The Data Center Buildout Got a Ballot in Wisconsin and None in Andhra Pradesh

Half a Point Decided Wisconsin

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley won the Democratic nomination for governor over state assembly member Francesca Hong by just over 3,200 votes, 39.8 percent to 39.4 percent with 98 percent counted, according to the Wisconsin Examiner¹. The Associated Press called it at 2:34 a.m. Wednesday after Hong conceded. Crowley had dropped out earlier and re-entered last month at the urging of outgoing Governor Tony Evers. He would be Wisconsin's first Black governor if he wins in November. Hong would have been the first democratic socialist governor of any state.

The Intercept² reports that the issue which took Hong from unknown to within half a point was data centers. She was the only candidate calling for a moratorium on new construction until the state writes rules on energy and water use; Crowley wants more regulation and has rejected a moratorium as a short-term fix. The Intercept cites Gallup polling from May finding seven in ten Americans oppose data center construction in their own area, and names candidates who won primaries elsewhere on the same position, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Senate race.

The money is disputed and the accounts do not reconcile, so both stand attributed. Jacobin³, whose piece is argument rather than reporting, puts advertising at under $500,000 for Hong against $4 million for Crowley. Vox⁴ reports that a group tied to the Republican Governors Association spent more than $3 million on ads meant to raise Hong's profile with Democratic primary voters, the clearest available signal that Republicans wanted her as the opponent.

Two things are true at once, and the left press has mostly carried one. Hong overperformed against a candidate holding the governor's endorsement and roughly eight times her advertising. She also lost, in a state that lived through eight years of Scott Walker, after repeatedly walking back old posts on abolishing police and cancelling Thanksgiving, and without endorsements from Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who Jacobin⁵ reports privately doubted her as a candidate. A movement that records only the first fact will keep losing by half a point.

The Republican nominee is Congressman Tom Tiffany, which drew less attention than the Democratic margin. Vox⁶ reports Tiffany signed the December 2020 Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden's win, voted on January 6 against certifying Pennsylvania and Texas, has said he would have overturned Wisconsin's result, and endorsed an FBI inquiry into the state's elections this year. In every other top swing state, Vox reports, Republicans nominated an election denier for governor or secretary of state or both.

The counterweight belongs in the same hand. The election law scholars Vox interviewed, Rebecca Green of William and Mary and Rick Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, both say a stolen 2028 election remains unlikely, citing bipartisan counting procedures, court orders that force certification, and the 2022 rewrite of the Electoral Count Act. The space between complacency and alarmism is narrow, and both ends are bad.

The Same Buildout, Without a Ballot

Jacobin⁷ reports from Tarluvada, a village outside Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, where Alphabet plans to spend $15 billion over five years on what would be Google's largest data center outside the United States. Fifty-one Dalit families, allotted two acres each by the state in the 1970s, were offered 8 million rupees per family, roughly $84,000, plus a promise of replacement land equal to one fifth of what they gave up, at a location nobody has specified. Residents say they were not consulted.

Two of the three sites, about 440 acres, cleared environmental review in roughly ten days, and one sits less than a mile from the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary. Google did not answer Jacobin's questions about how much water and electricity the facility will use. State officials have acknowledged that renewables alone will not cover round-the-clock demand and that more coal generation will be needed. The servers are expected online in 2028. A Wisconsin voter and a Dalit farmer are being asked to absorb the same buildout, and only one of them got a ballot.

$533 Million, Zero Shells

ProPublica⁸ published an investigation into a General Dynamics artillery plant in Mesquite, Texas, that has cost taxpayers $533 million and has not produced a single 155 millimeter shell that passed inspection. Not a reduced number. Zero.

The reporting rests on 36 current and former employees of the company, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House, on internal documents, and on a Defense Department inspector general report from July 2026. Robotic arms caught fire. Turkish-made forming machines failed. Workers said they beat a press with sledgehammers nightly for want of a standard procedure. Three former workers said the shells displayed at the May 2024 opening ceremony had been shipped in from elsewhere, and one said he found one that appeared to be plastic.

The Army waived competitive bidding, let work start before terms were set, and required no equipment demonstration before committing to three production lines. It halted two of them in August 2025, then paid $26.3 million in progress payments in December. Since August 2025 the same division has been awarded $2.5 billion in new contracts, which the Army told ProPublica are for separate production lines and unrelated. A company spokesman called the reporting a "materially false and misleading hit piece" and, ProPublica says, did not identify a single error.

Enforcement Is Buying Compliance by the Glove

The Associated Press reported this week, carried by PBS NewsHour⁹, that ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on thousands of electric shock gloves in a no-bid purchase from Compliant Technologies of Lexington, Kentucky. The product, the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, functions as an ordinary patrol glove until an officer presses a switch, at which point skin contact delivers what the manufacturer describes as an immediate and sharp pain stimulus for compliance. The manufacturer's own warnings say not to use it as punishment, not on someone showing only verbal defiance, and not on children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people.

404 Media¹⁰ says it obtained the user manual and that the manual notes the device may contribute to sudden death. Most of that story sits behind a subscriber wall, so the claim rests on the visible opening paragraphs rather than on the manual itself. The Department of Homeland Security had no immediate comment. Reported delivery deadlines conflict across accounts by a full year, so no date is given here.

The same day, NPR¹¹ and the Washington Post reported that Health and Human Services awarded a no-bid contract worth $158 million to Our Rescue, the Utah group formerly called Operation Underground Railroad, to provide legal services to unaccompanied migrant children for six months. It is not clear the organization employs immigration lawyers. Its founder, Tim Ballard, was the subject of the film Sound of Freedom and was quietly removed from leadership after accusations of sexual exploitation, which he denies. Its chief executive, Derek Benner, formerly ran Homeland Security Investigations. A Texas firm, Burke Law Group, withdrew from a separate $150 million award after reporters found that two of its 24 attorneys practiced immigration law. The government is paying nine figures for children to be represented by organizations that mostly do not do this work.

Fusion Centers Are Cataloguing the Camera Critics

404 Media¹² obtained intelligence bulletins through public records requests showing that state fusion centers are monitoring social media accounts critical of Flock Safety license plate readers. Bulletins from centers in Wisconsin, Colorado and central Florida warn police about what one calls extensive and ongoing chatter about methods to physically destroy Flock cameras, flag a specific Instagram account, and tell officers to increase patrols ahead of a National Week of Action Against Automated License Plate Readers set for August 16 through 22. The vandalism estimate they carry, roughly a few dozen acts nationally, is the fusion centers' own.

Will Freeman, who built the open-source mapping project DeFlock, told 404 Media his project has never called for disabling cameras or covering plates and says it has helped kill more than 100 contracts through ordinary public pressure since 2024. That figure is his claim. The mechanism is the part worth naming: the paperwork does not distinguish between someone cutting a camera down and someone mapping where the cameras are.

Two more from the same beat. A University of Sydney study covered by 404 Media¹³ analyzed 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026 in which men wearing Meta's camera glasses filmed women without consent and posted the footage. Comments were open on 93.3 percent of them, and the researchers found the covertness of the filming tracks with the severity of the harassment that follows. And Twitch¹⁴ has switched on a setting, on by default, that lets Amazon train generative models on streams, video on demand, clips and chat.

The Vaccine Order Changes No Recommendation and Plenty of Practice

President Trump signed an executive order on Monday, August 10, directing Health and Human Services to develop a way to split the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three shots given at separate visits, first reported by Axios¹⁵. The order changes no recommendation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the combined vaccine and says no published evidence supports separating it. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician who chairs the health committee, said breaking up vaccines means children get more shots for the same protection, not fewer.

The Guardian¹⁶ reports the practical damage would run through parents rather than through law: spacing shots could mean four or five extra visits per round, insurance often will not cover them, and each delay is time a child is unprotected. KFF polling cited by the Associated Press¹⁷ suggests the politics are thinner than the argument's volume implies: 10 percent of Make America Healthy Again supporters name vaccine safety as their top federal priority, and 42 percent name lowering health costs.

The same administration finalized a rule on Tuesday ending coverage of gender-affirming care through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, effective October 13, with litigation expected, according to The Guardian¹⁸. Ma'ayan Anafi of the National Women's Law Center says the proposal drew nearly 35,000 comments, about 90 percent opposed; that count is the center's, not a government tally. An HHS spokesperson, Emily Hilliard, said American children will not be subjected to life-altering interventions on the taxpayer's dime without reliable evidence of safety and clinical benefit. If the rule survives, affected children get up to six months to taper off medication. States can still cover the care with their own Medicaid share, so the map of who keeps access is about to get uneven.

Three Executions Scheduled for One Day

Three men are scheduled to be executed on August 13 in Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma. NPR¹⁹ reports that has not happened on a single day since January 7, 2010, in Louisiana, Ohio and Texas.

Tennessee plans to execute Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, whose attorneys say he suffered two strokes this year and is paralyzed on his left side and partly blind. The state's last attempt, on Tony Carruthers in May, ran about 40 minutes of failed attempts to place an intravenous line before a physician tried to place a central line in his chest. Governor Bill Lee stopped it and granted a one-year reprieve. The Intercept²⁰ reports the physician involved testified he had not placed a central line in 13 years and holds no hospital privileges to do so. Nine Republican state senators asked Lee in June to spare Hines. Lee said Monday he would not intervene.

In Colombia, the Missing Count Is the Measurement

The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck western Colombia on Monday, August 10, has now killed more than 265 people according to Colombian authorities, with more than 3,500 injured, per NPR²¹ and Euronews²².

The two available counts of the missing diverge and neither can be dismissed. The government reports nearly 500 unaccounted for. Civilian databases assembled by families searching for relatives list more than 4,100. President Abelardo de la Espriella, in office for days when the quake hit, says more than 25,800 families were affected and that the effort is focused on the disappeared. The geological service has logged 130 aftershocks.

Rescue crews in Cali, Pereira, Manizales and Quibdó are past the 72-hour window, and officials now describe the search as entering its final phase²³. The United States sent disaster teams and $15 million, Mexico sent military aircraft and specialists, and El Salvador offered two planeloads, according to the Associated Press²⁴. In Chocó, where poverty and armed conflict predate the quake, the Norwegian Refugee Council says remote communities remain unreachable and without cell service. The gap between 500 and 4,100 measures how much of the country the state can see.

Hormuz Stays Closed While Both Governments Claim to Control It

The war is near six months old and the Strait of Hormuz has been largely closed since late February. Trump said this week that the United States totally controls the strait. Iran's national security council secretary said it stays closed until the United States changes its behavior and meets Iranian conditions on sanctions relief, frozen assets and a regional ceasefire. Both are claims by governments about their own position, and neither is established fact.

The verifiable number is transit volume. Al Jazeera²⁵ reports eight vessels transited the strait on Tuesday against a pre-war average of about 130 a day. Iran says talks with Oman on a new management arrangement are in their final stages, and Qatar's foreign ministry spokesman says he has heard positive signals from both capitals. In the Bab al-Mandeb, six people were killed and ten wounded in an attack on a cargo vessel, four crew and two Yemeni rescuers.

A Closed Military Zone That Keeps out the Monitors

Drop Site News²⁶ reports from Taybeh, one of the few Christian-majority Palestinian villages in the West Bank, where the Israeli military declared a closed military zone on Sunday and said the order was meant to stop escalating settler attacks. Residents say it does the opposite. The village priest, Jack Abed, asked what the settler roaming the area is if not Israeli, and said the order keeps out human rights monitors rather than settlers. Nayef Kaabneh, who heads the village's Bedouin community, described soldiers ordering activists to leave, the settler leaving with them, and the settler returning once the army had gone. The military issued similar closures for Kufr Qallil and Jalud on Tuesday.

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry report from June found Israeli authorities directly involved in settler attacks and said the participation of security forces amounts to a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers. That is the commission's finding, and Israel disputes its mandate. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian body, counted more than 500 attacks in the past week, its own tally. At the Security Council this week the West Bank was described as at breaking point, with 76 Palestinians killed there as of August 10.

Drop Site²⁷ also reports that its contributor Mohamed Awad, 38, a Palestinian journalist, was arrested at his home in Bitunia early Wednesday, blindfolded and taken away in a military jeep, according to his wife's account to Al-Araby. The Palestinian Prisoner's Society counts 40 Palestinian journalists in Israeli prisons. A separate Intercept piece²⁸ by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick argues Israel has justified its wars by casting adversaries as irrational; it is opinion, and no factual claim here rests on it.

What Deere Is Actually Buying

Ten thousand United Auto Workers members at nine John Deere plants vote on August 23 on whether to extend their contract by two years, from six to eight. The current agreement expires October 31, 2027, six months before the union's contracts with the Big Three automakers expire, and that timing is the fight.

Labor Notes, republished in Jacobin²⁹, reports Deere approached the union in June with a package that mostly holds the status quo: the remaining 4 percent annual raises, a $3,000 signing bonus, a lump sum pushed out to 2028, and health insurance unchanged, on the argument that low commodity prices make stability worth having. The union council countered with 5 percent raises, cost of living folded into base wages, $2,000 per year of service into retirement accounts, and a ban on further outsourcing. Deere says that costs an extra half billion and rejected it, while forecasting fiscal year net income of $4.5 billion to $5 billion. Stewards told Labor Notes the shop floor started split and has moved toward no. What the company buys with two years is the removal of a strike deadline that would otherwise land while every auto local in the Midwest is already at the table.

The July Jobs Report Against the C-Shaped Claim

The July employment report³⁰ from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the country lost 23,000 jobs, and revisions took another 103,000 off May and June combined: May came down from 129,000 to 63,000, June from 57,000 to 20,000. Unemployment sat at 4.1 percent with 6.9 million people out of work. Average hourly earnings reached $37.62, up two cents on the month and 3.2 percent over the year, which is below the inflation rate.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on August 4 that the K-shaped economy is over and the country is seeing a C-shaped one instead. PBS NewsHour³¹ checked the claim with economists, who mostly said the gap may be narrowing but has not closed, that C-shaped is not a term economists use and appears to trace to a hotel executive's earnings call, and that wage gains at the bottom sit alongside a stock market that pays the top. Bank of America saw convergence in spending and said it depends on whether the labor market holds. The National Retail Federation's chief economist said the K persists.

Robert Reich, writing opinion in The Guardian³², cites Morgan Stanley research finding unemployment about half a point higher than it otherwise would be in occupations heavily exposed to artificial intelligence, roughly 30 percent of employment. That citation is his. Fox News argued the same day that the labor market is not following the AI-apocalypse script. This is a live empirical dispute, and both sides are reading the same federal data.

Also This Week

Midwest storms. Severe weather cut power to about 540,000 homes and businesses across the Midwest on Thursday morning, The Guardian reports³³. Indiana was hardest hit with more than 267,000 out, about 8 percent of the state's customers. A four-year-old boy was killed in Geneva, Indiana, when a tree fell on a home, and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said a Roseville resident died during a medical emergency because flooded roads kept first responders away.

Abuse in juvenile prisons. ProPublica, with Nashville Public Radio³⁴, found that Wayne Halfway House, which runs three of Tennessee's highest-security youth facilities holding about 300 young people, repeatedly failed to report abuse to the state. Surveillance video from June 2024 shows a teenager dragged across a floor and locked in a cell while guards watched; the state confirmed it received no incident report. Six weeks later the company got a bigger contract. It denies discouraging reporting.

Youth sports. ProPublica, with the Washington Post³⁵, found the Amateur Athletic Union, which registers about 760,000 athletes and coaches, never delivered the child protection reforms it promised after a 2011 abuse scandal. Its coach training was a repurposed sports psychology module, and it changed its website language from mandatory to encouraged after reporters asked. Eight coaches banned or suspended by the U.S. Center for SafeSport kept coaching AAU teams within the past five years.

A union chair under investigation. The Guardian³⁶ reports that Stephen Wheeler, a data scientist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and chair of its union organizing committee, was placed on leave and investigated without being told what he is accused of, weeks after he spoke to NPR about forced staff relocations. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.

Threats against judges. PBS NewsHour³⁷ interviewed two federal judges. The U.S. Marshals Service recorded a nearly 60 percent jump in security incidents of significant concern in fiscal 2025 and is on pace to rise again. Chief Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island and several other judges received pizzas ordered in the name of Daniel Anderl, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was shot dead at their home in 2020.

An indictment against a former SPLC official. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Heidi Beirich, 59, who ran the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project until about six years ago, charging wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a bank, and money laundering conspiracy, the Associated Press reports³⁸. A June superseding indictment alleges more than $4 million in donated funds went to people who infiltrated or associated with violent extremist groups between 2007 and 2023. These are allegations. Her attorney says she is innocent and the case is political; she was released on her own recognizance.

A suit over paid access to presidential posts. The Intercept³⁹ and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the president on Wednesday over Trump Media's plan to sell early access to his Truth Social posts through a product called Truth API, priced at $60,000 to $100,000 a month. The complaint argues that selling preferential access to presidential statements violates the First Amendment right of equal access. The Intercept is a plaintiff in the case it is reporting.

The Coverage Gap

Coverage diverged in both directions on August 12 and 13, and the direction unflattering to the left is the larger one.

Conservative outlets carried stories the left feeds did not. The Los Angeles Lakers sold for $12.5 billion to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, a record for a sports franchise, confirmed by ESPN⁴⁰, Forbes and Variety after the New York Post and Breitbart broke it into the feed. Nothing on the left carried it, though the buyer is the brother of the president's son-in-law and the price is a clean data point on where capital is parking. The Dispatch⁴¹ asked whether Flock cameras are worth the privacy trade-off on the same day 404 Media reported the government monitoring anti-Flock activists, which means the libertarian right was arguing the surveillance question while left outlets were mostly reporting it. The Dispatch also ran on the American munitions shortage, the strategic frame ProPublica's $533 million factory story leaves out. And Fox News argued the labor market is not confirming an AI jobs apocalypse, a claim that deserves testing rather than dismissal, because the federal data underneath it is the same data Reich used to argue the opposite.

A separate category on the right is amplification rather than reporting. Fox News and The Daily Wire ran multiple items on transgender athletes in professional women's basketball, which is volume, not news. Breitbart and the Washington Examiner spent the day on socialism as a label, including Senator Tom Cotton's argument that history says socialism will hurt. Volume is easy to mistake for coverage, and this is a message being tested for November rather than a story being reported.

In the other direction, several documented stories never reached a right-leaning feed. The General Dynamics factory that took $533 million and produced nothing appeared on none of them, a notable silence from outlets that campaign against government waste. Neither did the ICE shock glove purchase, the ProPublica investigations into juvenile prisons and youth sports, the CFPB union suspension, or the Colombia earthquake. The sharpest asymmetry is on transgender issues: right-leaning outlets ran heavily on athletes and not at all on the rule cutting Medicaid and children's health insurance funding for gender-affirming care in October. The symbolic fight gets the coverage. The material one does not.

The left and independent side has its own version of the same failure, and it is structural. The analysis tier ran hot on personality. AlterNet's feed was given over to Trump psychology and Republican dysfunction while the wires carried material stories, including a Chinese chipmaker tripling profits on artificial intelligence demand and a European drought shrinking harvests from Dutch potatoes to Bosnian corn. Neither reached left commentary outlets. When the political economy of the AI buildout is available only as a wire headline and a single Jacobin dispatch from India, the gap is on that side of the ledger. The Hormuz coverage shows the same pattern: a war covered as a war for six months and rarely as a price, even with transit at eight vessels a day against a pre-war 130.

Method

This edition was assembled from a fixed set of 24 RSS feeds inside a 36-hour window. Twenty-three resolved, yielding 153 body items and 86 detection items; the NPR feed failed on malformed XML. Reporting-spine bodies were read in full rather than summarized from headlines.

Source weighting is explicit. Reuters and the Associated Press arrive through Google News bridges and are headline-only by design, as are The Atlantic and WIRED; nothing from those four was used beyond a headline. Most of the 404 Media shock-glove piece sits behind a subscriber wall, so that item rests on its visible opening and says so. Every figure, date, toll, price and officeholder was checked against live web search before publication, including the July payroll numbers, which were read from the Bureau of Labor Statistics release itself rather than taken from the column citing them.

Corrections this run: five mechanical and three judgment calls. The mechanical set resolved conflicting dates and figures against a third source or dropped them, covering the date of the last three-execution day, the age of one of the men scheduled to die, the Wisconsin margin, the date of the Colombia quake, and an internally inconsistent incentive figure in the Andhra Pradesh reporting. The judgment calls were the Colombia missing count, where both the government's near-500 and the families' 4,100-plus stand rather than being reconciled; the ICE glove delivery deadline, where one account gives a date already past and another a date a year later, so the date was cut; and the Wisconsin advertising totals, attributed separately rather than merged.

One standard of attribution applies throughout. Government claims about casualties, damage, transit control and fraud are attributed to the government that made them, whether American, Iranian, Israeli or Colombian, and the same standard applies to the Palestinian bodies whose attack counts are cited and to the advocacy groups whose comment tallies are cited. Opinion columns are labeled as argument and are not used to carry facts.