Media Articles
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Kamala Harris’ campaign team’s decision to doctor headlines on Google that tout the Democratic presidential candidate has sparked “significant ethical concern” over possibly “misleading” the public. The vice president’s team launched the sponsored posts on the search giant that linked to real news stories from various unsuspecting publishers such as CNN, USA Today, The Guardian and the Associated Press — but featured headlines and descriptions that were edited by her team. Google called the practice “common” and said the ads did not violate its policies because they were clearly labeled as “sponsored.” However, Rich Hanley, Quinnipiac University associate professor of journalism emeritus, called the marketing move “troubling” and “exploitative.” Hanley, who teaches a class in disinformation, said the Harris campaign is “exploiting a vulnerability in the information ecosystem” which is dangerous in this “climate of disinformation and misinformation.” “What they are actually doing is manipulating someone else’s content by changing headlines,” he said. “There should be a clear and bright line when it comes to news organizations.” The altered headlines ... were changed without the news outlets’ knowledge. For instance, one sponsored ad that links to NPR’s website features the headline “Harris will Lower Health Costs” while another that links to the Associated Press reads “VP Harris’s Economic Vision – Lower Costs and Higher Wages.”
Note: Both parties engage in sophisticated media manipulation to influence voter behavior, as with the Hilary Clinton campaign and DNC conspiracy to keep Bernie Sanders from getting the party nomination in 2016 and Cambridge Analytica's role in targeting voters with personalized ads in the UK on behalf of the political right. For more along these lines, explore summaries of revealing news articles on elections corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
State House Republicans defended former colleague, presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in a letter sent Sunday to the Transportation Security Administration demanding she be removed from the federal government’s terrorist watch list. The letter, sent to David P. Pekoske, TSA’s director in Washington, D.C., noted that one of their “former Hawaii State House colleagues, one of Hawaii’s ‘favorite daughters’, former Congresswoman, former Presidential Candidate, and combat veteran is on your TSA terrorist watch list.” “We understand that you are harassing her with your Air Marshals from flight to flight. We strongly urge you to immediately withdraw her name from the Quiet Skies program and/or provide full public transparency of the TSA’s reasons for maligning her name and reputation,” read the letter. Gabbard ... said that her inclusion on the watch list “is clearly an act of political retaliation.” “It’s no accident that I was placed on the Quiet Skies list the day after I did a prime-time interview warning the American people about ... why Kamala Harris would be bad for our country if elected as President and Commander in Chief. What hurts me the most is the fact that like so many Americans I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11, deployed to war zones to go after those terrorists, still serve in the US Army for over 21 years, and now my government is surveilling me as a potential domestic terrorist,” Gabbard said. “The real pain this has caused is the stress of forever looking over my shoulder, wondering if and how I am being watched, what secret terror watch list I’m on, and having no transparency or due process.”
Note: Why is the government targeting individuals who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
In 2015, my career with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency led me to step forward as a whistleblower, exposing a grave issue—the placement of unaccompanied migrant children with inadequately vetted sponsors. Since 2012, Homeland Security officials have released over 730,000 children they encountered to Health and Human Services (HHS) for placement with sponsors. This year alone, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, nearly 95,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been encountered at the border. Each of these numbers represents a vulnerable life. The crux of the issue lies in our inadequate vetting processes for sponsors. Despite my whistleblowing efforts in 2015 that briefly led to policy changes, we've regressed. Children continue to be placed with potentially dangerous sponsors, exposing them to risks of trafficking, abuse, and neglect. This is not a partisan issue; it's a moral imperative that transcends political affiliations. Despite the gravity of this crisis, it's important to note that Congress is not meaningfully acting on the problem. Senator Chuck Grassley ... revealed that the HHS had placed children with sponsors connected to MS-13, a notorious international criminal gang, and even with individuals suspected of involvement in human trafficking rings. The trafficking of minors across our borders has become a dark and lucrative business, and our failure to adequately safeguard these children makes us complicit.
Note: This article was written by former U.S. Army Captain Jason Piccolo. Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on immigration corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.
Peregrine ... is essentially a super-powered Google for police data. Enter a name or address into its web-based app, and Peregrine quickly scans court records, arrest reports, police interviews, body cam footage transcripts — any police dataset imaginable — for a match. It’s taken data siloed across an array of older, slower systems, and made it accessible in a simple, speedy app that can be operated from a web browser. To date, Peregrine has scored 57 contracts across a wide range of police and public safety agencies in the U.S., from Atlanta to L.A. Revenue tripled in 2023, from $3 million to $10 million. [That will] triple again to $30 million this year, bolstered by $60 million in funding from the likes of Friends & Family Capital and Founders Fund. Privacy advocates [are] concerned about indiscriminate surveillance. “We see a lot of police departments of a lot of different sizes getting access to Real Time Crime Centers now, and it's definitely facilitating a lot more general access to surveillance feeds for some of these smaller departments that would have previously found it cost prohibitive,” said Beryl Lipton ... at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “These types of companies are inherently going to have a hard time protecting privacy, because everything that they're built on is basically privacy damaging.” Peregrine technology can also enable “predictive policing,” long criticized for unfairly targeting poorer, non-white neighborhoods.
Note: Learn more about Palantir's involvement in domestic surveillance and controversial military technologies. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed in the US for drug trafficking. But the narco-state he ran was a product of US foreign policy and of the US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya’s left-wing government. By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as “El Tigre” and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States. Bonilla had been a “highly trusted” torpedo loyal to the Hernández tribe. According to a Justice Department press release, the president and his brother had “El Tigre” shielding their drug shipments while also conducting “special assignments, including murder” of a rival trafficker. In heading the Honduran police, Bonilla also organized the return of death squads, tasked with “socially cleansing” Honduras of environmental activists, indigenous spokespersons, and investigative reporters. Hernández began his second term in 2017 atop a heap of killed and tear-gased protesters. [Honduras] was, according to Honduras scholar Dana Frank, “the first domino that the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America.” After Honduras, a parliamentary coup took place against Paraguay’s progressive president Fernando Lugo in 2012, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2015, and Brazil’s current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a now-annulled prison sentence in 2017. Obama, hailed as the US president of “hope” and “change,” oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements.
Note: Bonilla was trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Moore, Georgia (now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), which graduated more than 500 human rights abusers all over the world. For more along these lines, watch our latest Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace — the company’s controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 — a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database — to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list — which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments — was leaked.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Since religious riots tore across the central Nigerian city of Jos two decades ago, its Muslim and Christian residents have largely kept apart. They have their own neighborhoods. They vote for different political parties. But the cost-of-living crisis that has swept Nigeria over the past year has blurred some of those boundaries. “If there is hunger in the land, the hunger that the Christian is feeling is not different from the hunger the Muslim is feeling,” observes Tony Young Godswill, national secretary of the Initiative for a Better and Brighter Nigeria, a pro-democracy group. When nationwide anti-government protests broke out in early August, hungry, angry Jos residents from all backgrounds poured into the streets. When Muslim demonstrators knelt to pray on a busy road one Friday afternoon, hundreds of Christian marchers spontaneously formed a tight, protective circle around them. Nigeria’s protests began in response to the soaring costs of food and transport over the past year and a half, which have more than doubled in some cases. Protesters blame the economic stabilization policies of President Bola Tinubu, which have included removing a heavy subsidy on petrol and devaluing the naira, Nigeria’s currency. In Abuja, the capital, Ibrahim Abdullahi was among those who marched. As a Muslim, he says he previously thought it was inappropriate for him to protest against a fellow Muslim like Mr. Tinubu. Now, he held a placard that read “We regret Tinubu.”
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Once upon a time, you could have yourself a nice little Saturday of stocking up at Costco (using your sister’s membership card, naturally), before hitting up a museum (free admission with your 15-year-old expired student ID) or settling into a reality TV binge sesh (streaming on your college roommate’s ex-boyfriend’s Netflix login). Thanks to the fine-tuning of the tech that Corporate America uses to police subscriptions, those freeloading days are over. Costco and Disney this month took a page from the Netflix playbook and announced they are cracking down on account sharers. Want to put on “Frozen” for the kids so you can have two hours to do literally anything else? You’re going to need a Disney+ login associated with your household. The tech that tracks your IP address and can read your face has gotten more sophisticated. Retailers and streaming services are increasingly turning to status-verification tech that make it harder for folks to claim student discounts on services like Amazon Prime or Spotify beyond graduation. Cracking down on sharing was hugely successful for Netflix. For years, the streaming giant turned a blind eye to password sharing because doing so allowed more people to experience the product and, crucially, come to rely on it. Netflix kept growing and growing until 2022, when [it] cashed in on its brand loyalty, betting that it had made itself indispensable to enough viewers that they’d be willing to cough up $7-$15 a month to keep their access.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing. This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future. That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue. Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation.
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
If you rent your home, there’s a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it’s something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the “supreme evil” of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine. Property owners feed RealPage’s “property management software” their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm—which also knows what competitors are charging—spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed. Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it. In more than 40 housing markets across the United States, 30 to 60 percent of multifamily-building units are priced using RealPage. The plaintiffs suing RealPage, including the Arizona and Washington, D.C., attorneys general, argue that this has enabled a critical mass of landlords to raise rents in concert, making an existing housing-affordability crisis even worse. The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with its pricing suggestions.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
There is a massive battery right under your feet. Unlike a flammable lithium ion battery, though, this one is perfectly stable, free to use, and ripe for sustainable exploitation: the Earth itself. While temperatures above ground fluctuate throughout the year, the ground stays a stable temperature, meaning that it is humming with geothermal energy. “Every building sits on a thermal asset,” said Cameron Best, director of business development at Brightcore Energy in New York, which deploys geothermal systems. “I really don’t think there’s any more efficient or better way to heat and cool our homes.” A couple of months ago Eversource Energy commissioned the US’s first networked geothermal neighbourhood operated by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. Pipes run down boreholes 600-700ft (about 180-215 metres) deep, where the temperature of the rock is consistently 55F (13C). A mixture of water and propylene glycol ... pumps through the piping, absorbing that geothermal energy. Heat pumps use the liquid to either heat or cool a space. If deployed across the country, these geothermal systems could go a long way in helping decarbonise buildings, which are responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Once a system is in place, buildings can draw heat from water pumped from below their foundations, instead of burning natural gas. The networks ... can be set up almost anywhere.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.
The eruption of racist violence in England and Northern Ireland raises urgent questions about the responsibilities of social media companies, and how the police use facial recognition technology. While social media isn’t the root of these riots, it has allowed inflammatory content to spread like wildfire and helped rioters coordinate. The great elephant in the room is the wealth, power and arrogance of the big tech emperors. Silicon Valley billionaires are richer than many countries. That mature modern states should allow them unfettered freedom to regulate the content they monetise is a gross abdication of duty, given their vast financial interest in monetising insecurity and division. In recent years, [facial recognition] has been used on our streets without any significant public debate. We wouldn’t dream of allowing telephone taps, DNA retention or even stop and search and arrest powers to be so unregulated by the law, yet this is precisely what has happened with facial recognition. Our facial images are gathered en masse via CCTV cameras, the passport database and the internet. At no point were we asked about this. Individual police forces have entered into direct contracts with private companies of their choosing, making opaque arrangements to trade our highly sensitive personal data with private companies that use it to develop proprietary technology. There is no specific law governing how the police, or private companies ... are authorised to use this technology. Experts at Big Brother Watch believe the inaccuracy rate for live facial recognition since the police began using it is around 74%, and there are many cases pending about false positive IDs.
Note: Many US states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects, even though misidentification is a common occurrence. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
In 2021, parents in South Africa with children between the ages of 5 and 13 were offered an unusual deal. For every photo of their child’s face, a London-based artificial intelligence firm would donate 20 South African rands, about $1, to their children’s school as part of a campaign called “Share to Protect.” With promises of protecting children, a little-known group of companies in an experimental corner of the tech industry known as “age assurance” has begun engaging in a massive collection of faces, opening the door to privacy risks for anyone who uses the web. The companies say their age-check tools could give parents ... peace of mind. But by scanning tens of millions of faces a year, the tools could also subject children — and everyone else — to a level of inspection rarely seen on the open internet and boost the chances their personal data could be hacked, leaked or misused. Nineteen states, home to almost 140 million Americans, have passed or enacted laws requiring online age checks since the beginning of last year, including Virginia, Texas and Florida. For the companies, that’s created a gold mine. But ... Alex Stamos, the former security chief of Facebook, which uses Yoti, said “most age verification systems range from ‘somewhat privacy violating’ to ‘authoritarian nightmare.'” Some also fear that lawmakers could use the tools to bar teens from content they dislike, including First Amendment-protected speech.
Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams—conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody “looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
My insurance broker left a frantic voicemail telling me that my homeowner's insurance had lapsed. When I finally reached my insurance broker, he told me the reason Travelers revoked my policy: AI-powered drone surveillance. My finances were imperiled, it seemed, by a bad piece of code. As my broker revealed, the ominous threat that canceled my insurance was nothing more than moss. Travelers not only uses aerial photography and AI to monitor its customers' roofs, but also wrote patents on the technology — nearly 50 patents actually. And it may not be the only insurer spying from the skies. No one can use AI to know the future; you're training the technology to make guesses based on changes in roof color and grainy aerial images. But even the best AI models will get a lot of predictions wrong, especially at scale and particularly where you're trying to make guesses about the future of radically different roof designs across countless buildings in various environments. For the insurance companies designing the algorithms, that means a lot of questions about when to put a thumb on the scale in favor of, or against, the homeowner. And insurance companies will have huge incentives to choose against the homeowner every time. When Travelers flew a drone over my house, I never knew. When it decided I was too much of a risk, I had no way of knowing why or how. As more and more companies use more and more opaque forms of AI to decide the course of our lives, we're all at risk.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
The 43,000 tons of radioactive waste and soil came from a top-secret initiative: The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bombs America dropped on Japan in 1945. In 1973, that waste ended up in an unlined landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb. Workers spread it to cover trash and construction debris. In 1990, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the West Lake Landfill one of the nation’s most contaminated sites requiring cleanup. [In 2012], residents mobilized, spotlighting stories of children dying from cancer. And they pressed waste-management giant Republic Services, the dump’s owner, to remove the radioactive waste. In refuting neighbors’ complaints, Republic tapped an unlikely ally that U.S. corporations have leaned on for decades: a federal health agency set up to protect people from environmental hazards just like the West Lake dump. A 2015 report by that small bureaucracy, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) ... declared that the landfill posed no health risk to the community. Deborah Mitchell grew up ... less than a mile from the dump. She lost both parents to cancer and battled the disease herself. Dozens of neighbors have similar stories. Three cancer researchers told Reuters the number of cases in the neighborhood is worrisome. “You just feel like you’re being gaslighted by your own government,” Mitchell said of the ATSDR’s role.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.
Liquid capital, growing market dominance, slick ads, and fawning media made it easy for giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to expand their footprint and grow their bottom lines. Yet ... these companies got lazy, entitled, and demanding. They started to care less about the foundations of their business — like having happy customers and stable products — and more about making themselves feel better by reinforcing their monopolies. Big Tech has decided the way to keep customers isn't to compete or provide them with a better service but instead make it hard to leave, trick customers into buying things, or eradicate competition so that it can make things as profitable as possible, even if the experience is worse. After two decades of consistent internal innovation, Big Tech got addicted to acquisitions in the 2010s: Apple bought Siri; Meta bought WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus; Amazon bought Twitch; Google bought Nest and Motorola's entire mobility division. Over time, the acquisitions made it impossible for these companies to focus on delivering the features we needed. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are simply no longer forces for innovation. Generative AI is the biggest, dumbest attempt that tech has ever made to escape the fallout of building companies by acquiring other companies, taking their eyes off actually inventing things, and ignoring the most important part of their world: the customer.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
The bedrock of Google’s empire sustained a major blow on Monday after a judge found its search and ad businesses violated antitrust law. The ruling, made by the District of Columbia's Judge Amit Mehta, sided with the US Justice Department and a group of states in a set of cases alleging the tech giant abused its dominance in online search. "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Mehta wrote in his ruling. The findings, if upheld, could outlaw contracts that for years all but assured Google's dominance. Judge Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law in the markets for "general search" and "general search text" ads, which are the ads that appear at the top of the search results page. Apple, Amazon, and Meta are defending themselves against a series of other federal- and state-led antitrust suits, some of which make similar claims. Google’s disputed behavior revolved around contracts it entered into with manufacturers of computer devices and mobile devices, as well as with browser services, browser developers, and wireless carriers. These contracts, the government claimed, violated antitrust laws because they made Google the mandatory default search provider. Companies that entered into those exclusive contracts have included Apple, LG, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Mozilla. Those deals are why smartphones ... come preloaded with Google's various apps.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
In 2017, hundreds of artificial intelligence experts signed the Asilomar AI Principles for how to govern artificial intelligence. I was one of them. So was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The signatories committed to avoiding an arms race on the grounds that “teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards.” The stated goal of OpenAI is to create artificial general intelligence, a system that is as good as expert humans at most tasks. It could have significant benefits. It could also threaten millions of lives and livelihoods if not developed in a provably safe way. It could be used to commit bioterrorism, run massive cyberattacks or escalate nuclear conflict. Given these dangers, a global arms race to unleash artificial general intelligence AGI serves no one’s interests. The true power of AI lies ... in its potential to bridge divides. AI might help us identify fundamental patterns in global conflicts and human behavior, leading to more profound solutions. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data could help identify patterns in global conflicts by suggesting novel approaches to resolution that human negotiators might overlook. Advanced natural language processing could break down communication barriers, allowing for more nuanced dialogue between nations and cultures. Predictive AI models could identify early signs of potential conflicts, allowing for preemptive diplomatic interventions.
Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI from reliable major media sources.
The average American today spends nearly 90 percent of their time indoors. Yet research indicates that children benefit greatly from time spent in nature; that not only does it improve their cognition, mood, self-esteem and social skills, but it can also make them physically healthier and less anxious. “Outdoor time for children is beneficial not just for physical health but also mental health for a multitude of reasons,” says Janine Domingues, a senior psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute. “It fosters curiosity and independence. It helps kids get creative about what they can do … and then just moving around and expending energy has a lot of physical health benefits.” [A] 2022 systematic review found that time outdoors can improve prosocial behaviors, including sharing, cooperating and comforting others. Research has found that nature can be particularly helpful for those who’ve had adverse childhood experiences. Such experiences can include growing up with poverty, abuse or violence. One 2023 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology looked at how making art in nature affected about 100 children in a low-income neighborhood in England. Their confidence, self-esteem and agency all improved. For all these reasons, it’s important for even very young children to have access to nature where they already are, says Nilda Cosco, a research professor.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about reimagining education.
More than half of Americans believe the First Amendment can go too far in the rights it guarantees, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment–focused nonprofit. The survey, released on Thursday, asked 1,000 American adults a range of questions about the First Amendment, free speech, and the security of those rights. Fifty-three percent of respondents agreed with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" to at least some degree, with 28 percent reporting that it "mostly" or "completely" describes their thoughts. Americans were further divided along partisan lines. Over 60 percent of Democrats thought the First Amendment could go too far, compared to 52 percent of Republicans. "Evidently, one out of every two Americans wishes they had fewer civil liberties," Sean Stevens, FIRE's chief research adviser, said. "Many of them reject the right to assemble, to have a free press, and to petition the government. This is a dictator's fantasy." Further, 1 in 5 respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" worried about losing their job if someone complains about something they said. Eighty-three percent reported self-censoring in the past month, with 23 percent doing so "fairly" or "very" often. Just 22 percent of respondents said they believed the right to free speech was "very" or "completely" secure.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
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