blocks Now Allegedly Stealing City Power
You’ve likely seen it if you’ve the nearby Hell’s Kitchen entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel…
What began as a growing homeless encampment on Manhattan’s West Side has now escalated to alleged utility theft, according to the NY Post.
According to reports, one resident of the sprawling encampment was seen Tuesday tapping into city electrical lines to power a makeshift shelter near West 34th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue. The camp now stretches roughly a dozen blocks, from 34th Street to 46th Street near the Intrepid Museum, and has become an increasingly visible flashpoint for residents, commuters, and tourists.
The NY Post writes that bus drivers and local workers say the encampment has continued to expand over the past several weeks, with tents multiplying and sidewalks becoming increasingly obstructed.
“It’s been almost a month now and it gets a little bigger every time I come back,” one FlixBus driver told the New York Post. He said garbage piled along the sidewalk forces passengers waiting for buses into the street, while some people living in the encampment have reportedly approached travelers asking for money. He added that complaints to city officials have produced little visible response.
Police officers were seen Tuesday ordering the individual accused of siphoning electricity to disconnect from the utility line. Elsewhere along the encampment, officers reportedly seized extension cords and power strips from another makeshift shelter. Despite those actions, there appears to be little expectation that the enforcement will significantly reduce the camp’s size.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has defended the city’s broader approach, saying the priority is moving homeless individuals into shelters and ultimately permanent housing rather than simply dispersing encampments from one neighborhood to another. Asked specifically about the West Side encampment, he said the city would review the situation.
Despite growing attention, reports indicate that no sanitation crews or homeless outreach teams had been seen at the site in the days following news coverage of the encampment.
The camp itself has reportedly continued to grow, with additional tents appearing over the weekend. Reports also claim that the area has attracted people struggling with addiction, along with sex workers, adding to concerns from nearby businesses and residents who say conditions continue to deteriorate.
