US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has quietly rescinded several internal policies that were designed to protect some of the most vulnerable people in its custody—including pregnant women, infants, the elderly, and people with serious medical conditions. The decision, outlined in a memo dated May 5 and signed by Acting …
Read More »US Border Agents Are Asking for Help Taking Photos of Everyone Entering the Country by Car
United States Customs and Border Protection is asking tech companies to send pitches for a real-time facial recognition tool that would take photos of every single person in a vehicle at a border crossing, including anyone in the back seats, and match them to travel documents, according to a document …
Read More »Trump’s Policies Are Creating Uncertainty for Fossil Fuel Companies
“Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy. It’s clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which …
Read More »States and Startups Are Suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
American nuclear is in 25-year-old Isaiah Taylor’s blood: his great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. In 2023, Taylor, who dropped out of high school to work in tech, started his own nuclear company, Valar Atomics. It’s currently developing a small test reactor, named after Taylor’s great-grandfather. But the company says …
Read More »In a Boon for Tesla, Feds Weaken Rules for Reporting on Self-Driving
Automakers and tech developers testing and deploying self-driving and advanced driver-assistance features will no longer have to report as much detailed, public crash information to the federal government, according to a new framework released today by the US Department of Transportation. The moves are a boon for makers of self-driving …
Read More »As Summer Approaches, Federal Cuts Threaten Program to Keep Vulnerable People Cool
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon, to Quillayute, Washington, broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled …
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