内容摘要：Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defense said Sunday that drones were being used for the first time at the Hajj. These can be used for surveillance and monitoring, as well as extinguishing fires.

Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defense said Sunday that drones were being used for the first time at the Hajj. These can be used for surveillance and monitoring, as well as extinguishing fires.

A data center owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, is under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pa., on Jan. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)Some state lawmakers have contested the incentives in places where a heavy influx of massive data centers has caused friction with neighboring communities. In large part, the fights revolve around the things that tech companies and data center developers seem to most want: large tracts of land, tax breaks and huge volumes of electricity and water.

And their needs are exploding in size: from dozens of megawatts to hundreds of megawatts and from dozens of acres up to hundreds of acres for large-scale data centers sometimes called a hyperscaler.While critics say data centers employ relatively few people and pack little long-term job-creation punch, their advocates say they require a huge number of construction jobs to build, spend enormous sums on goods and local vendors and generate strong tax revenues for local governments.In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are writing legislation to fast-track permitting for data centers. The state is viewed as an up-and-coming data center destination, but there is also a sense that Pennsylvania is missing out on billions of dollars in investment that’s landing in other states.

“Pennsylvania has companies that are interested, we have a labor force that is capable and we have a lot of water and natural gas,” said state Rep. Eric Nelson. “That’s the winning combination. We just have a bureaucratic process that won’t open its doors.”Kansas approved a new sales tax exemption on goods to build and equip data centers, while Kentucky and Arkansas expanded pre-existing exemptions so that more projects will qualify.

Michigan approved one that carries some protections, including requirements to use municipal utility water and clean energy, meet energy-efficiency measures and ensure that it pays for its own electricity.

Such tax exemptions are now so widespread — about three dozen states have some version of it — that it is viewed as a must-have for a state to compete.Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell

that the central bank was likely to keep its key interest rate unchanged at about 4.3% as it waited to see how Trump’s policies impacted the economy. Trump called for the Fed to cut rates on Friday.“There’s a lot of waiting and seeing going on, including by us,” Powell said. “And that just seems like the right thing to do in this period of uncertainty.”

It’s International Fact-Checking Day, an event to highlight the work of fact-checkers around the world.marking the day, Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the the International Fact-Checking Network, noted the recent challenges faced by fact-checkers, including a loss of funding and attacks on fact-checkers and their organizations.