Dupont Circle, DC’s historic epicenter of LGBTQ+ life, has long been the backdrop for the annual Capital Pride Parade—until this year. The 2024 parade on Saturday, June 8 will begin at 14th and T Sts., NW, the same location as last year. However, instead of moving toward Dupont, revelers will continue down 14th Street to […]
The post The Capital Pride Parade Won’t Go Through Dupont Circle This Year first appeared on Washingtonian.
Enlarge / Google HQ. (credit: Getty Images)
Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google.
"Having a unified team across Platforms & Devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners," writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster — as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making."
Google also justifies the decision the same way it does most decisions nowadays: by saying it's AI-related. The announcement is a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging post by Pichai, titled, "Building for our AI future," and the new division is taking a chunk of Google Research along with it, specifically the group that has been working on computational photography. Pichai wants the team to live in "the intersection of hardware, software, and AI."
Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)
Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.
User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:
While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.
Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.
Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)
![Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ]](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1189385839-800x533.jpeg)
Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg/)
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.
A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.
But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.
Giving a kidney saves a life. Paying donors could fix the shortage.
What if I told you there was a way that the US could prevent 60,000 deaths, save American taxpayers $25 billion, and pay a deserving group of people $50,000 each? Would you be interested? Would you wonder why I’m pitching this to you like I’m the host of a late-night basic cable infomercial?
I am not a spokesman. I am simply a fan and supporter of the End Kidney Deaths Act, a bill put together by a group of kidney policy experts and living donors that would represent the single biggest step forward for US policy on kidneys since … well, ever.
The plan is simple: Every nondirected donor (that is, any kidney donor who gives to a stranger rather than a family member) would be eligible under the law for a tax credit of $10,000 per year for the first five years after they donate. That $50,000 in total benefits is fully refundable, meaning even people who don’t owe taxes get the full benefit.
Elaine Perlman, a kidney donor who leads the Coalition to Modify NOTA, which is advocating for the act, based the plan on a 2019 paper that estimated the current disincentives to giving a kidney (from travel expenses to lost income while recovering from surgery to pain and discomfort) amounted to about $38,000. That’s almost $50,000 in current dollars, after the past few years’ inflation.
The paper also found that removing disincentives by paying this amount to donors would increase the number of living donors by 11,500 a year. Because the law would presumably take a while to encourage more donations, Perlman downgrades that to about 60,000 over the first 10 years, with more donations toward the end as people become aware of the new incentives. But 60,000 is still nothing to sneeze at.
Due to a law signed by Richard Nixon, the US has single-payer health care for only one condition: kidney failure. Medicare picks up the bill for most patients with kidney failure, including for the main treatment of dialysis, in which an external machine replicates the functions of a kidney.
Dialysis is not only worse for patients than a transplant, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment; it’s more expensive too. In 2021, Medicare spent $33.4 billion, or almost 7 percent of its overall budget, on patients with kidney failure, much of it on dialysis treatment. Getting people transplants saves both lives and money: At about $416,000 in estimated savings each, those 60,000 transplants made possible by donor incentives over the first 10 years would save taxpayers about $25 billion.
I write about a lot of government programs, and usually there’s a tradeoff: You can do more good, but you’re going to have to spend a lot more money. Win-win scenarios where the government saves money while saving lives are virtually unheard of. We’d be foolish not to leap at this one.
The End Kidney Deaths Act is trying to solve a fundamental problem: Not nearly enough people are donating their kidneys.
In 2021, some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed with end-stage renal disease, meaning they would need either dialysis or a transplant to survive. That year saw only 25,549 transplants. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead within five years. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Most people who do get kidney transplants get them from deceased donors. There’s more we can do to promote that: One study found that about 28,000 organs annually, including about 17,000 kidneys, could be recovered from deceased donors but are not, largely because organ procurement groups and surgeons have strong incentives to reject less-than-perfect organs. People are working hard on fixing that problem, but they’d be the first to tell you we need more living donors too.
The gap between kidneys needed and kidneys available is about 10 times larger than that 17,000-a-year figure. Kidneys from living donors also last longer than those from deceased donors, and the vast majority of those who die (96.7 percent by one study’s estimate) are not even eligible to donate their organs, usually because the prospective donor is too sick or too old.
So we should be recovering the organs that are eligible. But it won’t get us all the way. We need living donors too.
But we don’t have enough — particularly enough nondirected donors. These are donors giving to a stranger, and thus donors whose kidneys can be directed to the person with the most need. While I and others have done our best to evangelize for nondirected donation, our ranks are pretty thin. In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger.
The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold. Perlman told me the Coalition to Modify NOTA is open to supporting donors who give to family or friends as well, or even providing benefits to families of deceased donors. But in part because nondirected donations are so rare, starting out by just subsidizing them saves money upfront. The act is meant as a first step toward a system of more broadly compensating donors; if it proves this approach can work, we can always expand eligibility.
The most common objection to compensating kidney donors is that it amounts to letting people “sell” their kidneys, a phrasing that even some proponents of compensation adopt. For opponents, this feels dystopian and disturbing, violating their sense that the human body is sacred and should not be sold for parts.
But “selling kidneys” in this case is just a metaphor, and a bad one at that. The End Kidney Deaths Act would not in any sense legalize the selling of organs. Rich people would not be able to outbid poor people to get organs first. There would be no kidney marketplace or kidney auctions of any kind.
What the proposal would do is pay kidney donors for their labor. It’s a payment for a service — that of donation — not a purchase of an asset. It’s a service that puts some strain on our bodies, but that’s hardly unusual. We pay a premium to people in jobs like logging and roofing precisely because they risk bodily harm; this is no different.
When you think of donor compensation as payment for work done, the injustice of the current system gets a lot clearer.
When I donated my kidney, many dozens of people got paid. My transplant surgeon got paid; my recipient’s surgeon got paid. My anesthesiologist got paid; his anesthesiologist got paid. My nephrologist and nurses and support staff all got paid; so did his. My recipient didn’t get paid, but hey — he got a kidney. The only person who was expected to perform their labor with no reward or compensation whatsoever was me, the donor.
This would outrage me less if the system weren’t also leading to tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily every year. But a system that refuses to pay people for their work, and in the process leads to needless mass death, is truly indefensible.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Enlarge (credit: Getty | George Frey)
Drug shortages in the US have reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages already tallied this year, according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).
The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.
"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."
Enlarge / BYD electric cars stand at a BYD dealership on April 05, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese manufacturer that went from making solar panels to electric cars. The company is seeking to gain a foothold in the German auto market. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) has called on US President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the US automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy."
Brown's letter to the president is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.
The EU probe won't wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute.
Enlarge / Generic, non-Western Digital SD cards. (credit: Getty)
Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week.
Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association's Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward "complex media and entertainment workflows," such as those involving cameras and laptops that use high-resolution video with high framerates, the announcement said.
The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second. It will support minimum write speeds of 10 MB/s, AnandTech reported. Minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s, the publication said.
A month after our report about The Block potentially going dark at Pike & Rose, employees inside the four-year-old food hall tell us they’re expecting it to close at the end of April. Originally planned as an all-Asian food hall with a central bar, The Block cycled through a number of different food vendors and eventually added tacos, cheesesteaks and other cuisines to the lineup. It’s not clear what’s next for this space, but we’re hearing rumors that a Japanese restaurant is moving in. Federal Realty, which owns Pike & Rose, declined to comment.
The post Bleak outlook for The Block appeared first on Store Reporter.
Enlarge (credit: Layland Masuda)
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has finalized rules for handling water supplies that are contaminated by a large family of chemicals collectively termed PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Commonly called "forever chemicals," these contaminants have been linked to a huge range of health issues, including cancers, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and developmental disorders.
The final rules keep one striking aspect of the initial proposal intact: a goal of completely eliminating exposure to two members of the PFAS family. The new rules require all drinking water suppliers to monitor for the chemicals' presence, and the EPA estimates that as many as 10 percent of them may need to take action to remove them. While that will be costly, the health benefits are expected to exceed those costs.
PFAS are a collection of hydrocarbons where some of the hydrogen atoms have been swapped out for fluorine. This swap retains the water-repellant behavior of hydrocarbons while making the molecules highly resistant to breaking down through natural processes—hence the forever chemicals moniker. They're widely used in water-resistant clothing and non-stick cooking equipment and have found uses in firefighting foam. Their widespread use and disposal has allowed them to get into water supplies in many locations.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )
A sample consumer label for home Internet service. (credit: FCC)
Starting today, home Internet and mobile broadband providers in the US are required to display consumer labels with information on prices, speeds, and data allowances.
"Today's nationwide launch of the Broadband Consumer Labels means internet service providers are now required to display consumer-friendly labels at the point of sale," the Federal Communications Commission said. "Labels are required for all standalone home or fixed Internet service or mobile broadband plans. Providers must display the label—not simply an icon or link to the label—in close proximity to an associated plan's advertisement."
The labels are required now for providers with at least 100,000 subscribers, while ISPs with fewer customers have until October 10, 2024, to comply. "If a provider is not displaying their labels or has posted inaccurate information about its fees or service plans, consumers can file a complaint with the FCC Consumer Complaint Center," an agency webpage says.
Honeybees are too valuable to go extinct. Not every species will be so fortunate.
One consequence of being a journalist since, oh, the 20th century, is that you accumulate a track record.
In the hundreds and hundreds of stories I’ve published over the last 25 years, some look eerily prescient (like this cover story from 2017 warning about a coming pandemic). Some are weird. (Did I really write a story in 2007 about bars in Tokyo where men dress up as English butlers to entertain female customers? Apparently.)
And then there are the stories that maybe haven’t aged all that well. Case in point: In 2013, I wrote a feature for Time magazine with the cover line: “A world without bees.”
The gist of it is that colony collapse disorder (CCD) — a still not fully understood syndrome that began killing honeybee colonies in large numbers beginning around the mid-2000s — was in danger of wiping out honeybees altogether in the US. And that in turn would mean catastrophe for the many crops that depend on honeybee pollination.
An advantage (or drawback) of being in journalism this long is that the predictions you made, say, 11 years ago, have time to play out. And as you may have noticed on your last visit to the supermarket, our agricultural system hasn’t collapsed.
Almonds — which are so dependent on commercial honeybee pollination that something like 42 billion bees are used during almond trees’ spring growing season — have seen their acreage more than double since 2007, when CCD was first identified. If honeybees were truly dying out, you wouldn’t see almond milk everywhere.
As the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam wrote in a delightful column last week, the US may actually have more honeybees now than it ever has before. Data from the US Department of Agriculture’s extremely detailed Census of Agriculture indicates that there were, quite precisely, 3,800,015 honeybee colonies in the US in 2022.
That’s a startling 31 percent increase from 2007, and a larger increase than any other domesticated animals. Even chickens, which usually top these sorts of data tables.
So does that mean those who (ahem) predicted a possible “world without bees” were wrong? Yes. Does it mean that everything’s all good with Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee?
Not quite, because honeybees are still dying in massive numbers. According to the most recent survey data, beekeepers lost 48.2 percent of their managed honeybee colonies between April 2022 and April 2023, chiefly due to infestations of Varroa mites and the viruses associated with them. That’s nearly 10 percentage points higher than the previous year.
So we have a situation where there are apparently more honeybee colonies than there have ever been but honeybees are still dying by the billions from CCD and assorted other threats. What gives?
A lot of the confusion, it turns out, stems from the difference between how we think about honeybees and how we actually use them.
There’s a reason the USDA is in charge of counting up how many honeybee colonies there are in the US, and not, say, the Interior Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because honeybees aren’t a wild species — they’re essentially a farmed one.
Honeybees aren’t even native to North America — they’re colonists of a kind, first brought here by European settlers in the 17th century. And while a small number of them today are used to produce honey, the vast majority are effectively harnessed as biological machines to support specialized agriculture.
Consider the great spring almond pollination. Some 80 percent of the world’s almond supply comes from California’s Central Valley with trees that need honeybees for pollination. So every spring, beekeepers from around the US bring their colonies to California to carry out that lucrative pollination. And it’s lucrative: About $4 of every $5 spent on what the USDA calls “bee fertility assistance” goes to support the almond crop.
That, in part, is why bee colony numbers have kept growing even as the toll from CCD and other threats to honeybees have continued to mount. Simply put, honeybees are so valuable that even as they continue to die in large numbers, it’s economically viable to keep replacing them. (Another contributor, as the Post story points out, is that agriculture tax breaks make it valuable for more farmers to raise a small number of bee colonies on their land.)
Rather than thinking of honeybees as a species in peril like the red wolf or the right whale, a better analogy is to factory-farmed chickens. Like chickens, honeybees are stressed to the killing point by the conditions of mass farming (in the bees’ case, the stress of being moved across the country to service California almond trees). And just like chickens — where H5N1 bird flu has been taking a severe toll on poultry farms — honeybees contend with diseases and parasites that feast on their weakened condition.
Yet both chickens and honeybees are so valuable that it’s in farmers’ economic interest to more than replace what they lose, with the result that numbers keep going up. Which is not the same thing as saying that honeybees are doing all right.
“You wouldn’t be like, ‘Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!” Eliza Grames, a biologist at Binghamton University, told the Post. “It’s kind of the same thing with honeybees.”
A lot of the coverage at the height of the beepocalypse fears — my story included — used the mass death of honeybees as a symbol of how human beings had pulled nature out of whack. But it’s not, mostly because there is nothing natural about the way we’ve used honeybees over the past few decades, just as there is nothing natural about a factory farming system that raises and kills nearly 10 billion chickens each year.
Capitalism, as it turns out, is really, really good at finding solutions to scarcity when enough money is on the line. The mid-2000s moment that CCD was first entering the public consciousness also marked the height of fears around “peak oil”: the idea that the world had entered a terminal decline in oil production, with cataclysmic results for the global economy. And there was reason to believe this was true: On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time, while US oil production had been declining for decades.
Capitalism, though, finds a way. In part because oil had become so valuable, companies and governments invested in new technologies and new efforts to find unknown or previously untapped resources. Cut to today, when the world is producing more oil than it did during the peak days of “peak oil” and the US has become the single largest oil producer ever.
So we have honeybees and we have oil because that’s what the market demands. But the market doesn’t care about the condition of those billions of hard-working bees any more than it cares about the climate consequences of keeping the oil taps flowing, because it ultimately doesn’t care about that which cannot be priced. Unless we require it to.
Which is why the real beepocalypse isn’t found among those millions of managed honeybee colonies, but among the thousands of wild, native bee species, nearly half of which are in some danger of extinction. No commercial beekeepers are coming to their rescue.
We won’t have a world without honeybees anytime soon, but we may be headed toward a world where they are the only bees.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Enlarge (credit: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Tesla has abandoned plans to develop an affordable electric Model 2, according to a report in Reuters. The news organization says it has reviewed company messages that say the affordable Model 2, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed would sell for $25,000 or less, has been axed.
Musk has been talking about an affordable Tesla Model 2 for some time now. An affordable mass-market EV was supposedly always key to the company's long-term "master plans," and in December 2023, he said the company was working on a "low-cost electric vehicle that will be made at very high volume." Then, this March, Musk told Tesla workers that the Model 2 would go into production at the company's factory in Berlin.
In light of this news, that statement certainly raises eyebrows—Reuters reports that one of its three unnamed sources told it that the decision to scrap the Model 2 was made in late February. Instead, Musk is allegedly "all in on robotaxi," Tesla's plan to create an autonomous driving system that could allow its cars to compete with Uber or Lyft without a driver in the equation.
Enlarge / This photo taken in August 2014 shows macaque monkeys in a country park in Hong Kong. (credit: Getty | Alex Ogle)
A 37-year-old man is fighting for his life in an intensive care unit in Hong Kong after being wounded by monkeys during a recent park visit and contracting a rare and deadly virus spread by primates.
The man, who was previously in good health, was wounded by wild macaque monkeys during a visit to Kam Shan Country Park in late February, according to local health officials. The park is well-known for its conservation of wild macaques and features an area that locals call "Monkey Hill" and describe as a macaque kingdom.
On March 21, he was admitted to the hospital with a fever and "decreased conscious level," health officials reported. As of Wednesday, April 3, he was in the ICU listed in critical condition. Officials reported the man's case Wednesday after testing of his cerebrospinal fluid revealed the presence of B virus.
Enlarge / Chicago City Wire is a hyper-partisan website masquerading as an outlet that does journalism. (credit: FT Montage)
The number of partisan news outlets in the US masquerading as legitimate journalism now equals genuine local newspaper sites, researchers say, as so-called pink slime operators gear up ahead of November’s presidential election.
Pink slime sites mimic local news providers but are highly partisan and tend to bury their deep ties to dark money, lobbying groups, and special interests.
NewsGuard, which rates the quality and trustworthiness of news sites, has identified 1,197 pink slime sites operating in the US as of April 1—about as many as the estimated 1,200 real news sites operated by daily local newspapers.
We eat pigs. Do we need them to process our urine too?
No one tells you, when you donate your kidney, that from that point on you’re a Kidney Guy.
When kidney things happen in the news, everyone you know will text you. When a friend of a friend is diagnosed with kidney failure, as about 136,000 Americans were in 2021, you’ll hear about it. When acquaintances are thinking about donating, you’ll get a call.
It’s been nearly eight years since I donated mine in 2016, and my Kidney Guy status has not faded.
The flurry of kidney texts started anew at the end of March when researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced that they had transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a living human for the first time.
They weren’t the first to try something like this. In 2021, researchers at NYU conducted the first pig kidney (or “pigney”) donation to a brain-dead patient, finding that the transplant took and the kidney was producing urine, the way kidneys should. They also used a genetically engineered pig to reduce the odds that the human immune system would reject the organ. In 2023, the NYU team repeated the experiment and found that a pigney could last for over two months.
But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. He luckily remains alive as of this writing and is producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.
This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.
We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.
The Mass General announcement is big news for one simple reason: Not enough humans are donating their kidneys.
While some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed in 2021 with end-stage renal disease, a condition that you need either dialysis or a transplant to survive, only 25,549 transplants took place that year. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead by 2022. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Pigneys are exciting because they represent the possibility of a world where dialysis is a relic, like iron lungs for polio.
There’s still a ways to go before this future is realized. Technically, pigneys aren’t even in the clinical trial stage — to date, experiments have been allowed under “compassionate use” rules, and those participating have either been already dead or without any other option for survival. Researchers will need years to conduct formal trials and evaluate the approach for safety and complications.
But these early indications are promising, and logistically, it would be feasible.
We can easily have farms breed 68,000 pigs a year, each giving its kidneys to two deserving human recipients as soon as they’re diagnosed with kidney failure. The US has 75 million pigs alive now for meat production; a few dozen thousand more for transplantation is a drop in the bucket.
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Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
But there’s something sad to me about the pigney moment, too.
Partly this is because I’m an animal lover who thinks there’s something wrong with killing pigs, which are intelligent animals capable of tasks like playing video games, for meat.
And while I argue there’s obviously less wrong with killing them to harvest lifesaving organs, it seems like a necessary evil at best. Maybe we’ll take one kidney each from the pigs and then send them off to live on a beautiful farm, but I have my doubts.
The bigger issue is that we should not have to rely on pigs at all.
There are more than enough human beings walking around with spare kidneys who could donate them to strangers in need. They simply choose not to.
Getting 136,000 human kidneys for transplant every year in the US is very possible.
We can make up part of the gap by collecting more organs from deceased patients. Organ procurement organizations, which distribute organs from dead people, have been very conservative about which organs they’ll use; federal agencies are now investigating them for fraud. There are likely thousands more organs we could be recovering every year by reforming these groups — but not enough to wipe out the kidney backlog.
We can’t rely on dead people, or pigs, to close the kidney gap in the near term. We need living people.
We could do more to encourage donations. Going through a nephrectomy is real work, and it deserves compensation. Many kidney donors have rallied behind a proposal to give a $10,000-a-year tax credit for every donor for five years, to make up for lost wages and other costs incurred due to donating. This would go a long way toward filling the shortage
But that kind of policy change will take time as well.
In the meantime, we could eliminate the backlog, this year, if a tiny share of adult Americans agreed to donate their kidney to someone who needs one. Not everyone is eligible, but far more than most people think are. Maybe a friend of yours could. Maybe a family member. Maybe you.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
Enlarge / This cylindrical object, a few inches in size, fell through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home in Florida last month. (credit: Alejandro Otero on X)
A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home, and NASA is on the case.
In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.
Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
Everyone in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger. It’s entirely preventable.
Every resident of Gaza is at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity — and half are at risk of famine.
Yes, you read that right: Nearly six months into the Israeli invasion after the October 7 attacks, every single Gaza resident is at risk of at least crisis-level food insecurity — defined as households having high levels of malnutrition or resorting to “irreversible” coping mechanisms like selling livestock or furniture to afford even an insufficient diet.
It’s a crisis that has unfolded at a speed utterly unprecedented this century — and also one that was repeatedly predicted and entirely avoidable if Israel were not placing severe restrictions on aid.
It comes as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a ceasefire resolution on March 25 that calls for the release of all hostage and an immediate cessation to all hostilities for the remainder of Ramadan. All members of the UNSC voted in favor of the resolution — which also demands increased humanitarian aid to Gaza — except for the US, which abstained.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, defines five levels of food insecurity: Phase 1 (minimal), Phase 2 (stressed), Phase 3 (crisis), Phase 4 (emergency), and finally, Phase 5 (famine). More than 1 million people in Gaza could face famine by mid-July if a Rafah escalation occurs, according to a new IPC report.
Soon, “more than 200 people [will be] dying from starvation per day,” a UN aid spokesperson told reporters last week.
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Prior to the October 7 attacks on Israel, the Israeli government tightly controlled the flow of goods entering Gaza, having ramped up oversight since Hamas took over the territory in 2007 and created what many international law experts call a de facto occupation. Then, two days after the Hamas attacks, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, barring fuel, food, water, and electricity from entering the territory. (Siege warfare against an occupied territory is illegal under international law.) While Israel later allowed limited supplies, including food and medical aid, to enter Gaza, and minimal sources of clean water have been restored, none of these necessities are near the level that they were before the war started.
Though the Israeli government, through its official channels and to Vox, denies the possibility of famine in Gaza and disputes numbers released in the IPC report, facts on the ground show increasing desperation for the people of Gaza.
“If you cut off food, water, and power to a population that is fully dependent on importing, this is what you get,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told Vox in an interview. “I mean, that is just math.”
Around 80 percent of people in Gaza relied on humanitarian aid prior to the invasion, putting them in an already vulnerable position.
And even a month into the Israeli invasion, there were many indications that hunger was spreading very rapidly in Gaza, Konyndyk said. According to reports from the World Food Program, by mid-November only 10 percent of the necessary food items were reaching Gaza through the Rafah border with Egypt, which at the time was the only open border crossing.
The amount of aid that has entered since has been irregular and is not nearly enough to sustain the population regardless.
“One-fourth of calories needed is what’s getting in,” Tak Igusa, professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University, a contributor to a joint Johns Hopkins and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report on death projections in Gaza due to the war, told Vox. “So just imagine having one-fourth of what you usually eat for such a long duration. And it’s getting worse.”
The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military unit charged with overseeing civilian matters in Gaza and the West Bank, told Vox in a statement that it does not block entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
While Israel is no longer maintaining an all-out blockade as a matter of policy, accounts from NGOs on the ground show that in practice Israel prevents huge amounts of aid from entering.
Oxfam published a report this week accusing Israel of deliberately doing so, with aid trucks waiting an average of 20 days to enter and Israel rejecting a warehouse’s worth of supplies, including oxygen, incubators, water, and sanitation equipment.
James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, described to Vox witnessing plentiful aid, ready and waiting to cross into the region — then seeing only a dozen trucks cross through.
Ciarán Donnelly, the International Rescue Committee’s senior vice president for crisis, response, recovery, and development, told Vox that the organization’s partners on the ground tasked with delivering medical supplies and food to Gaza have experienced delays due to Israel’s “complicated, burdensome system of often arbitrary checks on supplies that are being brought in across the land border through Rafah.”
“It has taken us an inordinate amount of time to be able to get those supplies in,” he said, even if the process has sped up somewhat recently.
COGAT said that it requires a permit to bring in certain “dual-use equipment” intended for civilian use but that could be repurposed for military purposes. Food products are not included in the list of such equipment and are admitted to Gaza after screening without a permit, the agency said. But water testing kits and chlorine, which is necessary for treating water, have been restricted, and there are reports that at least some food items, including dates, have also been caught in bureaucratic limbo.
COGAT said that Israel has worked hard to improve its security screening capacity, but that “it appears that the most significant hurdle in the way of delivering the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip residents is the United Nations organizations’ capacity to collect and distribute the humanitarian aid inside the Gaza Strip.”
But the UN, and particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, has been a target of Israel for years for its perceived anti-Israel bias. UNWRA has recently been defunded by the US and other major donor countries over allegations that some of its workers participated in the October 7 attacks. That has real consequences: UNWRA is the “mainstay of aid administration in Gaza and it’s not possible to replace it,” Donnelly said, adding that any of the organization’s workers suspected of engaging in violence should be investigated.
The fighting has also made distribution difficult, with the bombardment of infrastructure — including food infrastructure such as bakeries and flour mills — and the attacks on civilians and aid operations, Donnelly said. Israel has also accused Hamas of stealing aid; however, the US envoy overseeing the delivery of aid said in February that Israel had provided “no specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance.”
The speed at which Gaza has reached its current depth of food insecurity is practically unheard of in the 21st century.
“I can’t think of another situation in which you have the entire population of an area in this level of food insecurity in such a short space of time,” Donnelly said.
Famines have become rarer because the world produces far more food than is necessary to feed the global population, and humanitarian networks have stepped up to address gaps in access. Though the world is starting to see the effects of climate change driving global hunger, most modern famines tend to have political causes. Those include wars and authoritarian rule, which can magnify the destructive effects of natural disasters on the food supply.
The IPC has only officially designated two famines since its founding in 2004: the 2011 famine in Somalia and the 2017 famine in South Sudan. But there have also been more recent food crises that threatened to become famines.
Somalia, for example, was again on the brink of famine in 2022 and 2023. An escalating decades-long conflict made the country increasingly reliant on grain imports from Russia and Ukraine, where supply chains have been disrupted due to the ongoing war there. Humanitarian workers have faced difficulty reaching certain parts of Somalia controlled by armed insurgent groups where there were reports of food deliveries being burned and water sources being poisoned or eliminated.
Those human-made problems compounded the effects of Somalia’s worst drought in 40 years and the later severe flooding that displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Though the situation has improved, nearly a quarter of Somalia’s population is still facing acute food insecurity in 2024.
Unlike in Somalia, however, the looming famine in Gaza has no natural causes.
The share of Palestinians in Gaza facing the highest levels of food insecurity as defined by the IPC system makes this one of the worst acute hunger crises in recent memory. Even at the peak of the crisis in Somalia and amid the ongoing civil war in Yemen, there was not such a high concentration of people experiencing crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity and famine.
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If the food insecurity crisis continues on its current trajectory, more Palestinians in Gaza will die of hunger. There is also the threat of infectious diseases, which should be easily preventable, attacking the weakened immune systems of hungry people.
“What happens after famine is really simple: People die in very large numbers,” Donnelly said. “The cause of deaths will start to shift. Whereas the majority of the 31,000 deaths so far have been from the conflict, what we will see is not just large numbers of people dying of hunger, but dying of preventable diseases, particularly children.”
Those diseases include diarrhea, pneumonia, measles, cholera, and meningitis — “diseases that people don’t need to be dying from in the 21st century,” he added. Similarly, some of the 43,000 excess deaths that occurred during Somalia’s droughts in 2022 were likely from such diseases.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University project that by August, absent a ceasefire, the number of excess deaths in Gaza — including from disease outbreaks — could reach 67,000 and potentially exceed 85,000 if there’s an escalation in the conflict. And an escalation seems likely: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims he has no choice but to order an imminent ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost region.
The Johns Hopkins researchers also estimate that as many as 46 percent of children in Gaza between the ages of 6 months and 5 years could suffer from malnutrition by August. That would represent a nearly 16-fold increase from the prewar rate of malnutrition.
NGOs, the United Nations, and international law experts have warned that Israel’s direct role in Gaza’s acute hunger crisis could amount to a war crime.
The Biden administration has insisted to its ally Israel that more humanitarian aid must be allowed into Gaza and, absent its cooperation, is coordinating airdrops of food into Gaza and constructing a port on the coast to facilitate international aid shipments by sea — moves that will provide some small help, but that some critics say simply cannot match the scale and immediacy of the need.
“The airdrops and the recent amount of food coming in through World Central Kitchen — every little bit helps,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told Vox. But “the US plan to have a pier — that may take another four to six or even eight weeks to develop that. It’s too long. And so to address the extreme situation right now, there needs to be a massive amount of trucks coming in and it can only be through land.”
After vetoing multiple ceasefire proposals in the UN Security Council, the US abstained from Monday’s Security Council vote, which represents a shift from its previous position. This will likely further strain the relationship between Israel and its most important ally; Netanyahu has threatened to cancel an upcoming delegation to the White House should the US do anything but veto a ceasefire resolution, Reuters reported.
While that presents a significant shift in US policy over the nearly six months of the war, the White House has failed to use the real, powerful leverage it has to push for a ceasefire or even more aid — leverage that could include curtailing weapons shipments and funding to Israel, as many advocates have pointed out.
“The US has resorted to these expensive, complicated, frankly desperate workarounds to get aid into Gaza and to be seen as getting aid into Gaza,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the US program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox.
And what limited pressure the US has put on Israel does not appear to be dissuading Netanyahu’s government from proceeding with a likely incursion into Rafah. If that does happen, things are only likely to get worse, meaning more preventable deaths.
“So many, many warnings have been made,” Elder said. “And history will judge very, very poorly those who had the decision-making power — and we must be very clear, children are suffering, children are dying, dehydrating to death, because of decisions made by those in power. Children’s pain is avoidable. Their loss is avoidable.”
A version of this story was featured in Vox’s daily flagship newsletter, Today, Explained. If you’re interested in receiving more stories like it — plus all the day’s key news — sign up here.
Update, March 25, 12:05 pm ET: This story, originally published March 25, has been updated with news of the UN ceasefire resolution passing.
All signs point to ISIS in a terrorist attack that killed over 130 people near Moscow, but Vladimir Putin is connecting it to the war in Ukraine.
The deadliest terror attack in Russia in decades may not be directly related to the ongoing war in Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have implications for the future of that conflict. In fact, the horrific attack has already become one more battle in the ongoing information war between Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s Western allies, including the US. The nature and timing of the attack, as well as its alleged perpetrators, have all combined to make this tragedy fertile ground for conspiracy theories and motivated reasoning.
At least 133 people were killed in the attack on the Crocus City Hall theater just outside Moscow on Friday, where a concert by the veteran Russian rock band Piknik was happening. A group of gunmen wearing tactical gear and carrying automatic weapons shot concertgoers and set fire to the building. Grisly videos circulating on social media seen by Vox show the attackers firing on defenseless people crouched on the ground.
With over 100 people wounded, the death toll is likely to rise, but it is already higher than the 132 people killed in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis — an event with which it shared some disturbing resemblances — and is likely to be the second-worst terrorist attack in Russian history after the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in the country’s North Caucasus region, which resulted in more than 300 deaths.
The Islamic State terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the attack and US intelligence officials have said they believe it was specifically the work of the group’s Afghan affiliate, the Islamic State in Khorasan (ISIS-K). (Khorasan refers to a historic region that includes parts of modern Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan.)
On Sunday, ISIS corroborated its claim by releasing bodycam footage of the attack, which has been verified as genuine by the BBC.
The US embassy in Moscow had issued a warning on March 7 advising US citizens to avoid large gatherings due to reports that “extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.” Russian authorities also claimed earlier this month to have foiled an ISIS attack on a synagogue in Moscow.
The four suspects, whom officials have identified as citizens of Tajikistan, appeared in court on Sunday, where they appeared to be badly injured.
Colin Clarke, a terrorism analyst with the Soufan Center, said that evidence suggested the four gunmen had experience and training. “If you look at the videos of this attack, the way that they shot, and even the spacing between them when they carry out the attacks, it’s clear they were well-trained,” Clarke told Vox. “It doesn’t seem like these were just local guys who were imbibing ISIS propaganda and decided to do something. I would put money on them being trained in Afghanistan.”
Why would an ISIS offshoot attack Russia? Islamist extremist groups like ISIS-K have long-standing grievances against Moscow dating back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as the Russian Federation’s brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Chechnya and the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s and its support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. More recently, ISIS-K carried out a suicide attack targeting the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022.
The simple explanation that ISIS was responsible would be an inconvenient one for President Vladimir Putin. It would mean that he had ignored the US warning of an imminent attack, which at the time he dismissed as “blackmail” intended to destabilize Russian society. (In fairness, he would definitely not be the only world leader to recently ignore such a warning.)
It would also be another instance, along with the remarkably detailed US warnings of Russian war plans ahead of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when America’s spies seemed to know more about what was happening in Russia than Putin’s own security services.
So it’s not that surprising that Russian authorities are already assigning blame elsewhere.
In a video statement released Saturday, Putin hinted that the attack was linked to Ukraine, saying that the suspects had been detained in the western Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, and “where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the border.”
The Russian government has not presented any evidence of a link. None of the videos that are circulating of the detained suspects contain any mention of Ukraine, including a particularly grisly one in which guards appear to cut a prisoner’s ear off. (This video, posted on Russian Telegram channels, has not been verified.)
There are also some indications the suspects might actually have been fleeing to Belarus, which also borders Bryansk. The Latvia-based Russian opposition news site Meduza reported, citing state media employees, that Russian news outlets have been instructed to emphasize possible Ukrainian involvement in the attacks.
Putin has not yet publicly mentioned any ISIS connection to the attack. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused the US of using the “bogeyman” of ISIS as cover for its “wards” in Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials have denied any involvement, with Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeting, “Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with” the attacks. He added: “Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods. It is always pointless.”
Earlier on Friday, Ukraine’s military intelligence services had gone further than that, posting a statement calling the attacks “a planned and deliberate provocation by the Russian special services at the behest of Putin. Its purpose is to justify even tougher strikes on Ukraine and total mobilization on Russia.”
The statement noted that the attacks come shortly after Putin’s reelection as president and just hours after the publication of an interview in which Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had described the conflict in Ukraine as a “war” for the first time, rather than the Russian government’s preferred euphemism: special military operation. In other words, the attacks would be used to justify a new, more brutal phase of the war for Putin’s new term in office.
To be clear: There is little evidence to suggest at this point that the attacks were planned by Kyiv or were a “false flag” operation by Russia. It seems far more likely that ISIS, the group that has claimed responsibility and has shown itself in the past to have both the means and motivation to pull off precisely this kind of attack, was the actual perpetrator. In addition to the attempted Moscow synagogue attack, a pair of ISIS-K suicide bombings killed nearly 100 people in the Iranian city of Kerman in January.
But there are several reasons why it will be particularly easy for partisans on both sides in the Ukraine-Russia war to believe whatever they want.
First: while Ukraine has never targeted Russian civilians like this and would risk losing all of its international support if it did so, officials like intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov have been fairly open about helping, though not actively coordinating with, anti-Putin Russian militant groups like the Russian Volunteer Corps and Freedom of Russia Legion. Both groups have carried out raids in Ukraine-Russia border regions, including in recent weeks.
Some of the leaders of these groups have extremist ties of the far-right variety, rather than to Islamist militants. Some Russian media outlets have also suggested the Russia Volunteer Corps may have been involved in the Crocus attack, though the group has denied it. Still, the notion of Ukraine backing militant attacks on Russian soil will not seem far-fetched to Russians nor to their international supporters.
On the other side, those suggesting it was a Kremlin inside job will point to the widespread allegations, with some compelling evidence, that it was the Russian government that was behind a series of apartment bombings in 1999 that were blamed on Chechen separatists.
Those bombings, which caused the deaths of more than 300 people, provided a pretext for Russia’s second war in Chechnya and were a key event in the political rise of then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The Russian government was also accused by Western intelligence services of orchestrating so-called “false flag” attacks in eastern Ukraine to justify the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Russian government already appears to be using Ukraine’s supposed involvement for propaganda value. “If it is established that these are terrorists of the Kyiv regime … All of them must be found and mercilessly destroyed as terrorists, including officials of the state that committed such an atrocity,” said former president and frequent Kremlin attack dog Dmitry Medvedev.
But as Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King’s College London, noted, “The fact that the Kremlin will use the attack for political purposes does not mean it was a false flag.”
The attack has also focused an enormous amount of attention on the US embassy warning from earlier this month. US intelligence agencies operate under a policy known as “duty to warn,” which requires them to warn potential victims, including non-Americans, of imminent lethal threats, as long as it does not compromise sources and methods of intelligence gathering.
There’s no exception for US adversaries: The US privately warned Iran’s government ahead of the ISIS bombings in January. But in this case, many Russian officials and media figures have instead seen the warning as evidence that the US was partly responsible for the attack.
Finally, the nature of ISIS-K lends itself to conspiracy theories.
The group simply doesn’t map neatly onto either the West’s or Russia’s prevailing geopolitical narratives. Yes, the group has now apparently attacked Russia and Iran this year, but before that, its best known attack was a bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 Americans and more than 100 Afghans in the end stages of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Just a few days ago, German authorities arrested two Afghan ISIS supporters allegedly planning an attack on the Swedish parliament.
Rather than taking sides in the clash between Russia and the West, ISIS’s propaganda has welcomed the war in Ukraine as the opening salvo in “crusader against crusader wars” that they hope will help destroy all their enemies.
“If you think about Iran, the US, and Russia, we’re always talking about great power competition, but ISIS hates all of those countries for different reasons,” Clarke said. Similarly, after the attack in Iran in January, Iran initially blamed the US and Israel despite ISIS claiming responsibility and the group’s long history of targeting Iran.
All of these factors contribute to a situation where it can feel like, as the title of a prominent book on Russia’s media environment puts it, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”
In normal times, the Russian state would be expected to carry out a brutal campaign of retaliation against the group responsible for the attack, as it did in the Caucasus after previous attacks. Right now, however, thanks to the war in Ukraine, Russia’s military and security services have little manpower to spare. Instead, we get Medvedev’s threats against Ukraine and other Russian officials calling for the country to reinstate the death penalty.
Even if ISIS was responsible for the attacks — and there’s every indication that they were —Ukrainians as well as Putin’s remaining opponents inside Russia are more likely to be targeted by the Kremlin’s response.
Update, March 25, 11:00 am: This story was originally published on March 23 and has been updated to reflect news about the identities and nationalities of the alleged attackers.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)
The US Department of Justice is angry about green message bubbles. Announcing today's antitrust lawsuit against Apple, US Attorney General Merrick Garland devoted a portion of his speech to the green bubbles that appear in conversations between users of iPhones and other mobile devices such as Android smartphones.
"As any iPhone user who has ever seen a green text message, or received a tiny, grainy video can attest, Apple's anticompetitive conduct also includes making it more difficult for iPhone users to message with users of non-Apple products," Garland said while announcing the suit that alleges Apple illegally monopolized the smartphone market.
The attorney general accused Apple of "diminishing the functionality of its own messaging app" and that of messaging apps made by third parties. "By doing so, Apple knowingly and deliberately degrades quality, privacy, and security for its users," Garland said. "For example, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages, the text appears not only as a green bubble, but incorporates limited functionality."
Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook leaving the US Capitol building on Thursday, September 14, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post )
The US Department of Justice sued Apple today, alleging that the company violated antitrust laws by restricting rivals' access to iPhone features and monopolizing the smartphone market.
The lawsuit in US District Court for the District of New Jersey alleged that "Apple suppresses... innovation through a web of contractual restrictions that it selectively enforces through its control of app distribution and its 'app review' process, as well as by denying access to key points of connection between apps and the iPhone's operating system (called Application Programming Interfaces or 'APIs'). Apple can enforce these restrictions due to its position as an intermediary between product creators such as developers on the one hand and users on the other."
The DOJ is seeking an order determining that Apple has illegally monopolized the smartphone market in the US. The agency also wants the requested order to block Apple from continuing its allegedly anticompetitive practices.
Enlarge / Just some of the unused Wonder Effect ideas submitted via sticky note by the development team. (credit: Kyle Orland)
SAN FRANCISCO—When thinking about what makes 2D Mario games special, Super Mario Bros. Wonder director Shiro Mouri recalled the excitement he felt playing the original Super Mario Bros., discovering things like the warp zone and hidden vine blocks for the first time. Across decades of 2D Mario games with similar designs, though, it has been harder and harder to make a game that feels like it's "full of secrets and mysteries," as he said during a Game Developers Conference presentation this week.
"At some point, all of this has become normal," Mouri said of once-fantastical Mario game elements like mushrooms and coin blocks that have now become staples of the games.
Recapturing a world full of "secrets and mysteries" was the guiding principle for the development of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mouri said, but it took a while to figure out the new perspective necessary to get to that point. When Mouri prototyped an item that warped Mario to a new location, for instance, producer Takashi Tezuka said the effect "isn't so different from how it's always been. What if we changed the environment instead?"
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
This week, the US Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency have published new fuel efficiency rules that will go into effect in 2026. The rules favor both battery-electric vehicles and also plug-in hybrid EVs, but not to the degree as proposed by each agency last April.
Those would have required automakers to sell four times as many electric vehicles as they do now. This was met with a rare display of solidarity across the industry—automakers, workers, and dealers all called on the White House to slow its approach.
Under the 2023 proposals, the DOE would change the way that Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations are calculated for model years 2027–2032 (which would take place from partway through calendar year 2026 until sometime in calendar year 2031), and the EPA would implement tougher vehicle emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for the same time period.
In a billowing white tent on the edge of the National Mall, you can see your next Metro train coming—it’s just not in motion yet. WMATA opened its Fleet of the Future exhibit on Wednesday, allowing the public to tour a mock-up of its upcoming line of trains, dubbed the 8000 series, until April 3. […]
The post You Can Now Tour Metro’s Upcoming 8000 Series Trains on the Mall first appeared on Washingtonian.
Enlarge (credit: DigiPub | Moment)
Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.
Enlarge / "Trimming the Herbs," mapped above, is all that stands between "Team 0%" and its ultimate goal of clearing every Super Mario Maker level. (credit: Is SMM Beaten Yet?)
As of late 2017, there were almost 85,000 "uncleared" levels in the original Wii U Super Mario Maker (SMM)—levels that had never been beaten by anyone except for their original uploaders. As of this writing, a group of persistent players gathered under the banner of "Team 0%" has spent years narrowing the list of uncleared levels to a single entry—a devious, Super Mario World-styled Bob-omb bounce-and-throw gauntlet named "Trimming the Herbs" (the second-to-last uncleared level went down on Thursday, March 14, as noted on the excellent "Is SMM Beaten Yet?" tracker).
Given enough time, Team 0% would undoubtedly be able to bring down SMM's "final boss," as it were. But the collective effort to finally and completely "beat" SMM has an external deadline: April 8, the day Nintendo has announced that it plans to finally shut down the aging Wii U's gameplay servers.
The next three weeks will determine whether Team 0% can live up to its moniker or if this one final level will leave the team just short of its ultimate achievement. "I’d never think we would be this close to actually achieving this goal," Team 0% founder Jeffie told Ars Technica recently. "How often does a community of gamers do something like this?"
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jenny Evans)
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday finalized a ban on the only type of asbestos still used in the US, chrysotile asbestos. This move was decades in the making.
Chrysotile asbestos, aka "white asbestos," is still imported, processed, and used in the US for diaphragms (including those used to make sodium hydroxide and chlorine), sheet gaskets, brake blocks, aftermarket automotive brakes/linings, other vehicle friction products, and other gaskets, the EPA notes.
Exposure to asbestos is known to cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer. And asbestos is linked to more than 40,000 deaths annually just in the US.
Last Monday morning, I started my shift like I do many others—scrolling through Twitter (fine, X) looking for a story. Then something caught my eye: an announcement from WMATA proclaiming “HOORAY! After 14 years of hard work, all 169 Metrorail restrooms have been completely renovated.” Now, as someone who was in the top 2% of […]
The post I Toured Metro’s “Newly Renovated” Bathrooms. Here’s What I Found. first appeared on Washingtonian.
You know that line, “every accusation is a confession?” For no reason at all, that’s coming to mind all of a sudden. No reason.
Anyway, a decade ago, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore wrote a fantastic piece for Foreign Affairs on “The End of Hypocrisy” (which we also wrote about here at Techdirt). They argued that, even as many people mock American hypocrisy around the world, at least the plausible deniability of Americans taking the moral high ground was an incredibly powerful and effective tool of soft pressure. And how it was squandered with each revelation of just how little Americans respected the sovereignty of other nations, and regularly abused our access to internet backbones to spy on others.
The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.
Speaking of all that: what interesting timing to have Reuters break the news that the Trump administration gave the go ahead on a covert program by the CIA to try to use social media inside China to turn the public against the government and cause chaos.
Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
I am also suddenly reminded of how the US government ran this big campaign for a few years about how no one should use Chinese networking equipment from companies like Huawei. This is despite the fact that a comprehensive White House report could find no evidence of nefarious behavior. Oh, but also, how some of the Ed Snowden docs revealed that the US government was actually installing secret backdoors in Cisco networking equipment to spy on people elsewhere?
Of course, there are a few different ways to look at this. One argument is that “well, we’re doing this, so we know that they must be too, and that justifies the US’s actions to try to cut them off.” And that would be maybe more compelling if there were more serious evidence that any of this actually works and that it doesn’t look absolutely ridiculous when it inevitably leaks out later.
The other way of looking at it is that the US comes off as a bunch of hypocrites who repeatedly squander whatever moral high ground they have on these arguments. As Farrell and Finnemore highlighted in that piece a decade ago, US foreign policy and the soft power it traditionally wielded relied heavily on (1) US politicians believing in the principles of freedom and openness we espoused, (2) our allies being able to back us up on those claims, and (3) our adversaries looking weak and pathetic in trying to go up against those principles.
But with each revelation of the US doing exactly what they accuse others of doing, all of that falls apart. US politicians making such claims look ever less sincere. Our allies can no longer continue to claim the moral high ground with a straight face. And our adversaries use our own stupid policies to justify their even worse ones.
I know (because I heard it all the time) that some people will say “but our adversaries don’t need any justification to do bad stuff.” That’s only true to some extent. Global pressure can be effective, but it’s harder to use that pressure legitimately when the US is doing something just as bad. In making it easier for our adversaries to justify their bad actions by pointing to similar activities by the US, it makes it even easier for them to go further, and to convince others to join them.
As that article noted towards the end, the solution should be that the US should act in a way that lives up to its rhetoric, rather than just being pathetically hypocritical.
A better alternative would be for Washington to pivot in the opposite direction, acting in ways more compatible with its rhetoric. This approach would also be costly and imperfect, for in international politics, ideals and interests will often clash. But the U.S. government can certainly afford to roll back some of its hypocritical behavior without compromising national security. A double standard on torture, a near indifference to casualties among non-American civilians, the gross expansion of the surveillance state — none of these is crucial to the country’s well-being, and in some cases, they undermine it.
The US’s attempts to use social media in China as a propaganda tool does not appear to have been very effective. The end result looks pretty silly and helps justify China doing very dangerous shit:
The covert propaganda campaign against Beijing could backfire, said Heer, the former CIA analyst. China could use evidence of a CIA influence program to bolster its decades-old accusations of shadowy Western subversion, helping Beijing “proselytize” in a developing world already deeply suspicious of Washington.
The message would be: “‘Look at the United States intervening in the internal affairs of other countries and rejecting the principles of peaceful coexistence,’” Heer said. “And there are places in the world where that is going to be a resonant message.”
But, coming at the same time that we’re looking to ban TikTok (or force its divestiture from a company based in China), maybe we should actually consider that suggestion from Farrell and Finnemore again. Maybe we should try to live up to our ideas. Maybe we should believe that if America is about freedom, and freedom is better than the authoritarian tyranny of China, we should be able to resist whatever they wish to pull with any social media propaganda campaign they could cook up.
Or do we think so little of Americans in general, that we think they won’t be able to resist the allure of this one social media app and its algorithm? If American freedom can’t resist an app of short videos, mostly used by kids, what kind of freedom is it really?
Enlarge (credit: Ladislav Kubeš)
If you have a dog or cat, chances are you’ve given your pet a flavored chewable tablet for tick prevention at some point. What if you could take a similar pill to protect yourself from getting Lyme disease?
Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing such a pill for humans—minus the tasty flavoring—that could provide protection against the tick-borne disease for several weeks at a time. In February, the Irvine, California–based biotech company announced results from a small, early-stage trial showing that 24 hours after taking the drug, it can kill ticks on people, with the effects lasting for up to 30 days.
“What we envision is something that would protect you before the tick would even bite you,” says Bobby Azamian, CEO of Tarsus.
