grassroots

Quilicura’s experience with datacentres has raised the alarm in other parts of the Santiago region. In 2024, residents in the district of Cerrillos succeeded in halting plans for a second Google datacentre. “In 2019, we learned about the project in our community. When we realised the scale of water it would require, we became alarmed,” says Tania Rodríguez, a teacher who lives in the area.

Google had secured water rights allowing it to extract up to 228 litres per second – roughly equivalent to the consumption of 40,000 households – from Cerrillos’s groundwater reserves. In 2024, residents succeeded in having the project halted on the grounds that it had failed to adequately consider the impacts of the climate crisis. The company also agreed to review its cooling system.

A group of Miami residents has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the state of Florida over a land giveaway for his proposed presidential library.

Almost three acres of prime waterfront land that once belonged to Miami Dade College (MDC) were illegally gifted to the US president by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, the lawsuit states.

It cites the domestic emoluments clause of the US constitution that prohibits a sitting president from receiving any personal gain, profit or advantage from their position.

The action was brought in US district court for the southern district of Florida by the Washington DC-based Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) on behalf of plaintiffs including an MDC student, a Miami non-profit, and residents, who state the land “is no longer available to serve MDC’s student community and downtown Miami”.

In a sign of the simmering discontent within the Make America Healthy Again coalition, some of its most visible figures rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, lobbing criticism at the Trump administration for siding with a pesticide-maker.

Inside, the justices were hearing arguments in a highly-anticipated case involving the glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup.

"You cannot claim to care about health while protecting poison. You cannot tell Americans to eat real food while protecting the cancer-causing chemicals sprayed on it," wellness influencer and "MAHA mom" Vani Hari, who goes by the "Food Babe," told the assembled crowd at the "People Versus Poison" rally.