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The rising cost of gas and higher utility rates are hurting farmers, ride-sharing workers and consumers from coast to coast. By Marcus Baram for Capital & Main Between the rising cost of gas, higher home heating bills and a rent hike that’s forcing her to change apartments, it’s been a tough month for Liza Ramsey. The mother of three drives for Uber and Lyft in the Atlanta area and…

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Think Discord chats, but with AI characters in addition to humans. 

Misha Collins made his arrival in The Boys season five in delightfully chaotic and gross style. He was one third of a Supernatural actor reunion, joining the show’s mainstay Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy) and Jared Padalecki (Mr. Marathon) for one wild scene at a mansion. In it, we discover that Misha Collins’ character Malchemical uses his powers in an attempt to dethrone Homelander because, well, he sucks and is ruining America. We caught up with Misha Collins to talk about this big reunion, his filming experience, and why he was so stoked to join The Boys in its final season. 

Nerdist: Fans have been waiting to see you reunite with your Supernatural co-stars Jensen and Jared for a while, and we finally got that in episode five! What was it like to reunite with them onscreen and collaborate once again?

Collins: It was very familiar in a lot of ways. We had Jared, Jensen, and I, and most of the scenes that I had, we were all there together. And Eric Kripke was on set and is the showrunner and creator of The Boys and Supernatural. And we had Phil Sgriccia there, who was our producer and director on Supernatural, and he’s a producer and director on The Boys. So there was a lot of familiarity to it and a lot of comfort, I think, in that. And yet it was a wildly different show with wildly different characters. And stepping into that also felt a little uncomfortable. So I think it was a funny dynamic of shaking off the familiar in order to do something new and was a lot of fun.

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Indeed. And speaking of doing something kind of wildly different, your character Malchemical is a super with a weird power who has some great interactions with Homelander. What were your initial thoughts when you read about his powers and how he’d end up using them?

Collins: Well, I was quite gratified to learn that I was powerful enough to knock out Homelander. That felt like a big deal. And then my ego was brought back down to earth by the fact that Jensen so very quickly dispatches me. [laughs]  So I took the good with the bad. It was like, “Oh, I’m powerful. Oh, I guess I’m not that powerful.”

I wasn’t expecting you to get choked like that! Pretty much everyone else got ran through by Mr. Marathon and got to have bloody deaths. Were you a little jealous that you didn’t get that gross and full Boys death experience? 

Collins: I was deprived of the full Boys experience with my death! I’ll be honest with you. Yeah, I was a little disappointed by that.

Yeah, but it was such a great scene all around. What was filming that sequence with so many awesome actors and one-liners? 

Collins: A lot of the portion of that scene, which was with the cast of celebrities, was a lot of improvisation that went into our filming. As is quite customary, we shot what was scripted. We managed to get that portion filmed as scripted. And then I think we probably spent twice as long filming additional footage that was improvised. There was more extensive riffing and improvising than we ever did on Supernatural, and we did it sitting around that table.

It went on for a very long time and it was a lot of fun. And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m sitting around at this table doing improv with Saturday Night Live guys. I’m out of my depth.” But it was actually a lot of fun and I quite enjoyed that. So for me, that was the most memorable aspect.

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I love that! Of course, you know Eric Kripke well and that was surely a factor, but what else made you want to be a part of The Boys, even for a small role? 

Collins: Well, there are two things that made me want to be a part of The Boys. One, my son loves the show and he has said repeatedly, “Dad, why aren’t you on The Boys? It’s Eric Kripke’s show! Why aren’t you on the show?” So that was one. I wanted to not disappoint my child. 

And two, the thing that I love most about The Boys is its satirical commentary on wealth and abuse of power and the notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it’s not very subtle commentary on extreme right-wing political perspectives. I have been increasingly impressed by all of that. Eric Kripke, I think, has been a real champion and advocate of being clear-eyed about the current state of American political affairs. And I think that this show so successfully delving into those waters has been an important voice in the political landscape in America.

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So I was excited about participating in something that is doing that storytelling and excited to lend my support to what Eric has been doing in that department. So those are the two reasons. Well, there’s a third reason. I actually just f**king liked the show. I have been waiting for each new season to come out with bated breath like, “Come on, when’s The Boys going to come out again?” It takes so long these days with these incredibly high production value, incredibly in- depth post-production schedules for new seasons to come out. It’s not like the old days where you expected everything to start airing in the beginning of September every year with only a three-month hiatus or whatever. 

Yeah, now it takes years for some shows to return! 

Collins: Right. It drives me crazy. So those are the three reasons. No, okay, fine! The fourth reason is I just wanted to be reunited with Eric and Phil and Jensen and Jared in filming something. So I guess I probably could come up with more reasons, but those are the first ones that come to mind.

The post Misha Collins on SUPERNATURAL Reunion in THE BOYS and Improv appeared first on Nerdist.

No shortcuts, human-review everything, says internal team - and keep hiring junior developers

Interview  Steve Tarcza, director of Amazon Stores, says his team — StoreGen — exists to help the retail giant's developers move faster and cut friction. But despite the AI mandate, one principle is non-negotiable: nothing ships without a human checking it first.…

The feature is rolling out in the U.S. and India with support for English, Spanish, and Hindi.

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Why Republicans don’t actually give a damn about affordability…

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Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence.

The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10. Shortly after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported and OpenAI later confirmed that the company had “banned” the shooter’s ChatGPT account eight months earlier for discussion of scenarios involving gun violence—but chose not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some members of its safety team.

One lawsuit includes plaintiff Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old survivor who was injured catastrophically by gunshots to her neck and head. It alleges that “ChatGPT deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack—the predictable result of a design choice OpenAI made to let ChatGPT engage with users about violence in the first place.”

The lawsuit argues that Altman and other OpenAI leaders knew their product was dangerous and acted negligently, and that they have tried to cover up the danger as the company barrels toward what is anticipated to be a mammoth initial public offering.

The contents of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s second ChatGPT account remain unknown to the public.

“ChatGPT is not the safe, essential tool the company sells it as, but a product dangerous enough that its makers routinely identify its users as threats to human life,” the lawsuit claims.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that the company has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence” and has “already strengthened our safeguards.” The spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

The new litigation underscores crucial questions that I examined recently with an in-depth investigation into the emerging risk of people using ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to plan violence. As I reported, there have been several publicly known cases since 2025 in which troubled individuals allegedly used ChatGPT to focus on grievances and prepare for attacks. In addition to Tumbler Ridge, those include a suicidal bombing with a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, a stabbing attack by a teenage boy at a school in Finland, and a mass shooting at Florida State University. The defendant in the FSU case received encouragement and tactical advice from ChatGPT just before opening fire, according to chat logs I obtained.

OpenAI says it uses guardrails—built-in limits on what ChatGPT will say or do—to prevent misuse and block harmful content. The company has also said that it improves such safeguards continuously.

Leaders in behavioral threat assessment told me, however, that AI chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a troubled person to move from violent thoughts toward action. They described high-risk threat cases in which the tactical advice and steady encouragement had a powerful effect, fueling users’ delusions and accelerating their violent planning. (The danger in those cases was thwarted with interventions before any violence occurred.)

The Gebala lawsuit claims that OpenAI leaders handled the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account with “full knowledge that ChatGPT had already been used to plan violence.” It argues the company knew of the above attacks, all of which predated the banning of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account in June 2025. OpenAI has acknowledged that it identified an account associated with the FSU shooter shortly after that attack in April 2025 and said it “proactively” shared information with law enforcement. The company now also faces a criminal probe in Florida; it denies wrongdoing.

The suit argues OpenAI’s conduct is a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé.

My investigation in part highlighted key questions about a second ChatGPT account used by the Tumbler Ridge shooter. That account is under analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and its contents and time frame remain unknown to the public. OpenAI declined to answer my questions about the second account, which it said it found only after the attack. The reason for the belated discovery remains unclear. But threat assessment experts told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining plans for violence.

The Gebala lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge case goes beyond even that pattern: It alleges that the banning of the shooter’s first account is further evidence of OpenAI’s negligence, because in reality it was merely a one-off deactivation for misuse that was easy to circumvent—by following OpenAI’s own published guidance. Here, the suit in part cites customer service instructions from an OpenAI article titled, “Why Was My OpenAI Account Deactivated?” According to the suit, that article explains how to re-register “immediately” for a new ChatGPT account by “using an alternative email address. If you don’t have another address available, you can use an email sub-address instead.”

In other words, customer engagement and retention are paramount, the lawsuit says, arguing that OpenAI’s policies are driven by growth and profit motives that are in direct opposition to product safety:  

The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history. Fixing those features would cost OpenAI its market share, its path to an IPO, and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation.

The company’s conduct with ChatGPT is a new twist on a familiar societal danger, according to the lawsuit—a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé:

In the 1970s, Ford kept selling the Pinto after its own engineers warned that the fuel tank design would cause people to burn to death in rear-end collisions. Ford concluded that paying settlements to the families of the dead would cost less than fixing the car. OpenAI has made a version of the same calculation. For Ford, the dangerous design was a flaw in an otherwise ordinary product. But for OpenAI, the dangerous design is the product.

The lawsuit will test interesting and potentially consequential legal terrain; it further alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot de facto “engaged in the practice of psychology without licensure.” It notes that, in July 2025, Altman acknowledged in an appearance on Theo Von’s popular podcast that “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT” and that users—“young people, especially”—use it “as a therapist, a life coach.” 

As I reported in my investigation, a Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.

The Gebala lawsuit also says OpenAI neglected a duty to warn, pointing to the longstanding Tarasoff precedent that is well known in the world of mental health. “By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy,” the suit claims, “OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat.”

The CBC reported on April 22 that the RCMP’s investigation into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting is “in its final stages,” with BC Premier David Eby suggesting that the results will soon be public.

In a letter dated the following day, April 23, Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community, stating, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” He also offered generalized statements that the company has made repeatedly about working with “all levels of government” to improve on safety and prevent harm.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.

Back to a time when source repositories were printouts and commits were hand-written notes

Antiques code show  Microsoft has released the source for another of its relics. This time, it's 86-DOS 1.00 getting the open source treatment, and a whole lot more for retro enthusiasts.…

'Online platforms can rely on our app,' says Commish, 'there are no more excuses'

The European Commission has recommended EU member states adopt an age verification app designed to protect children from harmful online content.…

Contract negotiations in Pajaro Valley Unified School District have intensified as teachers push back against a district proposal to cap health insurance contributions. The district says the cap is needed to address rising health care costs, while teachers argue it could drive staff out of the district.

The post Pajaro Valley Unified officials, teachers face off over district proposal to cap health insurance contributions appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Divine, a Vine reboot backed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, revives six-second looping videos.

Downtown Santa Cruz’s comic hubs are rolling out the red carpet for Saturday’s national Free Comic Book Day, including an appearance by cartoonist Mike Kunkel of “Herobear and the Kid” fame at Atlantis Fantasyworld as it and Comicopolis celebrate the industry’s day in the sun.

The post It’s ‘nerd Christmas’ in May as Free Comic Book Day returns to Santa Cruz appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation. 

The world’s richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk’s private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law. He has argued, instead, that his businesses are inherently philanthropic, since they develop technologies that will “extend the light of consciousness.” The $38 million he donated to OpenAI over the next four years was considerably less than the $100 million he later claimed to have given, or the up to $1 billion he offered behind the scenes. But it was vital capital at a critical stage, giving Sam Altman’s fledgling non-profit the nudge and the means to hire talent and make a name for itself in the artificial intelligence arms race. Over time, the two men’s ambitions diverged and the relationship soured. Musk left the board, stopped sending checks, and launched a competitor, xAI. In 2024, he sued Altman and OpenAI, alleging that they had abandoned their mission and misused his money. 

The case, which goes to trial this week in an Oakland federal court, is a clash over AI’s past and future. Musk accuses Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman of “stealing a charity” by effectively turning OpenAI into “a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.” Musk wants the now-private company behind Chat-GPT to revert back to the open-source non-profit he gave money to. The defendants have denied reneging on any agreement with their early benefactor, and painted Musk instead as a bitter and untrustworthy rival who schemed behind the scenes to benefit his own interests. There are designer drugs and disappearing emails; interludes at Davos and Burning Man; and altogether too much Larry Summers. 

Fundamentally, though, Musk v. Altman is about power—who has it, who should have it, and how it can be used. At a moment when Americans are pushing back against the physical infrastructure of AI and its approval ratings hover somewhere between the Democratic party and ICE, court filings made public ahead of the trial offer a revealing look at how tech oligarchs really see themselves, and the technology they promise will level-up civilization. They want you to trust them. But they don’t even trust each other.

Musk and Altman were first brought together by, of all things, a fear that too much influence was accruing in the hands of one Silicon Valley figure. In 2015, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary were the undisputed leaders in the race for Artificial General Intelligence. As Musk recalled in a 2025 deposition for his lawsuit, he came to fear Google’s hegemony after a conversation with Larry Page while staying at the Google co-founder’s house, sometime in the late Obama era. Musk had wanted to know what would happen to people when we reached AGI. Page had chastised him as a “speciesist” for raising such concerns, and said AI was “our successors.” Musk said in his deposition that based on that conversation, and others he had around that time, he came to fear “a unipolar world where any one person would control AI.” He had one specific person in mind: DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. In a 2015 email thread in which he and Altman tried to hash out a name for their new venture, Musk proposed calling their emerging AI project “Freemind,” as a way of signalling its opposition to “Deepmind’s one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach.” Draft language included in an email shared by Musk said the group’s purpose would be to ensure “the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated.”

The tech elites are worried about one person exerting too much control, but they’re not really interested in delegating power either.

That OpenAI—not “Freemind” or, as Altman suggested, “Axon”; “Intelligence.com”; or something “related to Turing somehow”—was initially pitched as a more altruistic, safety-conscious venture is well established, but it is nonetheless striking to read their behind the scenes conversations about forestalling what they feared would be Hassabis’ AI dictatorship. Brockman emailed a prospective hire that the aim was to avoid “making anyone into a quadrillion-dollar company or omnipotent surveillance state.” (He continued: “I think most people see the costs of AI (a la Terminator) but don’t know what the benefits would be. Maybe this requires something crazy like getting more movies like Her made.”)

While the men behind OpenAI may have all agreed that the technology they hoped to build would be too powerful to end up in the hands of just one person, figuring out exactly how many other people it should be entrusted to proved more difficult. They ran through a variety of numbers and structures. When they first began plotting in earnest in June 2015, Altman had proposed a five-person “governance structure” comprised of himself, Musk, Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’” Altman wrote, “and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide.”

But it was hard to find the right mix of people. Musk didn’t want to work with Gates (“not his biggest fan,” he said in his deposition) and Moskovitz ultimately gave money, but not much time to the project. Mark Zuckerberg’s own AI projects ruled him out. (Still, he makes an appearance: According to court filings, when Zuckerberg texted Musk in early 2025 to say that his team would crackdown on people “doxxing” DOGE members, Musk texted back to ask if he was interested in “bidding on the Open AI IP.”) While Amazon Web Services was an early partner, no one seemed to suggest bringing on Jeff Bezos, whom Musk described in a later email as “a bit of a tool.” They started off small, with four board members, then bumped it to seven. 

By September 2017, with DeepMind still lapping the field, Musk, Altman, Brockman, and star researcher Ilya Sutskever were at loggerheads over how their project could keep growing. They considered a variety of restructuring options—including merging the company with Tesla, or transitioning to a for-profit venture. It’s all a bit in-the-weeds, but the debates they were having internally about how to distribute power amongst themselves are striking. Musk wanted to “unequivocally have initial control” of a rebooted venture, and said he would not be comfortable unless he personally held at least one quarter of the seats on an expanded board. “[T]he rough target would be to get to a 12 person board…where each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals,” Musk wrote in a 2017 email, while conceding it would “probably” have to be “more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world.” During a meeting that year, Musk, according to notes taken by Brockman, raised expanding the board in the same megalomaniacal terms, saying “the challenge is gonna be how do we find, who should decide the fate of the world.”

You can see some flaws emerging here, both philosophically and logistically: On one hand, the tech elites are very worried about just one person exerting too much control; on the other hand, they’re not really interested in delegating power either. A dozen or so people, adhering to Elon Musk’s sense of morality, does not a democracy make.

Indeed, Musk’s partners in the venture expressed misgivings about giving him too much control. In a September 2017 email titled “honest thoughts,” Brockman and Sutskever wrote to Musk and Altman to express their fear that Musk would “end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI… The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose.” In a private journal that’s been excerpted in court records, Brockman expressed his desire to “get out from Elon,” and questioned whether Musk was the “glorious leader” they urgently needed. 

The fellowship scattered not long after. Musk left OpenAI in early 2018, and the project launched its for-profit arm later that year. Then it was Altman’s turn to be the target of suspicion from people who believed he couldn’t be trusted with the one ring. (Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent organization of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.) 

OpenAI, according to Musk’s lawsuit, has become a “market-paralyzing gorgon,” and a “for-profit leviathan” that has betrayed its founding ideals and sacrificed safety for money and market-share. Musk’s complaint laments that “OpenAI dropped a clause from its Usage Policies banning the use of its technology for ‘activity that has a high risk of physical harm’ such as ‘weapons development’ or ‘military and warfare.’” The complaint also warned that OpenAI was abandoning its safety mission at a time when AI “is leading to a proliferation in child sexual abuse material” and “supercharging the spread of disinformation” and “malicious human impersonation.” 

What started as an underdog alliance has become a parable about hubris and power.

It’s an interesting argument coming from Musk, a Pentagon contractor who built a Nazi-loving chatbot for pervs. It’s likewise a bit dissonant for someone who destroyed public health programs in the name of cost-cutting to argue that the “obligation to generate financial returns” will corrupt someone else’s mission, but Musk was not the only person raising these concerns about Altman. I won’t rehash the 2023 power struggle at OpenAI that led to Altman being fired by the board and then reinstated days later, but suffice to say, it is central to the narrative of the lawsuit. Musk’s team has cited criticisms of Altman by Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who both left OpenAI to start new companies after questioning Altman’s commitment to safety. Musk suggests that Altman—“Scam Altman,” as he called him eight times during his deposition—has become the Demis he wished to stop.

The court records offer a rare glimpse at the strained relationships and bruised egos behind one of Silicon Valley’s nastiest falling-outs. We find Altman backchanneling with Shivon Zilis—the Neuralink employee who, unbeknownst to Altman, had multiple children with Musk while serving on the board of OpenAI—in 2023 to ask if he should tweet something nice about Elon to make him feel better. We find Musk’s lawyers moving to censor a portion of their client’s deposition where he was asked if he ingested something called “rhino ket” at Burning Man in 2017 (he says he did not), and OpenAI’s lawyers responding in a later brief with the dubious but indelible words, “there’s nothing unfairly prejudicial about attending Burning Man.” Zillis is asked if she and Musk have “ever been in a romantic relationship” and responds by saying: “‘Relationship’ is a relative term. But there have been romantic moments.” Sounds like a dream.

“it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman wrote Musk in one 2023 text exchange.

“it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake,” Musk responded.

“i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better. it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization,” Altman wrote.

What started in 2015 as an upstart alliance against Google has become, in every respect, a parable about hubris and power. They each believe the other is the thing people hate about Silicon Valley, and they are each, in a sense, sort of right. Musk, in his deposition, pointedly noted having “read that—allegedly, Chat GPT convinced some kid to commit suicide.” (OpenAI has denied culpability.) Altman, in his deposition, called Musk’s Grok a “goonbot” and said xAI makes “anime sex bots for children.” (X has said it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”) In January, they waged a public argument on X about whose companies were responsible for more deaths. Neither OpenAI or xAI responded to emailed requests for comment on the case.

As a result of Musk’s months-long assumption last year of quasi-dictatorial powers within the federal government, he caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and helped destroy the country’s capacity for cutting-edge research while still finding time—as he revealed in his deposition—to complain about Altman to the president of the United States. Brockman, for his part, was perhaps not quite as concerned about a dictator as he once let on: In September he became one of the single-largest donors to Donald Trump’s super-PAC.

There’s one email exchange that embodies the mix of civilization-defining grandiosity and get-over-yourselves gamer brain that made and then broke the relationship—a short back-and-forth in the hours before OpenAI’s official 2015 launch. Altman and Musk took turns hyping each other up with motivational quotes that underscored their sense of civilizational struggle. Under the subject line “Re: Great Acton quotes,” Musk shared a remark attributed to the British aristocrat: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.” Altman replied with a link to a YouTube trailer for Halo 3, which began with the words, “This is the way the world ends.” (In fact, T.S. Eliot.) 

Acton, of course, is most famous for a line that captures the essence of these court filings, even if it doesn’t show up in them: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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

Sweeping changes underway at the federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s forests could result in the loss of more than a century of critical historical documents, conservationists warn. 

The US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced a major restructuring at the end of March that includes closing all 10 regional offices. Those offices house troves of archival documents—many of which are not digitized—that chronicle the history in the nation’s forests. Thus far, the agency has not made public its plans to keep that information safe. 

The Forest Service archives include data and records from the 120 years that the agency has operated, as well as historical documents going back to the 1800s. Included among them are photographs showing changes in forest landscapes, scientific research data, land management records and samples of water and plants. 

These records outline the recent history of climate change and provide crucial information for ongoing adaptation, said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brian Nowicki.

“We have to have our heads on straight in order to address [climate change],” said Nowicki, a senior public lands advocate. “We do that by having a strong historical record.” 

On Thursday, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a public records request to the USDA asking for details on the agency’s plans to relocate archives from the regional offices, and for any records that the agency refuses to submit to the National Archives before the offices are closed and the records are destroyed or inaccessible.

The agency has 20 business days to respond to the request, per federal law. 

In an email to Inside Climate News, a USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service follows legally mandated standards to ensure that public records are not lost or destroyed during organizational changes. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history… Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

“As offices transition or close, our protocol ensures public documents, from field photographs to hard-copy data, are preserved, accessible and protected under federal law,” the spokesperson wrote. 

The agency added that it will retain the majority of its agency-owned regional facilities after closure, but it did not respond to requests for a timeline and details of its plans to relocate or continue managing the archives. 

But the Trump administration has eliminated a variety of data sources in the past year. Nowicki wants to see specifics on the agency’s preservation plans. 

He said he has been speaking with staff within the Forest Service and they’ve told him they have no clarity on plans for the archives. 

He added that relocating more than a century of archival material will be a huge job for an agency whose staff is already overextended. The Forest Service lost 16 percent of its workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management.  “It would take years for staff to be able to go through and correctly digitize and archive all of these materials,” Nowicki said. 

The agency has said its reorganization will be implemented over the coming year. That includes other big changes, like moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah and shifting more authority to the states. About 6,500 employees have received preliminary notifications that they could be impacted, such as changes to their role, supervisor or location, the USDA wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. The agency did not directly answer a question about whether the impacts could include layoffs.

About 500 employees, mostly from Washington, will be relocated more than 50 miles from their current station, the agency said. 

The USDA said these changes will help streamline forest management and boost timber production. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America and it means preserving and protecting the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with across this great country,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement with the announcement. 

Critics say the latest changes will cause further upheaval and disruption, hindering staff’s ability to properly manage the nation’s forests while wildfire threats grow.

Eliminating swaths of Forest Service documents would fall in line with the administration’s axing of data and historical records, said Rachel Santarsiero, director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.  

Santarsiero recently published a comprehensive timeline of disappearing data from the start of the second Trump administration, including deletions of web pages and online tools, removal of data from federal websites and the closure of NASA’s largest research library. 

Climate information has been a central target. The administration has removed references to global warming from government documents and websites and ended federal tracking of high-cost climate disasters, alongside making big staff and funding cuts to agencies focused on environmental protection, weather and disaster management. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history,” Santarsiero wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

After the administration abruptly dismantled the US Agency for International Development, officials ordered staff to destroy classified documents and personnel files, The New York Times reported. Elimination of records-keeping staff there and in other agencies has hampered access to public records, Bloomberg and other news organizations found.

Nowicki emphasized that some records kept by the Forest Service can’t be digitized. The archives include samples of water or tree logs that can detail histories of forest growth progression, fires, rainfall and more. As scientists come up with new ways to glean information from historical samples, these specimens are involved in ongoing study.

Historical photographs dating back to the 1800s are critical for understanding patterns of forest fires, challenging assumptions about what historic forests looked like and learning how the nation’s forests have changed, Nowicki said. 

Records kept by the Forest Service are invaluable for climate adaptation and resilience, Santarsiero said, because they detail wildfires, soils, ecosystems, biodiversity and more. That’s crucial not just for historians and scientists, but for any person who wants to engage in their right to know about their environment, she said. 

“It’s the way the public is able to access its own history,” Santarsiero said. 

To prevent a potential lawsuit, the Capitola City Council will convene a special session on Thursday night to discuss switching from at-large to district-based elections.

The post Capitola City Council to weigh switching to district-based elections to avoid litigation appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

After Hashicorp co-founder blasts the source shack and numbers slide

Microsoft's code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes - one that includes the words "we are sorry."…

Joby’s electric air taxi takes Manhattan, a Monterey Bay nonprofit launches a forward-looking job training initiative and the end of the line for a Gateway Plaza coffee spot are all part of Jessica M. Pasko’s weekly look at local business.

The post This week in Santa Cruz County business: Joby’s big ride in NYC, training for emerging aviation careers, Java Junction shutters River Street café appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

32 phone calls, 17 email chains, a 5-day ordeal, and no help during the daddy of all stuffups, claim those affected

GoDaddy is currently investigating claims that it handed complete control of a valid 27-year-old domain to another customer, without requiring them to pass any authentication processes or upload any supporting documents.…

Micha Scott has been named the 2026 Santa Cruz County artist of the year by the county’s arts commission.

Scott is a professional dancer, choreographer and teacher who has performed on stages around the world as a 13-year member of Garth Fagan Dance.

The annual award is presented to local artists for outstanding achievement in the disciplines of performing, visual or literary arts who also have made a substantial contribution to the cultural enrichment of Santa Cruz County.

Since moving from New York to Santa Cruz in 2008, Scott has been involved in the local dance community, with particular focus on being an advocate for Black youth dance.

Since 2011, she has been the artistic director of the Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center (TWDCC). In 2021, she also became the executive director, using her roles to highlight the artistic traditions passed on to her by dance pioneer Garth Fagan.

In 2022, Scott started the annual Deep Roots Dance Fest, bringing artists of the African diaspora to perform original contemporary dances rooted in their traditional forms to Santa Cruz stages.

Scott served on the grants panels at Arts Council Santa Cruz County from 2021 to 2025, on the California Arts Council in 2023-24 and recently served as a guest panelist for The Great Cabrillo Arts Design Challenge at Cabrillo College. She has secured more than $120,000 in grants over the past four years to bolster TWDCC’s youth scholarship program.

For information on previous artist of the year winners, visit the Santa Cruz County Parks website.

A profile performance will be held at the Museum of Art & History on June 5 from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is free, though seating is limited and is on a first-come, first-served basis the night of the event.

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

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The post Santa Cruz County Arts Commission names Micha Scott artist of the year appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he promised to largely steer America clear of foreign entanglements. But over the last year, his administration has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened to take over Greenland, pressured Cuba’s communist government in an attempt to destabilize it, and openly talked about making Canada the 51st state.

But the most consequential move by far has been the attack on Iran, which reportedly has killed thousands inside the country and snarled the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.

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In some ways, it might appear that Trump is trying to revive the American empire. Not so, says Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. What Trump is really doing, he says, is undermining the liberal international system, something the US itself largely built following World War II.

“People sometimes look at Trump’’s wars and they see imperialism,” Immerwahr says. But instead, Immerwahr argues that Trump is “cannibalizing the empire” through what he calls “hit-and-run” foreign policy. On this week’s More To The Story, Immerwahr sits down with host Al Letson to examine Trump’s attack on Iran, why Trump is ripping apart the postwar international order, and the long-term consequences of his impulsive foreign policy.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.