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NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) - McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny.

One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store's patrons are willing to pay.

The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company ​pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy.

McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs ‌to discounted coffee for seniors.

The engine has widened existing price differences for the same product between restaurants, including from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same area, three franchisees told Reuters.

Journalism and free-expression organisations in Brazil see Tapajós de Fato’s decision, first reported by a network of independent Amazonian media outlets, as a serious example of the consequences of attacks against journalists during the electoral period.

“It reflects the different forms of attempted censorship and silencing that journalists have to face in Brazil,” said Letícia Kleim, legal coordinator at the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism.

“Silencing the message by silencing the messenger affects not just their community, but democracy as a whole, which will no longer receive the valuable information they were providing by reporting on the Amazon from within the region.”

Her association is part of a coalition that recorded 4,400 online attacks against journalists, media outlets and the press on X and Instagram between 30 August and 12 September alone, an increase of 67% compared with the previous two weeks.

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An explosive new lawsuit alleging that seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers gang-raped a student two years ago and that Cornell University did little to protect her in the aftermath rocked life on campus this month. The case, now known as “The Cornell Seven,” has also broken containment, quickly becoming a national issue over the weekend.

Students at The Cornell Daily Sun have been there covering every beat of the story. Senior editor Cereese Qusba spent months reporting on the case before breaking the news of the lawsuit on September 18. “What happened to me was horrific and deeply disturbing,” the plaintiff, who is only identified in court records as Jane Doe, told the Sun exclusively. “Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact every day and night.”

For the past two weeks, reporters at the student paper have been relentlessly chasing follow-ups, from the administration’s response to the district attorney’s office reopening its criminal investigation and the larger fallout in Ithaca. The Sun also published a blistering editorial, printing the names of the accused men and taking the university to task for its lack of transparency. Throughout it all, the team has approached this case with care and moral clarity.

“We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force,” the board wrote. “Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.”

On Monday afternoon, I called up Qusba and editor-in-chief Sophia Dasser to talk about their work, how the editorial came together, and what’s next in their reporting.

We still have far to go in the attempt to encode a land ethic sufficiently strong to temper our appetite for Earth’s resources and focus our work towards restoring land health. A land ethic, good land use, and an equitable and civil society arise from countless actions and conversations, constantly unfolding, as the nation’s citizens go about their daily lives.

Agriculture is an ecologically embedded enterprise, and we should not tolerate actions that degrade our natural capital, the diversity and function of our ecosystems, or the health of the atmosphere, soils and waters that surround and support us. At the same time, we must recognise that agriculture is embedded in society – a farm practice that runs counter to society’s goals is hard to maintain. I agree that a farm can and should be valued by its owners as a place to live, and as a source of pleasure in good farming, good eating and engagement with both domestic and wild neighbours. Society continues to measure farms, and judge farmers, on their production of grain, meat, biomass and other commodities. Farmers are caught up in a highly competitive market system that typically allows only a slim margin between money coming in and money going out. Meanwhile, the goal of public policy for agriculture continues to be guided by the desire for cheap food.

While the predicament of modern agriculture may appear so dire that we will inevitably adapt and organise a more sustainable system, ecologists at Murdoch University in Australia came to a different conclusion after analysing the problems facing farmers in the semi-arid southwestern part of that continent. Farmers and policy-makers continue to invest in production systems that don’t fit the land because they are now tightly bound up in patterns of modern agribusiness and food production. Financial capital goes to conventional farmers more easily than to alternative farmers, and social capital – in the forms of agronomic research, technical assistance (for addressing issues with animal health, soil fertility, soil erosion and water pollution), and especially processing, distribution and retail – supports the energy- and natural-capital intensive system. The authors describe this as a ‘lock-in trap’, ‘an industry that has so much “sunk-costs” that it may continue to degrade the resource it relies upon until the capital is totally removed.’ Shifting the system to a more desirable state – one that is ecologically as well as socially resilient – requires us to forge new social connections in the quest to establish more sustainable patterns of land use.

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios is bowing to the pacifists and trialing a PvE mode in their extraction shooter. If you play between October 13th and 20th, you'll be able to flick a toggle that means you load either into the traditional world of Arc Raiders, where human players vie for the valuable scraps left behind in a ruined world watched over by killer robots, or a slightly safer version where the machines are still deadly but the humans can't hurt you.

"We’re seeing a large and growing group of Raiders who come to the Rust Belt for the co-op and the ARC, not fighting with other Raiders," Embark say in the post announcing the trial. "That group has become a core part of our community, so it’s important we learn how to support them properly rather than leave them working around the game."

To back this up, the studio share some data they've collected, showing that there are now more players that play only friendly co-op and never attack other humans than the merciless pure PvP bunch. Apparently the PvP group has remained at a stable 34% since the game's launch, but the number of mixed players, who spend most their time being affable members of the post-apocalypse society but occasionally dabble in wanton homicide, has shrunk, with most opting to become full-time peaceniks.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including at least 13,000 homes. The Rent Brigade emerged as a spontaneous, grassroots response to the widespread illegal rent gouging that followed.

Initially formed by volunteers who documented violations and helped victims of rent gouging seek justice, the organization has since evolved into a dues-paying membership organization that conducts strategic research, develops policy, and builds the know-how and power needed to win a future in which housing is treated as a right available to all, rather than a commodity sold for profit.

Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset she saw emerging. Originally published in 2000, Paulina’s observations in Cyberselfish have proved truer now than when it was first written. She saw that the culture of high tech was determinedly anti-government, even as it owed its growth to government subsidization. That tech prioritized the idea of progress and profits and ignored all costs. That it co-opted the language of evolution to make human decisions and power structures seem inevitable. That the industry was hyper-male and tended toward hyper-misogynistic. That its figureheads possessed great wealth but were abysmal at sharing that wealth through philanthropy.

Cyberselfish was published into a moment in which tech and its leaders’ reputations were immaculate and unquestioned. Now we know better. Thanks to a surge of interest in her prophetic insights, Cyberselfish will be reissued this fall to a world that’s finally ready to listen. The following is an excerpt from the new edition.

Indigenous lands from Canada to Ecuador to Nepal are increasingly being hit by catastrophic storms, fires, and floods. Worse, these climate disasters often come one after the other as overlapping crises rather than isolated incidents. Still, despite the ongoing destruction, Indigenous peoples continue to prove that they have the knowledge and skills to respond, if only global powers will let them.

Even amid growing recognition by scientists and policymakers of the power of Indigenous expertise to respond to climate change, the key role that Indigenous governance plays in those knowledge systems has not received as much respect.

Hnin Aye sat listening with growing concern as the officer called out numbers at the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok. “Why are they skipping me?” she thought. A former schoolteacher, she was waiting to get her passport renewed so she could stay in Thailand where she now lived and studied. A denied renewal could lead to imprisonment in Bangkok, or worse, being forced to return home.

Finally, when there was no one left in the room, the official told her to approach the desk. “You better call the person who has been assisting you,” he said. Hnin Aye, 33, glanced at her small red passport on the table, which she had submitted to the official earlier. It was her most prized possession. She snatched it and left to call her broker. She got lucky, the broker told her later; the embassy officials could have simply canceled her passport.

Hnin Aye is one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who went on strike after the Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021, overthrowing the democratically elected government. (Hnin Aye is a pseudonym.) The mass strike, known as the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), hoped to topple the regime through non-violence. The strike has undermined the junta’s ability to provide public services. Many hospitals and most public schools were completely shut following the coup, and many remain closed today, while others limp on with limited capacity. After the political crisis escalated to civil war, some who quit their jobs as part of the strike became civil servants in rebel territories, which are ruled through a patchwork of decentralized governments. Others fled the country entirely to escape persecution and to find new work as the economy collapsed.

Hnin Aye is one of an estimated 4 million Myanmar people living in Thailand, roughly half of whom crossed the border in 2023 and the first half of 2024 alone. She’s been able to live relatively freely in Thailand, attending university and traveling for conferences and academic workshops. But her seemingly normal life is clouded by constant anxiety over the possibility of being sent back home.

The junta has tried to compel civil servants living in Myanmar to come back to work. It has threatened family members of dissidents, expelled strike participants from government housing and even brutally murdered some. (In 2022, a teacher was publicly beheaded by the junta in central Myanmar, where resistance to the military is fierce.) The junta promises amnesty, but most greet this with skepticism.

The military has exerted pressure on those outside the country through their passports. Myanmar passports are only valid for five years, which means that anyone who applied for a travel document right after the coup in 2021, including Hnin Aye, must now get it renewed. Many choose to make use of a corrupt brokerage system, where people with connections in the foreign ministry and other regime appendages facilitate large bribes for new, and sometimes fake, documentation. But it is by no means a guarantee, especially as the junta expands a digitalized system to track, restrict and repress its citizens. Identity and statehood have become a new weapon.

When we were hired by the United Electrical Workers to spearhead the union drive at Twitter, it seemed the tech industry might finally be bending to progressive pressure. It was early in 2022, a year after the historic Capitol attacks of January 6, which saw Donald Trump call on his nearly eighty-eight million Twitter followers in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. More and more public outrage was being directed at the tools that had enabled the president to mobilize his supporters. And Twitter, after deleting a series of Trump’s incendiary posts, had taken the most extreme measure of all the major social media platforms by issuing a permanent ban on the sitting president’s account.

Many outside the industry attributed the decision to Silicon Valley’s then-progressive values—management taking a principled stand against an overt attack on democracy—but in reality, it was almost entirely worker-driven. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and then-CEO, initially hesitated to take action after the Capitol attack. He said to staff that the company was not “the government,” and it was the responsibility of elected officials—not a private platform—to “do the work to right this and bring the country together.” Twitter’s employees, feeling complicit in enabling Trump’s insurrection, pushed management for decisive action. Two days after the sitting president’s self-coup attempt, hundreds of workers delivered an open letter to their employer that demanded Trump’s permanent suspension. “As Trump’s megaphone,” the letter declared, “we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” That internal revolt proved decisive. Twitter’s leadership caved and permanently removed Trump from the platform.

Emboldened by their success and fueled by a newfound sense of solidarity, the group of employees who penned the letter decided to launch a union drive to codify their collective leverage and ensure the platform would never enable events like January 6 again. They had helped safeguard democracy before. This time, they were determined to win it for themselves—and we, joining their drive as dedicated staff, were determined to help them. Clarissa had helped win one of the first tech unions at Kickstarter. JS, meanwhile, had organized graduate students at MIT. By bringing our experience as organizers to Twitter’s campaign, we hoped we could harness the nascent movement’s energy and steer it with some established labor tactics. We knew we were in for a challenge—but we could never have anticipated how quickly the tech elite would dig up the ground from underneath us.

A year passed, and after much muddling and processing, S and I found our way back to each other. In the years since, we have cultivated a deep, trusting relationship across our differences.

S is trans, and their body has shifted and transformed as they’ve gone on and off testosterone. I have long-standing insight into some of that experience—the frustration of clothing stores not carrying cute things that fit, the indignity of family members’ comments about your body as it changes. Sometimes my empathy is clunky: a bruised, childhood side of myself feels exasperated at their surprise at how the world shifts when you get fatter. But I also know there are nuances to their experience that are personal, and that I’m not privy to.

Our unruly bodies continue to surprise me in their overlapping struggles. We each face barriers accessing public space. Before we go on dates, I’ve taught S to research weight capacities and seat structures. While chairs are usually not a problem for them, S pays closer attention to restrooms, gender designations and the vibes of the other guests. Will they give S a hard time, or will we be in the comfortable company of other gays with crazy haircuts? We’re familiar with each other’s food needs, our energy limits, our precautions around COVID. We advocate for each other in turn.