One of the factors that led Greg Pirio to buy his house in Loudoun County, in northern Virginia, 14 years ago, was the nature surrounding it. A historian specializing in Africa, he loved to take long walks with his dog and listen to the birds. Three years ago, a large data center was installed just a hundred meters from his door. Since it began operating a year and a half ago, the birdsong has been replaced by a constant buzzing together with fumes that cause headaches, conjunctivitis and respiratory problems.

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In Santa Teresa, a town in the remote New Mexico desert, a group of residents rises up during a town council meeting, holding signs painted with marker pens: “We don’t want data centers! Water is for humans, not data centers!” In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a similar scene unfolds: a group of local residents interrupts deliberations in the state legislature carrying banners that read: “We don’t want to be a data center city.” In Memphis, the city where Elvis Presley was born, a recent meeting of the county board of supervisors to consider a possible slowdown in the construction of new data centers ended in a fistfight between supporters of the tech facilities and their opponents.

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U.S. President Donald Trump was halfway through his speech at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, this Saturday, surrounded by his usual supporters: mostly white, dressed in red, wearing MAGA hats, and displaying messages of support for the Republican. “It’s amazing. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me,” he boasted. On cue, the crowd, amid laughter, applauded.

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There is less than a month left until the midterm elections on November 3. The outcome will determine which party controls both houses of Congress and begin shaping the post-Donald Trump era.

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The Pentagon plans to broadcast a firing-squad execution live, a practice that might seem more characteristic of terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State than of governments that are signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to a senior Defense Department official, the institution plans to stream online the execution of former military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan on December 3; Hasan killed 13 people in a 2009 shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas.

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Asked by reporters about Brazil’s upcoming presidential election, to be held on Sunday amid heightened tension between Washington and the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is following it “very closely.”

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Artificial intelligence will be one of the central subjects at the White House summit on Thursday between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the leaders of the two most powerful countries in the world and the ones that have made the most progress with that technology. Both governments view advances in these models as crucial to their economic and military competitiveness. The differences are not only geopolitical, but also in their nations’ mindsets. Their populations hold very different perceptions about the risks and benefits of AI: while a majority in the United States regard them with concern, in China they are embraced with enthusiasm.

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