Artificial intelligence needs more power than America will give it, so the industry went looking for ground where nobody gets a vote. In Parsons, Kansas, where one in five residents lives in poverty, that means the first nuclear reactor in history designed to operate underground, drilled through the aquifer, on land where the Army still detonates waste explosives under federal permit.

She spent time on the CIA payroll and a lifetime near power. Gloria Steinem died wealthy, surrounded by family and friends, lionized in the New York Times. Assata died in exile. Black and Brown feminists ask whose liberation the icon’s bourgeois politics served.

A secret contract. No policy protecting riders’ data. The Defender obtained the deal KCATA signed to harvest bus riders’ faces for AI.

Two days after city officials violently arrested a community leader, I sat in a chamber swarmed with police and watched eleven council members give a billionaire one of the biggest public deals this city has ever seen, without letting a single resident speak.

A Royals stadium worker was violently attacked and pinned to the ground at City Hall as Kansas City advanced the billionaire ballpark with no public vote.

A month after the World Cup ended, the spectacle is gone. The racial and political tensions it exposed are not, as Argentina’s President Javier Milei, much like Trump, stokes racial tensions to cover for a sick economy and its savage inequalities.

Da’Shae Breeze learned to write at Maya Angelou’s desk. Now she writes to The Defender from a solitary confinement cell as Missouri strips away her medical care. She spoke to us from inside state prison, alongside Jessica Hicklin, who spent 26 years in maximum security and won the federal ruling the state just defied.