Data Centers in Champaign County: A Conversation with UIUC Computer Science Students

Posted on 05/30/2026 by Amy Young

A data center in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Photo by Geoffrey Moffett, used under free Unsplash license

What do computer scientists think about data centers coming to Champaign County?

I recently had coffee with three computer science (CS) students at the University of Illinois. I was intrigued that they are being expertly trained in computer science, while having a critical stance about the proposed data centers in Champaign and nearby counties in Illinois.

Bhavana Bheem and Andrea Watkins are graduate students. Samuel Gerstein is graduating this month with a BS in Computer Science.

In my view, these three students are quite atypical, because Bhavana, Samuel, and Andrea are intentionally informed about the impacts of data centers: water use, pollution, and massive amounts of waste heat. They also talk publicly about the harms of AI in education and in daily life. Continue reading →

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April Issue Front Cover

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Public i

A version of a Norouz (Persian New Year, March 21) greeting card, created by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, with the help of AI; used with permission

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Alex Pretti and the Death of Western Liberalism

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Alen Romero

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was wrestled to the ground on the streets of Minneapolis, disarmed of the pistol he was legally carrying, and fatally shot by ICE agents.

He is the second person fatally shot by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) operating in Minneapolis that month. Video of the incident taken by bystanders went viral, and again directly contradicts Kristi Noem’s and DHS’s narrative. In fact, a report by CNN outlined DHS’s development of an internal database of protesters’ personal information. A source told CNN that “Pretti’s name was known to federal agents,” a fact that flies in the face of the prevailing narrative, created by DHS, that officers have been defending themselves during the course of their legal operations. Continue reading →

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Are Data Centers Responsible Economic Development?

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Lori McKiernan

Photo from Atlantic Council

Responsible economic development must balance financial benefits with harm and risk to the community. Many residents of Illinois feel like the risk of electricity rate increases, potential harm to health and quality of life, and noise and air pollution from data centers outweigh the promised tax revenues and temporary jobs.

AI data centers are large buildings (millions of square feet in some cases) filled with computer processors that are built to handle enormous amounts of data and computing power. These differ from traditional computer processors, possessing the graphical, analytical, and learning capabilities of the computer processors used for AI. These highly specialized processors generated more heat and use much more electricity and water than traditional processors. Continue reading →

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“Revolution” in Iran? Doomed If It Succeeds

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Lucy Jane

This essay was written before the February 28 beginning of the US–Israeli war on Iran. It is an edited version of one that appeared in The People’s Voice, the chapter newsletter of YDSA ISU, on February 18.

An oft-repeated sentiment in leftist spaces in the US is that Iran’s current regime must be tolerated because of its anti-Western/anti-imperialist stance. As an Iranian leftist, I’ve found this argument to be too black and white. The cost of this leftist support for Iran is paid by the Iranian people. Asking protesters to cease their revolt and insinuating that they are in the wrong for trying to remove the current regime completely excuses the theocratic fascism upheld in Iran. Iranians live under an extremely oppressive theocratic regime that silences voices against the government, kills protesters in the street, and enforces extremely strict religious laws. Most recently human rights groups estimate that the death toll of the 2026 protests has reached more than 7000, ranging from protesters to bystanders, many of whom were under the age of 18. Getting an accurate number is extremely difficult because the Iranian government enforced an internet blackout during the protests, leaving communications heavily censored or completely disabled.

On the other hand, Iran’s current government has made Iran one of the most important anti-imperialist countries of the Middle East. They have openly offered material support for resistance groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. Iran’s support has been key to the struggle of these nations against Western imperialism.

It is good to remember here that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Just because many want to see a change in the government in Iran does not mean that Donald Trump’s call for an end to the current regime is necessarily going to lead to a brighter future for the Iranian people, or for others in the region. Continue reading →

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Champaign’s Attempt to Criminalize Homelessness Fails after Swift Public Outcry

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Brian Dolinar

The closed downtown Champaign viaduct. Photo by the author

This is an edited version of an article originally published in Smile Politely on January 26, 2026.

On December 2, 2025, after two and a half hours of public comment from some 40 community members, Champaign City Council voted 9-0 against an ordinance banning public camping, with Mayor Deb Feinen admitting defeat at the end of the night.

The Champaign Continuum of Service Providers to the Homeless (CSPH), made up of over 40 organizations, including the City of Champaign, prepared a statement saying they had no “prior communication” about the ordinance, and were “shocked and dismayed” to find out about it the day of the vote.

What the public witnessed as a last-minute vote on December 2, just before the holidays, was actually a plan six months in the making, according to nearly 200 pages of emails I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Continue reading →

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Jesse Jackson: A Black Power icon

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Jesse Jackson at a 1975 rally for full employment in Washington, DC. From the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress

 

This article first appeared in the author’s regular column “Real Talk: A Black Perspective” in the Champaign News-Gazette, on February 22, 2026. It has been lightly edited for style.

 

On February 17, Jesse Jackson joined the ancestors. He now resides in our memories alongside our most revered warriors. He stands beside our most hallowed figures from the 20th century onward: Ida B. Wells Barnett, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) as one of our most brilliant and dedicated fighters.

 

Jesse Jackson was the last mass leader of the Black Liberation movement; he was the last national leader of Afro-America. He understood the drylongso—the everyday, ordinary working-class Black person. Perhaps more than anyone since Shabazz and King, Jackson channeled the aspirations, attitudes, and axioms of the African American people. He felt the people’s moods and shifted strategies to align himself with them.

 

And like King during his last years, Jackson took Black folk’s liberatory message to other oppressed darker nationalities, and even to working-class white folk exploited by global capital. He genuinely worked to build a rainbow coalition of “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.” Continue reading →

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Toward a Reparative Culture

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Sharon Irish

In May, 2023, about ten people gathered around a table at New Covenant Fellowship in Champaign to launch the Champaign-Urbana Reparations Coalition (CURC). Dr. Jeffrey Trask, already leading New Covenant’s efforts toward reparations for African Americans, led the meeting. Dr. Trask has continued to direct CURC as the group has grown in size and goals over the past three years.

CURC’s short-term goal is to establish and fund a Champaign County Reparations Commission for African Americans to study the need for reparations and bring recommendations for action to the public governing bodies and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). We’ve made good progress toward that goal. The city of Urbana (on June 9, 2025) and the Champaign County Board (on October 23, 2025) have already committed funds to this effort. We propose an 11-person commission. At least 51 percent of the commission is to be composed of community members, to ensure that the leadership and recommendations authentically represent African American residents of Champaign County. We await a decision about support for this commission from the city of Champaign and, possibly, the village of Rantoul. Continue reading →

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On Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Elissa Blake

Simone Weil, 1942. Image from Wikimedia Commons

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

Simone Weil

Born in 1909 to a secular Jewish family in Paris, Simone Weil is known for her independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity: “estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematizer,” according to an essay by Christy Wampole.

In her posthumously published book The Need for Roots—commissioned by the Free France government to help plan for the renewal of Europe after the scourge of Nazism; and written in 1943 shortly before her death of heart failure, brought on by refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations allowed for German-occupied France—she wrote,

“Uprootedness occurs whenever there is a military conquest. . . . It reaches its most acute stage when there are deportations on a massive scale . . . or where there is any brutal suppression of all local traditions . . . Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness. . . . For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behavior: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death . . . or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so. . . . Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted . . . doesn’t uproot others.” Continue reading →

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The Hungarian Elections: A Blow to European Right-Wing Populism?*

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Richard Esbenshade

One of the ubiquitous Fidesz campaign posters, on a main Budapest avenue. It shows mugshot-type-photos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and opposition candidate Péter Magyar; the text reads “DANGEROUS!” above, and “LET’S STOP THEM! ONLY FIDESZ, APRIL 12 [the date of the coming election] below.” Photo by Ábel Esbenshade

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been name-dropped by practically everyone on the American Right lately, from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, as a trailblazer and model for the conservative nationalist authoritarian state they covet—not to mention by MAGA’s European and even global allies. But after 16 consecutive years in power, he faces his starkest challenge yet in parliamentary elections on April 12. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party is holding an average 10-percentage-point lead over Orbán’s Fidesz in independent polling—a lead that has held steady for the past 15 months. Magyar is himself a Fidesz defector, running against the corruption, cronyism, and social-service and general economic decline of the country. Although he preaches reconciliation with the EU and restoration of Hungarian civil society, his traditional, Christian, patriotic profile is a sharp departure from that of the left-liberal cosmopolitan one of past opposition figures.

Could a prospective Orbán loss be a turning point for the fight against the populist Right in Europe and worldwide? Or just another tilt of the ship on the current stormy economic and political seas, that will inevitably tilt back the other way somewhere else (or even in Hungary)? There is a narrative afoot that the populist wave has perhaps crested: first with the loss of Orbán’s protégé the Polish PiS party in 2023 parliamentary elections; then the victory of the centrist mayor of Bucharest over a Trump-aligned candidate in the May, 2025 Romanian presidential elections (Orbán supported the losing ultranationalist, despite his strong anti-(ethnic) Hungarian positions, in turn costing the Hungarian leader support among the 1.2-million strong ethnic Hungarian community in Transylvania—who can also vote in Hungarian elections); the sharp drop in support for Geert Wilders’s favored anti-immigrant Party for Freedom in the Dutch parliamentary elections last October; and the triumph of the Portuguese Socialist António José Seguro over a right-wing populist in presidential elections last month. But the failure of the centrist Civic Platform candidate to consolidate that coalition’s control in the Polish presidential election last June is a cautionary tale, as are the victories of the right-wing Czech and Slovak prime ministers Andrej Babiš and Robert Fico last October and in September, 2023, respectively (both returning to office after previous stints). As far back as 2017, the Guardian felt compelled to headline an article “Populism Isn’t Dead”—so we’ve seen this movie before.

Continue reading →

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Just Five

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Matthew Murrey

I am more than fifty years past
being just five, but I’m trying
to remember how strange
the grown-up world was, how
the huge ones told us, “Do this.”

“Get over there.” “Right now!”
Some kids were reduced
to tears; some put a blank face
on fear. I remember that.
I remember someone pounding

on the door one night. At least
my mother was brave—not me.
I remember black and white
TV: children, uniforms, and wars,
but I was never forced to stand

in the cold without my father
while a man in a mask held me
from behind as I stared into
the salty black surface of dread.
Now I am old enough to know

history has no mercy for children—
when those in charge speak gun,
burn, and deportation, cameras find them
hands up from the ghetto, burned
by napalm, facing an unmarked car.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026) and Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019). He was a public-school librarian for more than 20 years and lives in Urbana with his partner.

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April Issue Back Cover

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Public i

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Winter Issue Front Cover

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Public i

“Modern Warfare” by Bryce Oquaye, a Lexington,
KY-based cartoonist. Used with permission

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Chicago ICE Raids: Self-Determination for All Subjugated Internal Nations

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Alen Romero

Both this and the following article were submitted before the killings of
Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents on January 7 and 24,
respectively. Here local demonstrators protest Good’s killing
on North Prospect Ave. on January 11, following a car caravan
from Lincoln Square Mall in Urbana to Lowe’s in Champaign.
Photo by Marci Adelston-Schafer, used with permission

In October of 2025 Julio Cucul-Bol, a Guatemalan citizen, was sentenced to 30 years in Illinois prisons for the fatal hit-and-run accident which claimed the lives of two white women here in Urbana. In September of 2025 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had announced on their website “Operation Midway Blitz” a targeted enforcement program aimed at Chicago. DHS said that, due to “sanctuary policies” and Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, immigration had become a problem in the state. The announcement dedicated the operation to the victims killed in that January, 2025 car crash here in Urbana.

And really, could this drama have even played out any other way? Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota, has been making quite the name for herself in the new Trump administration as the secretary of homeland security, even earning the nickname “ICE Barbie” for her habit of appearing front and center in official publicity photos and as a talking head on right-wing news media. In a recent video posted to YouTube by Benny Johnson, Noem can be seen touring a “200,000-square-foot” building she reportedly wanted to buy in the Chicago area to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing. It’s unclear whether this is a serious effort on her part or more like a social media stunt. Continue reading →

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Second Invasion of Chicago Spurs Resistance

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Bill Silver

Both this and the previous article were submitted before the killings of
Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents on January 7 and 24,
respectively. Here local demonstrators protest Good’s killing
on North Prospect Ave. on January 11, following a car caravan
from Lincoln Square Mall in Urbana to Lowe’s in Champaign.
Photo by Marci Adelston-Schafer, used with permission

For more than three months, the Chicagoland area has been under invasion by an outside armed force. At a cost estimated between $70 and $100 million, Trump has ordered an occupation of the city by federal agents, most of them with faces covered and in full riot gear—armed with guns, rifles, tear gas, pepper spray, and handcuffs, used to abduct immigrants but also to detain and harass protesters.

Undocumented persons of brown or dark skin color are the target, though a number of US citizens have been arrested as well. Street vendors, landscapers, roofers, workers lined up waiting for temporary work outside of Home Depot, immigrants going to court to renew legal green cards or work permits or even to become citizens, parents picking up their children at school—no one is safe, and fear is everywhere. One person in Franklin Park seeking to evade an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abduction was shot and killed by an ICE agent. The justification by ICE for the killing has been disproved by the actual camera footage. Continue reading →

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The Real Dividing Line in America: Class Power

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Kristin Davis

Mobilization in Minneapolis on January 23 against ICE and the killing of Renée Good. Photo by a participant, who wishes to remain anonymous; used with permission

On Wednesday, January 7, a white US citizen named Nicole Renée Good was driving near her home in Minneapolis when a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed her. Renée, as she was known to her family and friends, was a 37-year-old mother who loved poetry and cared deeply for her community. After attempting to wave ICE officers on, Good was approached by the agents and confronted before the shooting. Eyewitness accounts from neighbors as well as recorded video show the events as they unfolded for the world to see.

Soon after videos of her death were posted, Donald Trump described Renée Good as a “professional agitator” and stated that the “Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.” He went on to say, “They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE.” The Trump administration and federal officials continued to double down on the terrorism narrative, despite the eyewitness testimony and video evidence that appeared to show Renée simply trying to leave the scene.

For centuries, the ruling class in America has used race to pit the masses against each other in an effort to prevent socioeconomic unity. In the 1600s it was racial division. Today, it’s identity politics. The idea is the same: pit the working class against each other to distract from the concentration of power and wealth at the top. Continue reading →

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Resistance in a Red State: Jail Support for Immigrants Held in Missouri

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Brian Dolinar

A group of mothers demonstrates outside the Greene County jail in Springfield, Missouri, calling for Sheriff Jim Arnott to cancel his contract with ICE. Photo by Isaac Protiva

Author’s note: If local immigrants are picked up by ICE in the Urbana-Champaign area, they will likely be cycled through at least one of three major detention centers in Missouri. I spoke with activists doing solidarity work in Missouri jails and reported on them in an article that was co-published by Truthout and The Appeal on December 6 and 7, respectively. This version has been edited for length and style; you can read the original version online.

Local Communities Resist ICE by Reaching Inside Jails and Building Networks of Support

For more than 200 days, Fernando Herrera-Cruz has been sitting in a county jail in central Missouri on immigration charges. The conditions in the jail are “very bad,” Herrera-Cruz told Truthout, with the help of a translator. “There are some guards who are very racist towards immigrants.”

Herrera-Cruz, who is 25 years old, left Mexico to come to the United States to work with his brother for a roofing business in St. Louis. He was travelling in rural Missouri for a job when the trailer on his truck got a flat tire. Herrera-Cruz says a passerby stopped, began harassing him, and called the police. When local sheriff’s deputies arrived, instead of helping with the flat tire, they arrested Herrera-Cruz.

According to a Department of Justice press release, Herrera-Cruz was picked up on March 18, 2025, and charged with illegal reentry. He was arrested in Camden County, Missouri, best known for the Lake of the Ozarks, a scenic stretch of waterways surrounded by mountains.

Central Missouri is politically conservative territory in a deep-red state. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won Missouri with 58 percent of the vote. The state governor and local officials have eagerly collaborated with federal immigration agents to carry out the new administration’s mass deportation plans. Continue reading →

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Inspired by Palestinians, They Risked Their Lives to Reach Gaza by Boat: Three Americans from the Global Sumud Flotilla Describe Their Journey

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Kimberlie Kranich

Paul Reid

Carsie Blanton

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Clotfelter

A longer version of this article appeared on Kimberlie Kranich’s Substack page on November 21, 2025.

The Three Americans

Paul Reid, a graphic designer based in Portland, Oregon; Carsie Blanton, a songwriter based in New Jersey; and Jessica Clotfelter, a former Marine based in rural Windsor, Illinois: I interviewed them after they sailed for Gaza on boats in the Mediterranean Sea last September. They were part of the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla, which was organized to bring attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza during the Israeli war on Gaza that began following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Nineteen Americans made the full journey and were part of a fleet of more than 40 boats and 500 participants from around the world carrying food, medicine, and diapers to the Palestinians of Gaza. Their boats were intercepted by the Israelis and everyone was arrested and imprisoned in Israel. While held captive, Israeli forces physically and psychologically abused them before releasing and deporting them after holding most participants for five days. Continue reading →

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My Turn: An Airing of the Local Jewish Laundry

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Jake McGinty

This article was rejected by the News-Gazette as an op-ed.

To those unfamiliar with our local Jewish scene, our Champaign-Urbana community might seem small; but we in fact have four major Jewish institutions that pull a lot of weight in town: the C-U Jewish Federation, Sinai Temple, Illini Hillel, and Illini Chabad. Over the last two years, all four of these institutions have systematically suppressed Jewish voices who dared to question Israel, leaving a wake of fractures in our community we’ve yet to grasp the depth of.

The war of words, propaganda, and confusion from the community I grew up in has left me and my loved ones feeling more endangered from hate than ever before, but at the same time, I’ve never felt more protection and warmth in a community than I do from those fighting for Palestinians. Continue reading →

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If There Were a Draft, Would You Go?

Posted on 03/02/2026 by Maya Bauer

Bill in his natural element, on his farm out by Allerton Park, 2020

If there were a draft, would you go?

It is likely an easy “no” to most of us now—especially in the context of the Vietnam War, with decades of hindsight and a clearer understanding of its brutality. But in the late 1960s, the propaganda machine was powerful, dissent was dangerous, and refusing the draft came with real consequences—social and legal. Continue reading →

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