US Republicans narrowly avoided an embarrassing scare Tuesday, holding a district in deeply conservative Tennessee with a sharply reduced majority that underscored voter unease in one of Donald Trump’s safest bastions.Retired special-operations pilot Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn by an eight-point margin, according to projections from The New York Times and CNN — a steep drop from Trump’s 22-point romp in 2024 — in a race that had unexpectedly tightened into a referendum on the president’s standing.The result in the race for Tennessee’s 7th District House seat spared Republicans a political shockwave, but the trimmed margin set off alarms in a party already fretting over its threadbare House majority and the risk of further erosion in 2026.The Republican winning margin has been between 22 and 47 points in the last seven elections for that seat.Trump was quick to celebrate Van Epps’s victory in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform.”Congratulations to Matt Van Epps on his BIG Congressional WIN in the Great State of Tennessee. The Radical Left Democrats threw everything at him, including Millions of Dollars,” Trump wrote.The Republican win comes amid a run of Democratic momentum. Just weeks ago, Democrats swept major races in Virginia and New Jersey and won the New York mayoralty, a string of victories widely interpreted as a rebuke to Trump’s return to power.The party has noticed — and so has Trump.The president held a tele-rally Monday alongside Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who campaigned throughout the day with the Republican candidate. “HE WILL BE A GREAT CONGRESSMAN and, unlike his Opponent, he cherishes Christianity and Country Music,” Trump posted soon after polls opened.Van Epps, a West Point graduate and retired special-operations helicopter pilot, is running as an unwavering Trump loyalist focused on law-and-order, border security and low taxes. – Steep drop -He faced Democratic state representative Behn, a former social worker who has pushed progressive legislation on grocery-tax relief, rural health care, abortion access and marijuana reform.During the campaign, Republicans zeroed in on Behn’s social media posts from the 2020 racial justice protests, in which she amplified “defund the police” slogans and shared a message appearing to justify burning down a police station. Tennessee’s 7th District — stretching from Nashville’s Music Row through affluent suburbs and down to conservative rural counties — normally delivers Republicans around 60 percent of the vote. But the last Emerson College/The Hill poll before the election showed Van Epps at 48 percent to Behn’s 46 percent, well within the margin of error. Early polls in October had Van Epps up by as many as eight points, but also flagged elevated Democratic enthusiasm.Republican insiders predicted a five-point Van Epps win — a steep drop from former congressman Mark Green’s 2024 landslide — and conceded that anything tighter would be alarming. A loss, however unlikely, would have electrified Democrats and forced Republican strategists to rethink their entire 2026 defense map.Both parties flooded the district with cash and operatives, with Van Epps and his outside backers spending $3.5 million on ads, according to Punchbowl News, while Democratic groups invested $2.4 million.

As planes make their final approach to Washington DC’s Dulles Airport, just below lies Ashburn, a town otherwise known as Data Center Alley — where an estimated 70 percent of all global internet traffic at any moment finds its way.Decades ago, the expanse of empty lots, forest and farmland in this corner of northern Virginia was slowly filled with suburban development. Then came the advent of the internet and an influx of data center builders. They emerged with pledges of tax revenue and investment in return for building structures that, while not pleasing to the eye, were the backbone of a digitally connected world.Why here? A combination of strategic location, robust infrastructure, pro-business policies, and affordable energy helps explain it. The Pentagon and the US government are just down the road, as were the headquarters of AOL, the early web giant that once defined being online.The benefits to Ashburn from these anonymous buildings over the past two decades are undeniable.Woven through the expanse of data centers are new stores, residential neighborhoods, an ice skating rink and public facilities that prove this town is in no way short of money.Ashburn is in Loudoun County, the richest county per capita in the United States, with towns the world over looking at the Washington suburb as a way to win the future — even if others see it as a cautionary tale.Among its 40,000 citizens, Ashburn alone has 152 data centers currently in operation over its 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles), with more bursting from the ground, part of an AI investment boom creating a race for ever more massive structures.In 2025, private companies are spending roughly $40 billion a month on data center construction in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau, much of that for megaprojects by the major AI players: Google, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI.This compares to just $1.8 billion a decade ago.- Off limits -AFP reporters were given a tour of a typical data center facility by Digital Realty, a specialized real estate company that operates 13 data centers in Ashburn.”We provide not only the space that you see here, but the power, the cooling and the connectivity,” said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty.The servers in any given data center give life to basically anything we do online.Computer rooms here — which are strictly off limits to outsiders — are filled with racks of servers for a single client or broken into separate “cages” serving smaller clients. The emergence of AI has catapulted the industry to another dimension, creating new challenges as tech giants, caught in a bitter AI rivalry, scour the globe to build AI-capable data centers quickly.These new generation buildings require unprecedented levels of power, cooling technology and engineering: servers running Nvidia’s graphics processing units, necessary for training AI, are incredibly heavy, requiring bigger and sturdier structures that need massive amounts of electricity.”If we think about Virginia alone, just the data centers last year used about as much electricity as all of New York City,” said Leslie Abrahams, deputy director of the Energy Security and Climate Change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Data servers deploying ChatGPT-like technologies run very hot and require new-generation liquid cooling—air conditioning will no longer do the job—and in most cases this means access to local water.Not surprisingly, the new necessities have made new constructions a harder sell.”Growing up, we started to see a few data centers, but honestly, not at this accelerated pace — they’re just popping up everywhere,” said Makaela Edmonds, a 24-year-old who grew up in Ashburn.Her family’s home is part of a suburban development that abuts a massive construction site.Another issue is that jobs in data centers are mostly found at the construction phase. Teams in hard hats work the sites, often around the clock. But once operational, many sites betray very little human activity.”The benefits of data centers tend to be more regional, national and global than local,” Abrahams said. – ‘Monumental growth’ -In a major shift, local politicians in northern Virginia are now running campaigns to slow the expansion instead of promising to attract more construction.For companies like Digital Realty, the challenge is to work with communities to prepare them for what bringing in data centers entails.Despite any doubts, the demand is not abating.”The growth and demand in this market is monumental,” said Sharp.

Flipping their gender setting to “male” and even posting photos with fake mustaches, a growing number of women on LinkedIn have posed a provocative challenge to what they allege is an algorithmic bias on the platform.Last month, female users began claiming that adopting a male identity had dramatically boosted their visibility on the professional networking site, setting off a chain reaction.Women adopted male aliases — Simone became Simon — swapped their pronouns for he/him, and even deployed AI to rewrite old posts with testosterone-laden jargon to cultivate what they describe as an attention-grabbing alpha persona.To add a dash of humor, some women uploaded profile photos of themselves sporting stick-on mustaches.The result?Many women said their reach and engagement on LinkedIn soared, with once-quiet comment sections suddenly buzzing with activity.”I changed my pronouns and accidentally broke my own LinkedIn engagement records,” wrote London-based entrepreneur and investor Jo Dalton, adding that the change boosted her reach by 244 percent.”So here I am, in a stick-on moustache, purely in the interest of science to see if I can trick the algorithm into thinking I am a man.”- ‘Gendered discrepancies’ -When a female AFP reporter changed her settings to male, LinkedIn’s analytics data showed the reach of multiple posts spiked compared to a week earlier.The posts cumulatively garnered thousands more impressions compared to the previous week.Malin Frithiofsson, chief executive of the Sweden-based Daya Ventures, said the LinkedIn experiment reflected “gendered discrepancies” that professional women have felt for years.”We’re at a point where women are changing their LinkedIn gender to male, swapping their names and profile photos, even asking AI to rewrite their bios as ‘if a man wrote them,'” Frithiofsson said.”And their reach skyrockets.”LinkedIn rejected accusations of in-built sexism.”Our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told AFP.However, women who saw their engagement spike are now calling for greater transparency about how the algorithm — largely opaque, like those of other platforms — works to elevate some profiles and posts while downgrading others.- ‘More successful’ -“I don’t believe there’s a line of code in LinkedIn’s tech stack that says ‘if female < promote less,'” Frithiofsson wrote in a post on the site. “Do I believe gendered bias can emerge through data inputs, reinforcement loops, and cultural norms around what a ‘professional voice’ sounds like? Yes. Absolutely.”LinkedIn’s Sakshi Jain said in a blog post that the site’s AI systems and algorithms consider “hundreds of signals” — including a user’s network or activity — to determine the visibility of posts.Rising volumes of content have also created more “competition” for attention, she added.That explanation met with some skepticism on the networking site, where more visibility could mean enhanced career opportunities or income.Rosie Taylor, a Britain-based journalist, said the boost her profile got “from being a ‘man’ for just one week” saw unique visitors to her newsletter jump by 161 percent compared to the previous week.That led to an 86 percent spike in new weekly subscriptions via LinkedIn.”Who knows how much more successful I might have been if the algorithm had thought I was a man from the start?” Taylor said.burs-ac/msp/iv