East Coast of the United States

A slow-moving nor'easter battered the Northeast coast through the weekend, leaving residents in New Jersey and New York's Long Island to deal with a second consecutive day of flooding. Tidal surges swamped low-lying neighborhoods along the Jersey Shore, while powerful wind gusts knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes across the region.

Coastal towns such as Sea Bright, New Jersey, saw significant flooding and erosion as high tides combined with the storm's persistent winds. Nassau County officials, including County Executive Bruce Blakeman, responded to flooding impacts on Long Island. The storm disrupted air travel, with delays reported at Logan International Airport, and prompted comparisons to past major coastal storms like Hurricane Sandy given the scale of shoreline damage. Utility crews worked to restore power as authorities urged caution near flooded roads and eroded seawalls. The event underscores the recurring vulnerability of Mid-Atlantic and New England coastal communities to storm surge and flooding.

An AI-manipulated image showing Iowa Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand wearing a large mask and face shield has circulated widely on social media since at least July, amplified in a September 1 Facebook post by Republican nominee Zach Lahn. Lahn shared the image alongside clips from a podcast appearance in which he criticized Sand, Iowa's state auditor, as an "East Coast elitist."

Fact-checkers traced the photo to an unaltered original published by the Iowa Capital Dispatch in July, showing Sand without any mask or face shield while meeting cancer-advocacy group representatives in Des Moines. OpenAI's image-verification tool detected a SynthID watermark in the altered version, confirming AI manipulation. Sand's campaign called the image fake.

Lahn, who has aligned with vaccine-skeptic rhetoric and attacked Sand over past pandemic-era mask support, is locked in a tight race to succeed term-limited Republican Governor Kim Reynolds in the reliably red state.

Coastal Orange County communities are holding free public events Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped American security and daily life.

In Costa Mesa, the nonprofit 9/11 Day — founded by relatives of a volunteer firefighter lost that day — will host its annual "Honor Through Action" meal-packing event, with hundreds of volunteers aiming to pack more than 200,000 meals for families facing food insecurity, part of a nationwide effort seeking to top 50 million meals across all 50 states.

Huntington Beach will hold its annual Patriot Day celebration at Pier Plaza, led by Mayor Casey McKeon in partnership with American Legion Post 133, honoring fallen first responders and civilians. In Newport Beach, the Newport Harbor Elks Lodge and Sons of the American Legion Squadron 291 will host a remembrance ceremony at Veterans Memorial Park, open to the public with refreshments and a no-host bar for lodge members.

Data centers are drawing unusual bipartisan scrutiny as their rapid expansion to support artificial intelligence collides with local concerns over energy use, water consumption, and community impact. While debates over technology and infrastructure often split along party lines, opposition to large-scale data center projects is emerging among both Democrats and Republicans, complicating assumptions about who supports or resists the buildout.

A proposal by Google to site a data center in Hermantown, Minnesota, near Lake Superior's ample water supply, illustrates the trend. Despite the area's Republican lean, skepticism toward the project has not broken down neatly along partisan lines. Similar patterns have surfaced elsewhere, including among conservative legislative candidates in Wisconsin's Republican primary, several of whom favored local control over data center siting rather than outright support.

The dynamic matters for policymakers and industry alike, as the AI sector's massive infrastructure needs increasingly depend on winning over skeptical communities regardless of political affiliation, potentially reshaping how future data center projects are permitted and sited nationwide.