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.
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.
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.
Going low
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.
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.
Honeybees aren’t what you think
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.)
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.”
Bees are what they’re worth
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.
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.
Melissa Mattola-Kiatos, RN, removes the pig kidney from its box to prepare for transplantation as part of Mass General’s historic pig kidney transplant surgery on March 16, 2024. | Massachusetts General Hospital
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.
Why pigneys are a game changer
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.
Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful.
We shouldn’t need pigneys
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.
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.
Displaced Palestinians collect food donated by a charity before an iftar meal, the breaking of the fast during Ramadan, in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on March 22, 2024. | Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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 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.
“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.”
Experts have warned about this crisis since the beginning of the war
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.”
Famines were supposed to be in decline worldwide — but not in Gaza
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.
Famine in Gaza would lead to even more death
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.
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.
People light candles in honor of the victims of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack on March 23, 2024, in Krasnororsk, Russia. | Getty Images
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.
Moscow points at Ukraine
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.
Post-fact warfare
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.
Who is ISIS-K
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.
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?"
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.
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. […]
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?"
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 […]
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.
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?
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.
Is The Block leaving Pike & Rose? It certainly looks that way. The festively decorated food hall, which opened in 2019, includes a large bar and a rotating roster of mostly Asian vendors. While The Block is currently open and still listed as a tenant on the Pike & Rose website, its name has been removed from the property’s leasing brochure and its 8,500-square-foot space is now marked “TBD.” In the world of commercial real estate, “TBD” usually means a new tenant is on the way. Neither The Block’s owners nor Federal Realty could be reached for comment at press time. If we hear back, this article will be updated.
If you don’t know where to go when you need to go, some relief is on the way: High-tech toilet startup Throne Labs is bringing up to ten new public restrooms to DC this spring. The freestanding and free-to-use bathrooms will be in operation until the end of September (with the possibility of an extension) […]
This man is no longer one of the most powerful policymaking officials in the United States. | Courtesy of the Senate Judiciary Committee
The federal judiciary’s new rules target “judge shopping.” That’s terrible news for Matthew Kacsmaryk and other partisan judges.
Plaintiffs hoping to reshape federal or state policies will no longer be allowed to choose which judge will hear their case, at least in federal court. A new policy announced Tuesday bythe Judicial Conference of the United States, a government body that sets policy for federal courts, targets rules in some federal courts that the conference said “risked creating an appearance of ‘judge shopping.’”
At least in the short term, this policy is a massive victory for the Biden administration — and, indeed, for anyone who believes that federal and state policies should not rise and fall based on one outlier judge’s partisan views.
Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, has been very aggressive in bringing lawsuits that challenge Biden administration policies before right-wing judges who have then issued sweeping, nationwide orders blocking those policies — sometimes on highly dubious grounds that are reversed, months later, by the Supreme Court.
Among other things, this practice turned Matthew Kacsmaryk, an obscure advocate on the Christian right appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Northern District of Texas, into one of the most powerful government officials in the entire country. Because Kacsmaryk is the only federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas, any case filed in Amarillo was automatically assigned to him.
The Judicial Conference’s new policy is unlikely to strip Kacsmaryk, or any other judge, of jurisdiction over any case currently on his docket. But it does place significant new limits on litigants’ power to choose which judge will hear any new case that they file in the future.
How cases are assigned to judges in federal courts
The federal judiciary is divided into 94 different geographic districts, which normally encompass either all or part of a state. In many districts, newly filed cases are assigned randomly. So, for example, if a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a district with three Democratic appointees and three Republican appointees, they would have an equal chance of drawing a judge from either party (although some judges are partially retired and have a lighter caseload).
Some districts, however, have used different rules to assign cases — and one very notable example is the United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas. That district, like some others, is subdivided into multiple “divisions,” some of which only have one sitting judge. Any civil case filed in one of these Northern District of Texas divisions was automatically assigned to one judge: Kacsmaryk.
It didn’t take long for lawyers representing Republican causes generally, and the religious right in particular, to figure this out. Kacsmaryk’s courtroom became a magnet for lawsuits attacking federal policies, and he proved to be a rubber stamp for nearly any court order that a conservative litigant asked him to issue.
According to the Judicial Conference, the new policy concerns “all civil actions that seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions.” It does not apply to all lawsuits, but it does apply to any in which the plaintiff seeks either a “declaratory judgment” saying that a federal or state policy is invalid or “any form of injunctive relief” changing such a policy.
In these cases, “judges would be assigned through a district-wide random selection process.” So, a case seeking to block a federal policy that is filed in Amarillo would be randomly assigned to one of the 11 active judges or one of the six senior judges who sit in that district. It would not be automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk.
A spokesperson for the Judicial Conference of the United States confirmed via email that this new policy applies “to all 94 US district courts.”
The Judicial Conference did not explain why it decided to hand down this new policy now, but members of both parties have long complained about judge shopping — a problem that also arises in apolitical cases.
The press release announcing the new policy, for example, points to a November 2021 letter from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and then-Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that “raised concerns about a concentration of patent cases filed in single-judge divisions.” It also notes that Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concerns about judge shopping in patent cases in his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) has also introduced legislation seeking to curb judge-shopping.
Over the long term, the Judicial Conference’s new policy is likely to benefit both Democrats and Republicans. So long as the Supreme Court is controlled by Republican appointees, however, it is likely to be more of a boon for Democrats: The Court’s GOP-appointed majority normally moved very swiftly to block lower court decisions that targeted Trump administration initiatives, while it has often left decisions blocking Biden administration policies in place for months.
The policy will prevent litigants challenging federal and state policies of all kinds from handpicking judges that they know will rule in their favor, but it will not be a panacea against all litigants shopping around for favorable judges. There will still be districts where the judges were appointed mostly by Democrats or mostly by Republicans — the Northern District of Texas is still overwhelmingly Republican, for example — and litigants will no doubt continue to choose districts based on where they think they will receive a favorable hearing.
Federal appeals courts (and the Supreme Court) are ordinarily supposed to defer to the factual findings reached by trial judges. So a litigant who can choose their trial judge gains a lasting advantage even if the case is appealed.
The policy also does nothing to protect against litigants who choose where to file a case based on which appeals court will eventually hear it. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which hears federal cases arising out of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, is dominated by Republican appointees closely aligned with the MAGA movement. So Republicans like Paxton can still benefit from this right-wing court, even if they can no longer ensure that all of their trials will be heard by judges like Kacsmaryk.
Still, this is a significant policy change — one that will quell at least some concerns that federal litigation is a rigged game.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic turn down the dial on our loudest desires — seemingly for more than just food.
Marco Leyton, PhD, assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. Plus, it wasn’t for him. Definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — for science.
Leyton had jumped through many hoops to get to this point — getting an okay from the Canadian equivalent of the FDA, exempting him from criminal prosecution, and clearing his own university’s ethics approval. “I wasn’t asking people to bring in their own cocaine,” Leyton, an addiction neurobiologist at McGill University in Canada, tells me. Now that could be unethical.
It was all in pursuit of one of the deepest questions that haunts us as individuals: “Why do we really care about some things and not too much about others?” as Leyton says.
Really: Why do we want what we want?
With the drugs in hand, Leyton ran a small study for some insight. It involved just eight participants, but it’s noteworthy because it’s a relatively rare human experiment in a field that more commonly tests rodents (which have found similar results as the human studies).
Plus, it’s just wild. I have never read these words in an academic journal before: Participants “were presented with cocaine paraphernalia consisting of a mirror, a razor, a straw, and a bag with 3.0 mg/kg of cocaine hydrochloride.”
The study took place over four days. And while the cocaine is the eyebrow-raising component of the study, a special protein shake was the actual key.
On any given day, half the participants were randomly assigned to ingest a shake that was missing a key ingredient called phenylalanine, an important amino acid that helps your bodymanufacture the neurotransmitter dopamine. That’s the chemical released when your brain is expecting, or sometimes demanding, a reward, like a sweet treat or, well, cocaine.
So, if you’re like these study participants, and had been fasting before this experiment, and then only given a food source without phenylalanine, your body chemistry would subtly change. Leyton thought the participants who consumed this weird breakfast would have less dopamine available in their brains.
After their shake, the participants were then invited to do blow. Or, as the study plainly states, the participants “used the razor to divide the powder into three equal lines.”
Too many people have been put in an unfair battle against their wants. They’ve been told to somehow exert willpower over a system they have little conscious awareness of and control over.
They snorted it.
But remarkably, on the phenylalanine-free shake days, Leyton says “they decreased their craving for cocaine.” They said they were less interested in taking it.
But it was more than that: The special shake “decreased the ability of the cocaine itself to produce more desire for the drug,” he says.
And strangely, “it had no effect on the drug-induced euphoria,” Leyton says. In other words, they still liked cocaine. They just didn’t want it as much.
While talking to Leyton about his cocaine study, I wondered: Why isn’t the phenylalanine-free shake The Answer to addiction, to overeating, to similar problems of compulsive consumption?
Well, for one, because it’s impractical. Phenylalanine is in just about all protein food sources. So unless someone wants to solely eat speciality lab-generated shakes their whole lives, that’s not going to work.
But also because Leyton would expect it to decrease the motivation to do anything. “So now the whole world becomes kind of blah,” Leyton says. And what fun is that?
The reason why this cocaine study is so interesting is because it reveals where and how desire hides in the brain.
And desire is important. It’s a fulcrum on which our well-being balances.
Desire — for food, companionship, fun, sex, whatever — can bring excitement, joy, and even purpose to life. It’s the Good Stuff! But too much craving is the seed of addiction, of unhealthy eating habits, of the shameful feeling of being torn between what’s good for us and what we crave.
We cannot live without wants, yet we cannot be overcome with them.
The solution that has eluded researchers for a long while is a trick to help people reset the balance. A trick that turns down the dial of desire enough to be effective, but not too much, preserving our motivation to find joy in the world. And one that could work for a wide array of issues, including substance use disorders and overeating.
Scientists are starting to see the potential for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic to pull off this trick.
You may be more familiar with some of their brand names, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro. Or their generic names: semaglutide and tirzepatide. This class of drugs was first approved for use in diabetes, then for weight loss, and it is growing in popularity. In the last three months of 2022, clinicians wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for these drugs in the US, according to the health care market research firm Trilliant.
The drugs have made headlines for their use among the glitterati, and have been provoking important conversations about how society views and treats people with higher weights.
But they are also part of an emerging story that’s potentially much bigger: There are faint, early glimmers that they could be used for drug addiction, too.
We don’t fully understand how these drugs work. But they seem to be tapping deep into the brain’s wanting system and shining a light on a silent aspect of what it means to be human: What we want, and why we want it, is often not in our conscious control.
What is want?
After talking to several researchers for this story, I realized the English word “want” is imprecise to describe the psychological phenomenon Leyton has been describing.
“It’s not your desire for world peace,” says Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not my desire to exercise or lose weight.” Those are “real desires,” he assures. But they are not behind the sort of behavior that is facilitated by the dopamine system in the brain. “They don’t give you that kind of urge.”
Imagine this scenario. You’re at a house party, sitting on a sofa. In front of you is a bowl of peanuts. Humble, roasted, salted peanuts. Not a super exciting snack. And you’re not that hungry. But in a moment of fidgetiness, you take a peanut. A few moments pass. You take another. And then another. Do you even like peanuts? You know more food — tastier food — is coming when dinner is served. You don’t really want to eat these, but now, half the peanut bowl is gone. Still, there’s something inside you — wordless, noiseless, unceasing — compelling you to reach for more.
That’s want.
It’s a manifestation of our mesolimbic system, the reward pathway in the brain that’s facilitated by dopamine. It’s a system that’s trained, over time, to influence our decisions. It’s the system that compels you toward the peanut and also toward other things, like scrolling through endless TikToks or Instagram reels.
Leyton’s cocaine experiment highlights another key, unintuitive, way to define wanting — by showing that wanting is not the same as liking.
You might find this idea confusing. Scientists were once confused by it, too. “When I started in the field decades ago, we thought they were basically the same two words for the same psychological process,” Berridge says.
It made sense to conflate the two. In daily life liking and wanting ”go together really well,” Berridge says. We want things because we like the way they taste or how they make us feel.
It just seems so obvious that liking and wanting should go together. So it’s interesting to see the studies in which they can, indeed, be pulled apart. First, there were animal studies. Starting in the late 1980s, Berridge and colleagues surgically or chemically diminished lab rats’ ability to produce dopamine.
Without dopamine, “those rats won’t eat voluntarily, they won’t drink voluntarily, they won’t pursue any reward voluntarily,” Berridge says. “And it was thought that they had lost all pleasure.” But, studies concluded, they apparently did not.
There’s convincing evidence that this split between liking and wanting happens in humans, too. That’s what Leyton’s cocaine study demonstrates — the liking of cocaine and the wanting of cocaine can be disentangled.
Leyton has repeated the dopamine-reducing experiment with other drugs, “with alcohol, tobacco,” he says. When he puts people in a low dopamine state, they don’t just say they crave their drugs less, but they’re less willing to work on a tedious computer task to obtain them.
He’s even done a version of this study with money. “It’s not a drug,” he says, “it’s not even delicious!” But when Leyton put them into a low dopamine state, participants “were less willing to sustain the effort to obtain $5 bills.”
And in all these experiments with the dopamine-reducing protein shake, the same pattern emerged. “The motivation to seek out a reward was diminished, even though the pleasure was the same,” Leyton says. “The alcohol still tastes delicious,” he says. The cigarettes are “enjoyable as usual.” Extra money in your pocket is still great.
Another key thing about the wanting system — and arguably, its most frustrating aspect — is that it often exists beyond our conscious awareness.
“Many people would argue that we have very little [conscious] access to our motivational processes,” Leyton says. (Though he didn’t formally measure it in his studies, Leyton says his participants have a hard time guessing if they received the dopamine-reducing shake or a placebo shake. The low-dopamine days don’t seem all that abnormal. On the low dopamine days, it’s as though the participants just say “I’m just going to quit early today. That’s enough. I’m done.”)
With food, says Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a nutritional neuroscientist at Virginia Tech, you could seek out a particular food because of conscious choice. “I think I’m going to want this because I’m trying to eat healthy,” she says as an example. Or we can like the flavor, texture, or memory the food conjures.
But there are likely also unconscious processes going on that train the brain’s reward system. For instance, it’s hypothesized there is a nervous system pathway that connects our guts to our brains, which tells the brain’s reward system about the nutrient content of food, creating a want for it. Why do you reach for the cocktail peanuts? You could tell yourself a narrative like, “I’m just feeling fidgety.” But maybe it’s because your want system has learned to associate the nuts with a lot of nutritious calories.
“There’s actually two pathways that bring rewarding signals to the brain,” says Dana Small, a neuroscientist at Yale University who studies the food choices we make. “One pathway is what you normally think about when you think of food reward — the taste, the smell, maybe how it looks. Then there’s another pathway — the signals that are generated during digestion that you’re never aware of.”
Annual Review of PsychologyConscious signals like taste and flavor can play a role in which foods we want to eat, but there are also subliminal signals coming directly from our guts.
To illustrate the subtle power of this unconscious pathway, she tells me about a type of study (done in both animals and humans) where researchers take two similarly flavored beverages, but surreptitiously infuse one with more calories than the other. In these studies, “the dopamine circuits really respond more to the flavors that were paired with calories compared to the ones that weren’t,” Small says.
A lot of our thoughts about why we want food, DiFeliceantonio argues, “is the narrative that we put on top of a subconscious process.” Stories like: “I like that meal because it reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking.” But that narrative isn’t necessarily correct or complete. You also might like that food because of its caloric content.
Sure, wanting can start off as a conscious liking, I’m told. Addiction, in a simplified sense, is the wanting system’s most extreme manifestation. And “addiction ... usually it starts with liking,” says Mehdi Farokhnia, a physician-scientist who studies addictive behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. You do a drug because it’s pleasurable, you like it. But as the addiction progresses, “that liking aspect goes down.” You can detest a thing you crave. Or crave it not for pleasure, but to prevent something uncomfortable, like withdrawal.
Addiction reveals another of the wanting brain’s secrets: What we want doesn’t always reflect a physiological need.
“Older views presumed that our feeding, drinking, and other primary motivated behaviors were closely calibrated to our moment-to-moment physiological needs,” Leyton explains. But it’s not the case that if you miss a meal, you’re going to instantly die of malnutrition. “The great majority of food-seeking behaviors are unrelated to nutritional needs,” Leyton says.
Instead, the want system anticipates and preempts our physiological needs. But it can easily overshoot, or even choose targets seemingly without reason. For instance, sometimes patients with Parkinson’s disease, whose brains struggle to produce dopamine, will often go on dopamine replacement therapy. With these therapies, weird side effects can pop up. Sometimes, the want systems focus intensely on sex, binge eating, gambling, or shopping. “It’s like an addiction has developed,” Berridge says.
But why shopping, why gambling? What makes a person compelled toward one over the other? “We just do not have a clear understanding of how that happens in the brain,” Berridge says.
Turning down the dial of want
Sometimes wants seep into the conscious portion of our brains, shouting intrusive thoughts. But conscious does not mean the same as “in control of.”
“The messages I get from my brain are ‘you’re dying, you’re starving, you’re dying’ and they are constant,” says Sara, who was recently telling me about her “food noise” — i.e., intrusive thoughts about food — and whose last name I’m withholding for privacy reasons. Whenever she’d make progress in losing weight, the “food noise” in her brain would intensify.
“When I’m trying to do anything,” she says, there would be constant thought about food.
It’s not a pang of hunger, per se. “I think it’s more of an urge,” she says. “Like my body tells me ‘I need this.’”
Sara explained to me it was impossible to ignore. It was very hard to sleep when her brain was telling her “you need food right now” — even when she wasn’t hungry.
Stories like Sara’s underscore why asking people to engage in sheer willpower to subdue strong urges is a recipe for failure. Just look around. The US drug and opioid crisis continues unabated. Studies consistently find dieting and exercising are, in practice, ineffective solutions for weight management. It’s not that diet and exercise can’t work. There are success stories. But, arguably, if you were to evaluate the effectiveness of diet and exercise as a prescription for weight loss alone, you’d find they don’t help a lot of people.
When people engage in self-control to curb behaviors, they are fighting to use their conscious brain against their unconscious one. That’s never been a fair fight.
Remarkably, GLP-1 drugs could be leveling the playing field.
These drugs are called “GLP-1” because they mimic a naturally occurring hormone called Glucagon-like peptide-1. This hormone does a lot in the body, but in circuitous ways.
Primarily, it works on the pancreas to stimulate insulin, which lowers blood sugar. From there, it suppresses appetite through a few proposed mechanisms, including increasing the amount of time it takes for the stomach to empty, leading to feelings of fullness. “What they are doing is producing a sense of early satiety,” Small says.
These drugs aren’t perfect when it comes to weight loss. Many people struggle with side effects, such as nausea, or see their progress plateau. So far, GLP-1 drugs have mostly been studied in people with diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, so less is known about their effects on other populations.
Like any drug, they come with some risks. They’re known to increase the risk of developing thyroid cancer, for instance; they shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy; and despite more than a decade’s worth of safety data from diabetes patients (which show these drugs are, for the most part, very safe), scientists still don’t precisely understand how they work.
But a curious piece of the puzzle resides in the brain. GLP-1 drugs appear to work directly in the brain as a neurotransmitter, influencing neurons in the brain’s reward system, and in the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s metabolism. The drugs are “probably not acting primarily on dopamine neurons per se,” Berridge says. “But they’re acting on the neurons that dopamine neurons are talking to.”
So, it’s complicated. But however the drugs are working, they seem to pull off a neat trick. They seem to tap into the wanting system, dialing it down while leaving liking intact.
“I still like food,” says Sara, who was prescribed the GLP-1 drug Mounjaro a few months ago after learning she was prediabetic. “Food tastes great to me. I just get to experience it in a way that I haven’t before.”
Most importantly, she gets to experience eating without that cruel voice in her head.
“About 24 hours after I took the first dose, there was just a calmness in my body and in my brain,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about food.”
Finally, she was able to eat at mealtimes and not have intrusive thoughts in between. “That’s a very different way of living than I have been living for most of my life,” she says. Sara has lost 65 pounds with the medication. “And that is wonderful. But the peace part of it — that’s the best part of it.”
Researchers are now exploring whether this quieting of the wanting mind on GLP-1 drugs extends beyond food. Remarkably, this class of drugs has been showing promise in reducing cravings for other substances — like alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, and even opioids.
Theoretically this makes sense. “We only have one reward system,” DiFeliceantonio says. “There’s not a special reward system for food, and a special reward system for sex, and a special reward system for drugs.”
So, tapping into the reward system via appetite ought to impact cravings for other things. “There really isn’t a universe where we can impact food motivation and nothing else,” she adds. (Indeed, scientists have shown that the reverse is also true. Being hungry “increases motivation for drugs in many animal studies,” Berridge says.)
A lot of the evidence that GLP-1 drugs reduce cravings for drugs and alcohol is anecdotal. “There have been a lot of medical reports from patients,” Farokhnia, the NIH physician-scientist says. “People who took these GLP-1 drugs ... for their diabetes, obesity, other indications.” He says he’s heard reports from patients and colleagues that “they completely or almost completely lost their desire to drink alcohol or use drugs.”
Stories like this are starting to filter into scientific journals reporting on cases. Users have also taken to social media,where they marvel at their reduced cravings for alcohol.
The anecdotes are supported by evidence in animal studies, going back to the early 2010s. Rats on GLP-1 drugs seek out drugs and alcohol less than similarly addicted controls. Monkeys on GLP-1 also drink less. But human studies are starting to trickle out. One randomized control trial funded by Novo Nordisk (the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy) found that the GLP-1 drug exenatide decreased heavy drinking days, but only in obese patients.
At the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Denver, Colorado, researchers from Penn State presented unpublished data on a very small randomized control study (just 20 participants) using the GLP-1 drug liraglutidein an in-patient opioid withdrawal clinic.
The study found a 40 percent reduction in cravings among the participants taking the GLP-1 compared to people who did not (all participants in the study were also offered other medication for withdrawal, such as buprenorphine). Patricia Grigson, the Penn State scientist presenting the data, emphasized that reduction of craving is usually equivalent to 14 days of treatment as usual, which would cost around $15,000 in her clinic. “We do need to evaluate it in a larger population, but it’s very hopeful,” Grigson said.
Some words of caution: these data are not conclusive. But it is hopeful and could be huge if validated.
More clinical trials in humans are underway for a variety of substances — including alcohol and nicotine. And while scientists in this space feel these drugs can be a breakthrough, they urge caution. “I think it’s one of the most promising medications and targets we have had in the addiction field,” Farokhnia says. “But to make a conclusion, we do need to wait until data from clinical trials come out.”
Until then, the emerging picture is this: Though working primarily on appetite, GLP-1 drugs are potentially able to turn down the overall volume on the most intense wants.
GLP-1 drugs aren’t reducing wants for everything. The evidence suggests they are just tweaking the volume on the dial of desire.
“I’m looking at the preclinical data [i.e., animal studies], that’s how I interpret them,” Elizabet Jerlhag Holm, a pharmacology researcher who has conducted animal studies on GLP-1 and addiction behavior, says. GLP-1s tend to work on the most intense urges and cravings — perhaps even in areas like sex addiction, Holm notes.
Berridge agrees. “It may not be turning down the amplitude of all wants,” Berridge says. Instead, he thinks, “it’s sort of lowering the ceiling. Particularly strong wants, urges like addictive cravings and things, they might be blunted a bit.”
Are our desires purely chemical?
I asked Sara, the Mounjaro user, if she felt like a different person since starting the drug. “100 percent,” she said.
There’s already a pathway for GLP-1 drugs to become some of the most prescribed medicines in the US. They help with obesity and heart disease — each impact millions of people. Further research might see them more commonly used for people with substance use disorders, making the potential prescription pool for these drugs even larger. JP Morgan projects these drugs might reach 30 million US users by 2030.
In that case, how might they change our wants, collectively?
Might many people be nudged into feeling like a slightly different person, with different wants? Might they make a mark on society, economies? Already there’s evidence GLP-1 users are buying different products at the grocery store. Anecdotal reports abound on the drugs changing compulsive behaviors in subtle ways: users stop biting their nails, stop picking their skin. (As these drugs are tested in wider populations, Farokhnia says he’ll be looking out for instances of anhedonia — or a lack of interest and enjoyment in life.)
In all my conversations about wanting and liking, I couldn’t help but think about free will. If we’re so impacted by subconscious forces, so silently influenced by pharmaceuticals, are we just the sum of these chemical interactions?
“If you and I go for a drink together tonight, maybe I would answer that,” Leyton jokes, saying the question of free will is beyond his pay grade.
“Certainly we can exert free will over these processes,” he says when pressed. “When we walk by the fridge, and we find ourselves opening believing that we’re not hungry, we can stop ourselves. As an amateur, I think there is such a thing as free will even though much of our behavior, even though many of our tendencies, reflect preconscious phenomena. We can control things.”
Yes, we can control things, but when you have a voice in your head telling you you’re starving, like Sara did, you have to engage in that sense of control all the time, and it grows exhausting.
“I had kind of given up,” she said of her weight challenges. “I had decided if I don’t live a long life, then I don’t, because this is too painful.”
Sara told me that being on Monjouro changed that for her.
Too many people have been put in an unfair battle against their wants. They’ve been told to somehow exert willpower over a system they have little conscious awareness of and control over. This might be the most remarkable thing about GLP-1 drugs: At least in the realm of appetite, they can potentially tip this battle, giving people a dependable dial to turn down the wanting noise in their brain.
“It’s not just about our willpower,” Sara says of obesity. But the sentiment ought to be the same for people with addictions. “This is a disease that requires treatment, and there’s treatment that can now help us. And I think for a lot of people, that is really liberating.”
Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Waze, the navigation app owned by Google, is adding some new features. Some of these are safety-oriented, like alerts about first responders or speed limit changes. Others are convenience-minded, like help navigating roundabouts or parking information. It's also expanding its use of crowdsourcing to determine road conditions.
When Google bought Waze in 2013, the navigation app was already well-liked for adding a slightly social aspect to in-car navigation—something that seems adorably quaint and perhaps unthinkable these 11 years later.
Over the years, Google has slowly incorporated more of Waze's features into its own Google Maps platform and taken away Waze's autonomy, too. In 2022, it was formally merged into the same division at Google that runs Maps, and last year, Google laid off some workers and ditched Waze's own ad platform for Google ads.
Oregon has joined the small but growing list of states that have passed right-to-repair legislation. Oregon's bill stands out for a provision that would prevent companies from requiring that official parts be unlocked with encrypted software checks before they will fully function.
Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law. Consumer groups and right-to-repair advocates praised the bill as "the best bill yet," while the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Janeen Sollman (D), pointed to potential waste reductions and an improved second-hand market for closing a digital divide.
"Oregon improves on Right to Repair laws in California, Minnesota and New York by making sure that consumers have the choice of buying new parts, used parts, or third-party parts for the gadgets and gizmos," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, in a statement.
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