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2026-09-18 05:42:43

Last month, Cory Mills’ career in Congress imploded when the Florida Republican lost his primary by 13 points. Now part of a weapons facility operated by a company that Mills co-owns has exploded.

The incident occurred on Wednesday evening at a Pacem Defense facility in northern Florida and caused no injuries, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Mills, who entered Congress in 2023, has said that he stepped away from running his arms companies years ago, but he still owns a majority stake in Pacem Defense, according to his most recent congressional financial disclosure.  

The explosion at Pacem Defense, which specialized in making and selling high explosive grenades to foreign militaries, was apparently massive. The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in its statement that one building at the Pacem facility sustained “significant damage” in the explosion, adding on Facebook that “[m]any residents heard and felt” it. One person who lives about three miles away from the facility wrote on the site that her brick home started shaking. 

The sheriff’s office said that neither of the workers who were at Pacem Defense at the time of the explosion was harmed. It added that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Department of Defense, and the Florida state Fire Marshal’s office are now involved in the investigation. 

The blowup is only the latest challenge for Mills. Since 2025, the scandal-plagued Florida man has been accused of stealing valor, placed under a restraining order by a judge after subjecting an ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking, and was nearly arrested after being accused of domestic assault by a different girlfriend. (That partner later retracted the allegation, and no charges were filed.) As I reported in a February profile of Mills, the full list is much longer. 

Nevertheless, Mills managed to secure Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” earlier this year. Despite that support, Mills was easily defeated in his August primary by Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor.

In late 2025, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its employees after racking up tens of millions of dollars in debt, according to court records. It has remained largely shuttered since then, a former employee told me on Thursday. (In March, Craig Pittman called the Pacem facility a “ticking time bomb.”)

According to a Florida court filing, Pacem ended up owing a Canadian lender more than $66 million. In another case, Pacem is subject to an order under which it is obligated to pay $8 million to an arms company that bought grenades from Pacem but never received them.  A status update submitted in federal court on Wednesday states that Pacem has still not “paid any portion of the judgment amount.”

Mills’ financial disclosure states that he also maintains a 100 percent interest in Pacem Estate Holdings, the real estate entity that owns the site where the explosion on Wednesday occurred. According to court records, Pacem Estate Holdings continued to receive $12,000 per month in rent from another Pacem entity while the company’s employees were out of work.

Last Thursday, after remaining mostly silent on social media in the wake of his primary defeat, Mills struck a defiant tone on X—posing in front of a wall of fire and water in a tight polo with a Swiss watch that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. 

“A Phoenix rises from the ashes,” Mills declared. Six days later, the ashes appear to have become real.

2026-09-18 03:25:51

More than 60 percent of Americans believe it’s at least moderately likely that artificial intelligence will kill us all, according to a Politico survey released Wednesday.

It’s easy to see why. Arguments that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” have dominated the news this week. But despite our fear that AI might kill us en masse, another new poll shows that very few Americans know our government is already using AI to do just that abroad. 

The US-Israel war on Iran is not only the least popular war the United States has ever waged, but also represents an unprecedented application of AI in warfare. New data from the Institute for Global Affairs and YouGov shows that the present weaponization of AI has flown under the radar, with most Americans largely unaware of our own military’s AI use. 

Only 8 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about the military’s use of AI in the war with Iran. The majority, almost two thirds, have heard “only a little,” and four in ten have heard “nothing at all.”  

“We wanted to get a gut check on, do Americans know this is happening?” survey co-author Jonathan Guyer said in an interview. Despite a long history of US military development eventually boomeranging back home, the answer to that question might be “no”—notwithstanding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s relentless messaging about the “AI-first Department of War.” 

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers,” Guyer said. 

Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, wrote in June that xAI’s Grok “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.” 

That admission, part of the administration’s case for the national security importance of Elon Musk’s data centers, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System, built by Palantir, also uses Anthropic’s Claude AI—the same program that people use to create AI boyfriends for themselves or draft awkward texts to their roommates—to “semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way,” according to Katie Livingstone of Military Times. 

Claude’s target selection is reportedly only about 60 percent accurate in good conditions, 30 percent accurate in bad weather. So Pentagon officials claim there’s always a human in the loop when selecting who to bomb.

“We follow the law and humans make decisions,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. “AI is not making lethal decisions.”

But it’s making lethal recommendations, which don’t appear to receive enough human oversight to prevent atrocities. In February, the US military fired Tomahawk missiles directly at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran and killed over 150 people—most of them young children. Seven months later, UN experts called the strike a crime against humanity. 

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, much of the US news coverage focused on whether Claude was used to select the school as a target. But the fact that a human was at some point involved does not lessen the harm done.

At a congressional human rights hearing September 16, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Steven Feldstein explained how AI has facilitated a massive ramp-up in the speed of missile target selection. 

“In the Iran war, during the first week of hostilities alone, the Pentagon reported it had struck more than 3,000 targets,” Feldstein said. By the time a ceasefire was announced 38 days later, that number of targets had risen to 13,000. 

“In Israel, AI targeting systems have played a crucial role in supporting its military campaign against Gaza,” Feldstein added. One system, known as Lavender, identified 37,000 individuals as potential airstrike targets in the initial weeks of the war. As AI companies make their way onto the battlefield, Feldstein said, “the scale of atrocities committed by warring parties is rising correspondingly.” 

In January of this year, Pete Hegseth released a memo directing the United States to embed AI in every part of the “kill chain.” As it moves to comply, the Department of Defense is placing relatively few checks on what technology companies can or cannot do when the United States is waging war. “We’re in a situation where the companies are essentially regulating themselves,” Guyer, of the Institute for Global Affairs, said. 

Ethical principles for AI use that the Department of Defense adopted in 2020 require only that military AI be “governable” by humans. And the additional safeguards AI policy groups tend to propose revolve around stopping fully automated technology—not regulating the semi-autonomous technology that is already being used to kill at scale. 

As American policymakers debate potential future AI threats, it seems as though the immediate threat of AI—the ongoing expansion of those “kill chains”—is not even making it into the AI safety discussion. Nor are the victims of AI-assisted warmaking.

That means tech companies are still the ones making the rules: “Their terms of service are defining how AI systems are being used for war to a greater extent than any laws that have been written, or to a greater extent than even executive branch guidelines,” Guyer said. 

2026-09-18 03:09:23

“It’s a milestone deal in making the Western Hemisphere the center of the global energy system,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday.

He was talking about a fellow Trump ally’s oil deal with Venezuela: oil tycoon Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a US petroleum and natural gas production company, who announced a preliminary deal with PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, that same day. The agreement, which allows Continental Resources to develop and operate 126,000 acres of oil fields—an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil—was presented by Hamm, with Wright beside him, at this week’s G20 energy summit in Houston.

Hamm is in Trump’s inner circle and has advised the president on energy issues to benefit his business ventures, including fracking, and personally contributed $4.3 million to Trump-aligned PACs for his 2024 election campaign. 

The deal comes after Chevron became the first known major US oil company earlier this month to expand production in Venezuela since the Trump administration seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, investing $7 billion over five years to more than double its production to 600,000 barrels a day. 

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that ExxonMobil is close to signing its own deal with Venezuela, which could be completed as early as the end of this month and include more than 50 billion barrels in oil reserves (Venezuela says it has about 300 billion barrels in total reserves). The potential Exxon deal is notable as the company has repeatedly tried to win more money in restitution after former Venezuela President Hugo Chávez nationalized major foreign oil operations in 2007, forcing Exxon to abandon its Venezuela projects. 

While some oil executives remain hesitant to invest in Venezuelan oil due to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s August deal with the country, the challenges of scaling up production, and the chaotic relationship between the US and Venezuela, it’s become more clear that it has opened the door for his friends and other wealthy companies to invest in the country’s massive oil reserves.

Since the Trump administration captured Maduro, acting President Delcy Rodríguez has overhauled regulations on oil to encourage outside investment, including lowering tax rates on production. Continental Resources cited these changes as a major reason to pursue its oil deal.

As Jeff Colgan, a political science professor at Brown University, told me earlier this month, the winners of Trump’s oil agreement won’t lower gas prices for American consumers or help everyday Venezuela residents—it will just “line the pockets of some American companies.”

2026-09-17 21:21:01

When Jon Rosenthal announced his campaign last fall for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, he never expected to talk about the short-lived Republic of Rhodesia.

Rosenthal, a 63-year-old mechanical engineer and Democratic state representative from northwest Houston, is the kind of politician you might expect to show interest in the influential but little-understood three-member board that, despite its antiquated name, regulates the oil and gas industry. He is an earnest, bald father of two—the kind of guy who uses phrases like “subsea production” and “deep-water intervention systems” in casual conversation. The Republican chair, he believed, was too cozy with the industry, and Rosenthal prepared a pragmatic slate of ideas to weatherize natural gas networks and clean up abandoned wells. It was shaping up as an important but low-profile race. 

But Rosenthal is not facing that incumbent. In a bitter May runoff, Republicans instead nominated Bo French, an investor and former county GOP chair with only the vaguest glimmer of industry experience and a mostly irrelevant and racist political program that calls for deporting 100 million people, purging the nation of Muslims, and emulating a defunct apartheid state. Now Rosenthal is the only man standing between one of the most notorious bigots in North Texas and one of the country’s most powerful regulatory positions. 

Polls suggest he has a shot. While this year’s US Senate race between state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton may represent Texas Democrats’ best chance to win a statewide race in more than 30 years, French’s lead over Rosenthal is just outside the margin of error.

That French could be vulnerable in a race Republicans have long taken for granted speaks to both his party’s weak standing and his own. But the fact that he’s made it this far tells a troubling story. The state’s Republican leaders have mostly not renounced French. Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed him. Paxton has campaigned with him. The defeated incumbent—who once slammed French for his “ignorant bigotry” and “hateful attacks on the Jewish people”—has offered his congratulations. Because while French might say some things that others in his party won’t, or use language and imagery that many of them might avoid, the forces that increasingly power their movement are ones he embodies—Christian nationalism, internet-addled white supremacy, and a slow-building and then frighteningly sudden frenzy of state-sponsored Islamophobia. For a long time, much of the Texas GOP seemed to exist to serve oil and gas. Now the industry is a means to a culture-war end.

Rosenthal views the job as a culmination of his life’s work. Before launching an Indivisible chapter and flipping a Republican state House seat in 2018, he spent 25 years in and around the oil and gas industry, making service calls to Gulf platforms and West Texas rigs. He told me he was motivated to run after the state government’s muted response to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, in which hundreds of Texans died after a catastrophic power grid failure.

In addition to production and pipelines, the office also deals with the industry’s environmental footprint. When we spoke in August, Rosenthal had recently returned from a trip to the “Dead Sea of Texas” in the Permian Basin, where an uncapped well had swallowed a county road and created a turquoise-colored lake. In the nearby town of Grandfalls, a derelict oil well burst last April, spewing 1.5 million gallons of toxic water in a church parking lot. The RRC was responsible for mitigating such risks, he said, but ill-equipped to do the job.

“I present myself as serious-minded and keen on the issues and working with industry to protect our communities and strengthen our infrastructure and our economy,” he said, ““and [French] is, forgive the expression, tilting at Islamic windmills.”

He has done considerably more than tilt. A 56-year-old political activist who once ran a military and law enforcement training company with “American Sniper” Chris Kyle (French denied Kyle’s widow’s claim that he stole the firm, and the parties eventually settled), French gained notoriety chairing the party in Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and putting it at the forefront of Texas conservatives’ proudly Islamophobic shift. In 2025, around the same time the Tarrant GOP demanded Texas leaders acknowledge new Islamic centers as an “invasion” and “dangerous threat,”French polled his X followers: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The two choices: “Muslims” and “Jews.”

The backlash, and French’s subsequent attempt to clarify that antisemitism “has no place” in the party, was revealing. The problem had not been that he demonized religious minorities, but that he was insufficiently clear which minority he was targeting. French’s Islamophobia is generally more direct: Last year, he said President Donald Trump should “denaturalize and deport” a Muslim state representative, then expanded it to say the president should “round up every Muslim in America, denaturalize them, and deport them.” To the extent that his candidacy is focused on the Texas Railroad Commission at all, it is because French believes the oil industry, too, must be purged of “the influence of radical Islam.” French, who did not respond to a request for comment, referred to Jim Wright, the Republican commissioner he defeated, as “Jihadi Jim” and alleged that Wright’s ties to a Saudi-owned company’s petrochemical facility had allowed “Islamic values and laws” to infiltrate the commission. 

French’s assertion that the state’s fossil fuel industry is being overrun by Muslims is part of his broader and quite explicit call for ethnic cleansing, analogizing patriotic “heritage” Americans’ current situation to that of white settlers in Rhodesia. As tends to be the case, what starts with one villainized group extends to others: French has written that Trump should “denaturalize and deport all the third world savages who hate our country”—including some Native Americans. “Time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” he wrote in July. (French has said the actual racists are Democrats who push DEI, not people like him.)

When he heard rumors French was running, Rosenthal assumed it was a prank. And while Rosenthal is well aware of his opponent’s oeuvre, when I asked about French’s assertion that “We need to be Rhodesia,” Rosenthal did a double take.

“We need to what?” he asked. “‘Be Rhodesia?’ I don’t even—that’s…I…I haven’t heard that.” 

“So Rhodesia is now, oh gosh…Zimbabwe?” he sighed, working it out. “He’s talking about apartheid and white minority rule—that’s just wild.”

French has begun to direct his venom Rosenthal’s way. Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen, the foremost chronicler of French’s rise and the Texas far-right, recently reported on a fundraising email from the campaign that accused Rosenthal, who is Jewish, of “mocking Christianity” and compared him to the Bolsheviks who killed Russia’s ruling Romanov family—a trope with a deep antisemitic history.

Rosenthal’s challenge is that he has to persuade a significant percentage of Texans to change their voting tendencies in a race they may have paid no attention to, and for an office, he acknowledges, they may never have even heard of. While Democrats came within a few points of knocking off both Paxton and Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, no candidate for railroad commissioner has cracked 45 percent since Bill Clinton’s first term.

“The hope for me actually in this whole election is that there’s a significant coalition among the rank-and-file—especially for Republicans, or people that consider themselves independent or unaffiliated, right-of-center—who don’t agree with this,” he said. “It’s not just partisan politics. It’s grossly embracing horrendous moral and ethical positions.”

French’s views leave the narrowest of openings. After all, more than 600,000 Republicans have already voted against him twice this year. No Republican running statewide this fall received fewer votes in the runoff. And while French’s primary campaign was backed by the West Texas billionaires who reliably bankroll the state’s far right—oilmen whose fervent right-wing Christianity is matched by their passion for deregulation—major Republican donors from Miriam Adelson to ExxonMobil opposed him. Rosenthal is, in addition to banking on a big Democratic turnout for Talarico and gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa, making the case to energy-industry workers, along with farmers and ranchers who work downstream. He pitches himself as a “serious professional,” who can work productively with the two other Republicans serving on the commission.

French, for his part, seems determined to make new audiences aware of his candidacy. On Saturday, he shared an image of a group of University of Texas students of South Asian descent, celebrating the Longhorns’ victory over the number-one-ranked team in college football. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The post prompted denunciations from a number of high-profile conservatives, including Republican Sen. John Cornyn and the current speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Longtime Republican operative Karl Rove announced in response that for the first time in three decades, he was going to vote for a Democrat for statewide office—Rosenthal.

More troubling, though, is the very real possibility that most Republican voters won’t think twice. French’s positions are extreme, but French himself is no longer fringe: His comments about deporting 100 million people who “shouldn’t be here” came at CPAC, one of the conservative movement’s premier confabs. Paxton stumped with French at his runoff launch party a few weeks after that. As the southern border has receded in salience during Trump’s second term, the state’s Republican leaders have filled the void with attacks on Islam. Paxton has attempted to ban the Council on American-Islamic Relations from operating in Texas. Abbott has designated the civil rights group a terrorist organization, while attempting to block a Muslim housing development near Dallas on the grounds it would spread Shariah. At June’s state convention, the Texas GOP chair told two Muslim delegates to leave the party. 

Replacing an industry-friendly Republican with a wealthy activist who treats The Camp of the Saints like it’s a beach read is in many ways the defining story of the era. It’s how the party of George W. Bush became the party of Trump. People become Republicans now because they think like French thinks, and they get ahead by saying the kinds of things French says.

Rosenthal is hoping enough voters will make a choice they have not made many times before. Beyond reminding them of French’s naked bigotry, his campaign is promoting a clip of Abbott telling an audience before the runoff that French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas” and would “wreck the miracle” of fossil fuel production in the state. It’s a good clean hit, a story that, with enough saturation, could help Rosenthal pull off a historic upset. But at the same rally, Abbott offered another even starker warning. If Rosenthal wins, he said, “it would destroy Texas, it would destroy America, it would destroy the world.” 

Republicans might not want to be Rhodesians. They live in mortal fear of becoming Democrats.

2026-09-17 19:30:00

In July, Meta published a press release saying that it would issue $2 million worth of grants to 30 organizations that would test ways its AI glasses could “help people work safer, learn faster, and live more independently.” The grantees include organizations that would develop workshops to help Blind people utilize the devices and assist people with intellectual disabilities prepare to enter the workforce.

“We want to ensure the future is for everyone—giving every person the tools to reach their full potential,” Meta wrote in the release. Meta also maintains a program to distribute its AI glasses to Blind veterans in the United States, which it has highlighted in recent advertising. The company, a viewer may conclude, is doing actual good. The full story is more complicated.

Meta first released its smart glasses, which include multiple cameras and speakers, in 2021; its latest version, launched in June, includes a raft of AI capabilities, which have drawn considerably more attention—and alarm.

As my colleague Anna Merlan recently wrote,

The company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all. 

New technology can be immensely helpful for disabled people navigating the world. Smart glasses, which are not exclusive to Meta, can have legitimate benefits for Blind people and others with low vision: hearing a dictated description of what’s in front of them, or having texts read aloud. For users with hearing loss, Meta glasses can be helpful with captioning. People with limited or no mobility in their arms can use the glasses to take photos of loved ones.

In a 2025 review of Meta glasses for the American Foundation for the Blind, vision rehabilitation therapist Steve Kelley weighed the pros and cons of the devices, writing that Meta glasses were affordable but “not instantaneous or accurate enough for something like street crossings” and cannot “replace tools like a white cane for orientation and mobility.”

Noah Currier, president and founder of the Oscar Mike Foundation, said that his team has been working with Meta in the development phase of newer versions of Meta glasses for about three years. “They brought veterans with disabilities, including people with spinal cord injuries, memory loss, and low vision, into the room early to shape how the hardware and features actually work,” Currier said.

Currier, who is quadriplegic, told me that his organization got in touch with Meta when the tech giant did outreach to disability organizations.

“I have really thought it was responsible,” Currier told me. I asked Currier about privacy concerns around Meta glasses; he told me he was not “real invested in knowing what any sort of policy or answer should be moving forward,” but feels the positives outweigh the negatives.

But disabled people, like anyone else, may not want to be filmed by strangers in their day-to-day lives—and are uniquely affected by surveillance in ways that predate smart glasses. Insurance companies have surveilled disability claimants through the use of private investigators. Disabled people seeking accommodations at work face stifling scrutiny; the rise of “bossware,” surveillance technology used to monitor employees, has an outsized impact on disabled people.

Experts I spoke with raised similar concerns that the spread of ubiquitous surveillance harms disabled people overall. Some advocate bans on smart glasses in medical settings, arguing that they may inadvertently capture HIPAA-protected personal health information or simply “change behavior, increase anxiety, and undermine trust.”

Posters on social media have reported pharmacy workers wearing smart glasses, nursing professionals wearing them on the job, or themselves using smart glasses to subtly photograph private health documents left visible at a doctor’s office. One law firm has documented an array of concerns around smart wearables in nursing homes, particularly that people with cognitive disabilities “may not fully understand that footage could be uploaded or shared, that the glasses contain a camera and microphones, when recording has started, what will happen to the recording [or] who might eventually see it.”

Meta has faced other criticism around its record on disability and health generally. In 2023, the mental health app BetterHelp faced federal fines for sharing protected health data with platforms including Meta. In 2025, a California jury held Meta liable for violating California privacy laws by improperly collecting reproductive health data from users of FloHealth, a period tracking app. And an ongoing class-action lawsuit alleges that Meta’s Pixel tracking software “allowed Facebook to receive data about users’ medical conditions, doctors searched, and appointments booked, all without patients’ knowledge or HIPAA-compliant authorization.”

And in July, the company was sued under allegations that it used artificial intelligence to target people who took medical leave. One former employee with a serious health condition alleged in the lawsuit that he was told by his management that taking leave “would result in his selection for the anticipated reduction in force”; in a statement to my colleague Alex Nguyen, a spokesperson said that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.” Right before the start of the second Trump administration, Meta killed its major DEI programs, another blow to disabled employees.

It’s not the first time that Meta, which has faced waves of criticism around privacy, surveillance, data mining, and its handling of user information, has met pushback in trying to provide what the company sees as a vital service. More than a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg personally headed up a push to provide a form of free internet access to millions of people in India, only to be rebuffed by regulators.

From Meta’s point of view, the potential benefits of the glasses should again put skeptics on the back foot. Why question its motivations for partnering with disability groups? Surely Meta is already subjected to enough critique around the placement of its data centers, alleged efforts to secure preferential treatment from government officials, high-dollar lobbying against regulation, and the effects of its products on young people, scrutiny that led to a landmark settlement in August, with Meta paying some $18 billion to resolve claims that it knew its products were addictive, underregulated, and harmful to youth.

In a statement to Mother Jones, Meta spokesperson Dana Still said that the company “builds for everyone and has a long history of working with partners like the Blinded Veterans Association, Lighthouse Guild, and Oscar Mike. As part of this work, we gather feedback and create capabilities and programs to build products and technology that better serve people.” The firm did not respond to privacy concerns directly in its statement. A spokesperson for Meta previously told CBS News Texas in May that “privacy and data protection are core to every product we build at Meta,” including its glasses.

“Certain companies have used accessibility and disability rights as a Trojan horse for a tool that poses significant privacy and security threats,” Center for Democracy and Technology disability lead Ariana Aboulafia told me, “and to be clear, the privacy concerns affect disabled people too.” 

While critical of Meta’s corporate record, My Tech for All founder Mark Friedman understands why disability organizations would work with the company—in part because of its resources. Many disability groups, Friedman points out, are “cash-strapped.” 

“This stuff is going to benefit people greatly, and it’s going to harm people” as an inevitable product of widespread opportunities for instantaneous filming of the general public—including disabled people—in day-to-day life. “I don’t think [the disability organizations] are being bought out. To the extent that they become knowledgeable, they’ll be able to raise the flag to say, ‘Wait a second,’” around privacy.

Virginia Tech science, technology, and society professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, expressed serious concerns about the tension between Meta’s profit motive and its ostensibly public-interest partnerships. Disabled people, she argued, can be viewed as a particularly promising market for a product that urgently needs one—and one that reflects well on the firms who sell to them. Shew thinks the benefits to firms like Meta are relatively clear—including the obvious benefits, beyond raw sales, of buyers who rely on a product rather than approaching it as a fun gadget.

Rebecca Monteleone, a University of Toledo disability studies professor and author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority, raised a related concern: that Meta could be using its efforts with disabled people to build a case for its technology more widely. This could render products like smart glasses a more challenging case for regulators and politicians.

“We’re seeing the systematic deconstruction of disability rights in the United States,” Monteleone said. “A company like Meta can justify the development of this technology based on all of these assumptions that there must be a social good here” in a moment when wins for disabled people are depressingly rare.

That speaks to a wider problem, Monteleone told me:

“Disabled people have to operate within this commercial system,” she said. “So often, the better product or the more useful product is a product that either is ridiculously expensive and unable to be obtained, or you have to go through a million different hoops through your insurance.”

Shew is also concerned that for-profit firms, and in particular giants like Meta—among the largest companies in the world—will crowd out opportunities for disability organizations and other advocates to find alternatives that are easier to trust. Backlash to smart glasses has reportedly already made some users hesitant to wear them in public.

“I worry that it will prevent better technology,” Shew told me, whether on the part of “companies that could do so more responsibly, or by disabled people themselves who make and hack and trade for themselves.” 

Issues regarding Meta AI glasses speak to larger issues on privacy and data collection that Friedman, who remains skeptical, doesn’t believe will be addressed under the Trump administration—despite cross-the-political-aisle backlash to a wide range of AI and data center development. 

“The real issue,” Friedman said, “is the public can accept” their privacy being undermined—whether or not the glasses are ultimately worth that tradeoff.

2026-09-17 19:30:00

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse,” delivering pollutants, pesticides, and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.

The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.

In many cases, this contamination reflected current farming practices as well as historical land use, demonstrating that plastic pollution can persist for many years.

The researchers also found that microplastics could interact with other agricultural stressors such as pesticides and veterinary drugs.

One study in Switzerland found that fields with the highest levels of tire-wear particles also had the highest levels of other toxic chemicals and metals.

Microplastics can create new microbial habitats on their surfaces. Known as the plastisphere, these surfaces form a hotspot for interactions between plastics, microbes, and agrochemicals, the researchers found.

An increase of antibiotic-resistant genes was found within plastispheres when compared with controls. Pesticides appeared to amplify this effect further.

Edoardo Puglisi, a partner of the project and professor of microbiology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, said the smaller the microplastics were, the more they tended to adsorb pollutants, microbes and DNA, leading to a “Trojan horse effect that can potentially increase the diffusion of pathogens and antibiotic-resistance genes.”

This Trojan horse effect can have an impact on earthworms and soil organisms by disrupting critical processes such as nutrient cycles, one study found.

Earthworms play a vital role in shaping the composition of the soil microbiome as well as the ecological functions of soils.

The EU-funded Minagris research project, in collaboration with the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, also found microplastics could affect plant growth and function. One study found that higher concentrations of microplastics reduced leaf area, chlorophyll content, photosynthetic efficiency, and plant biomass in lettuce.

When drought conditions were added, these effects became even more pronounced, with plants performing less well than under either stress alone.

Environmental assessments often consider pollutants individually, but the findings show pollutants can behave differently when they occur together. The researchers say policy needs to recognise that plastic contamination is part of a wider picture of soil degradation and pollution.

In an effort to reduce plastic pollution, there has been an increase in the use of biodegradable plastics. However, the project found biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics, potentially causing ecological damage.

“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove, acting as vectors for agrochemicals and altering critical soil ecosystems,” said Esperanza Huerta Lwanga, a research associate in soil physics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

“To protect long-term food production and soil health, policy must catch up. We urgently need standardised plastic monitoring, full manufacturer transparency, and risk assessments that evaluate through different species how microplastics interact with co-pollutants.”