Enlarge / Federal Communication Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, then a commissioner, rallies against repeal of net neutrality rules in December 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)
The Federal Communications Commission voted 3–2 to impose net neutrality rules today, restoring the common-carrier regulatory framework enforced during the Obama era and then abandoned while Trump was president.
The rules prohibit Internet service providers from blocking and throttling lawful content and ban paid prioritization. Cable and telecom companies plan to fight the rules in court, but they lost a similar battle during the Obama era when judges upheld the FCC's ability to regulate ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.
"Consumers have made clear to us they do not want their broadband provider cutting sweetheart deals, with fast lanes for some services and slow lanes for others," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at today's meeting. "They do not want their providers engaging in blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. And if they have problems, they expect the nation's expert authority on communications to be able to respond. Because we put national net neutrality rules back on the books, we fix that today."
The Senate last night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.
The "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law "as soon as it reaches my desk." He signed the bill into law today, according to news reports.
The bill classifies TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application" and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.
Last week, the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted to advance the Protecting and Enhancing Public Access to Codes Act, or the Pro Codes Act (H.R. 1631), to the full House. The bill would extend copyright protection to codes (such as building codes) that are developed by standards development organizations (SDOs) and incorporated by reference into local, state, and federal laws, as long as the SDOs make the codes “available to the public free of charge online in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.”
This is the latest development in a long-running battle between SDOs and public interest groups that have posted online standards incorporated by reference. SDOs have sued these public interest groups for copyright infringement, and the public interest groups have argued that once the standards are incorporated by reference, they lose their copyright protection. The public interest groups have argued in the alternative that the fair use right permits the online posting of the standards. The courts have ruled in favor of the public interest groups on the fair use theory without addressing the protectability argument. The Pro Codes Act seeks to foreclose the protectability argument without directly implicating the fair use theory.
The SDOs supporting the Pro Codes Act assert that it would increase access to the law by incentivizing the SDOs to provide online “reading rooms” where the public could read the standards incorporated by reference. However, such reading rooms are unnecessary because public interest groups already provide free online access to the standards in more usable formats. As Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), stated: “This legislation is a solution in search of a problem: at least one public interest organization is already providing much better access to the law, also for free, with no financial impact on the standard organizations.” In 2023, McSherry successfully represented Public.Resource.Org in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org, where the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held that fair use permitted Public.Resource.Org to post online codes incorporated by reference because it served a nonprofit, educational purpose.
During last week’s markup of the Pro Codes Act, Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced dozens of amendments to improve the bill, one of which would codify the ASTM precedent established by the DC Circuit. Unfortunately, the committee rejected this amendment. (In fact, the committee voted down all of Lofgren’s amendments, except for one that would require the Government Accountability Office to study the effects of the bill.)
Rep. Lofgren also entered into the record an opposition letter in which a coalition of libraries, civil society, disability rights groups, and others argue that providing free access to the law furthers the fundamental purpose of copyright, which is to allow public access to knowledge. Some of the letter’s signers also made this point in an amicus brief in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org:
The Copyright Act ultimately aims to achieve the constitutional goal to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” U.S. Const. art 1, cl. 8, sec. 8.
During last week’s markup, some members of the House Judiciary Committee displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. Proponents of Pro Codes claimed that the bill would strike a balance between copyright law and public access to information. But copyright law and access to information are not in tension; facilitating access to information is the constitutional purpose of copyright, as the library and civil society groups wrote in their brief in support of Public.Resource.Org.
Some members of the committee tried to parse standards incorporated by reference from other elements of the law. But as Rep. Lofgren rightly noted, in 2020 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the “government edicts doctrine” that works created by government officials in the course of their official duties are not copyrightable. Accordingly, when a work is incorporated by reference into an official government document it has the force of law and belongs in the public domain. In 2019, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) filed an amicus brief in State of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org asking the Supreme Court to affirm this reasoning, and explaining how libraries rely on the government edicts doctrine to preserve and provide access to the cultural record, including all elements of the law.
Another flawed argument by lawmakers at the Pro Codes markup is that standards incorporated by reference is an unfair “taking” of the SDOs’ copyrights under the Fifth Amendment. As the lawmakers’ argument goes, governments must compensate property owners when they take over private property for public use under eminent domain; similarly, the government should extend copyright to the SDOs in exchange for the use of their standards. But this analogy falls apart because there is no reluctance on the part of the SDOs for the adoption of their standards; in fact, the SDOs actively lobby governments to adopt their standards.
A related argument by supporters of the Pro Codes Act is that the SDOs provide a valuable service, and therefore they deserve a revenue stream in exchange for their contribution to the public good. But copyright law does not grant copyright to reward hard work (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service). Further, the DC Circuit Court found that although Public.Resource.Org has been posting incorporated standards for 15 years, “the plaintiffs have been unable to produce any economic analysis showing that Public Resource’s activity has harmed any relevant market for their standards. To the contrary, ASTM’s sales have increased over that time.” The SDOs can also derive significant revenue from selling training materials and programs. SDOs do not need a copyright incentive; the development of standards advances the economic interests of their members.
Additionally, Rep. Lofgren pointed out that, in 2020, the Supreme Court in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org found constitutional limits to legislatures’ ability to expand copyright. Chief Justice Roberts stated “no one can own the law” and reaffirmed that if “every citizen is presumed to know the law, … it needs no argument to show … that all should have free access” to its contents. Pro Codes would be unconstitutional under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments, which guarantee the public’s rights to read, share, and discuss the law.
It is worth noting that several House Judiciary Committee members made nearly identical arguments in favor of the bill, and I assume the standards development organizations circulated talking points in advance of the markup. We know that passing the Pro Codes Act is a major legislative priority for the SDOs.
ARL and our fellow advocates are disappointed that the Pro Codes Act will advance to the House, particularly since the House did not hold a hearing on the bill. We remain grateful to Representative Lofgren, who has defended copyright law against overprotection for decades.
Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries. This post originally appeared on the ARL’s site.
Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan talks with guests during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 03, 2024 (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has issued a final rule banning noncompete clauses. The rule will render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable, according to the agency.
"In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes," the FTC said.
The US Chamber of Commerce said it will sue the FTC in an effort to block the rule, claiming the ban is "a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive."
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced that genetic fragments from the highly-pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 have been detected in the pasteurized, commercial milk supply. However, the testing completed so far—using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)—only detects the presence of viral genetic material and cannot tell whether the genetic material is from live and infectious viral particles or merely remnants of dead ones killed by the pasteurization process.
Testing is now ongoing to see if viable, infectious H5N1 can be identified in milk samples.
So far, the FDA still believes that the milk supply is safe. "To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe," the agency said in a lengthy explanation of the finding and ongoing testing.
In December, Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address containing thousands of animation files. Included in the cache were animation cells, videos, and notes discussing the work, plus changes that needed to be made to ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from an Amazon Prime Video superhero show and an upcoming Max (aka HBO Max) children’s anime.
There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements.
One of the more interesting paradigm shifts underway in the automotive industry is the move to software-defined vehicles. Cars have increasingly been controlled by electronic systems during the past few decades, but it's been piecemeal. Each added new function, like traction control, antilock braking, or a screen instead of physical gauges, required its own little black box added to the wiring loom.
There can now be more than 200 discrete controllers in a modern vehicle, all talking to each other through a CAN bus network. The idea behind the software-defined vehicle is to take a clean-sheet approach. Instead, you'll find a small number of domain controllers—what the automotive industry is choosing to call "high performance compute" platforms—each responsible for a different set of activities.
Today we're releasing the first beta of Android 15. With the progress we've made refining the features and stability of Android 15, it's time to open the experience up to both developers and early adopters, so you can now enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android 15 Beta and feature drop Beta updates over-the-air.
Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity, give users a premium app experience, protect user privacy and security, and make your app accessible to as many people as possible — all in a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of devices, silicon partners, and carriers.
Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android beta program plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 15 developer site has lots more information about the beta, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.
We’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release cycle, and be sure to tune into Google I/O where you can dive deeper into topics that interest you with over 100 sessions, workshops, codelabs, and demos.
Edge-to-edge
Apps targeting Android 15 are displayed edge-to-edge by default on Android 15 devices. This means that apps no longer need to explicitly call Window.setDecorFitsSystemWindows(false) or enableEdgeToEdge() to show their content behind the system bars, although we recommend continuing to call enableEdgeToEdge() to get the edge-to-edge experience on earlier Android releases.
To assist your app with going edge-to-edge, many of the Material 3 composables handle insets for you, based on how the composables are placed in your app according to the Material specifications.
On the left: App targets SDK 34 (Android 14) and is not edge-to-edge on an Android 15 device. On the right: App targets SDK 35 (Android 15) and is edge-to-edge on an Android 15 device. Note the Material 3 TopAppBar is automatically protecting the status bar, which would otherwise be transparent by default.
The system bars are transparent or translucent and content will draw behind by default. Refer to "Handle overlaps using insets" (Views) or Window insets in Compose to see how to prevent important touch targets from being hidden by the system bars.
Smoother NFC experiences - part 2
Android 15 is working to make the tap to pay experience more seamless and reliable while continuing to support Android's robust NFC app ecosystem. In addition to the observe mode changes from Android 15 developer preview 2, apps can now register a fingerprint on supported devices so they can be notified of polling loop activity, which allows for smooth operation with multiple NFC-aware applications.
Inter-character justification
Starting with Android 15, text can be justified utilizing letter spacing by using JUSTIFICATION_MODE_INTER_CHARACTER. Inter-word justification was first introduced in Android O, but inter-character solves for languages that use the white space for segmentation, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Android and Google Play announced support for app archiving last year, allowing users to free up space by partially removing infrequently used apps from the device that were published using Android App Bundle on Google Play. Android 15 now includes OS level support for app archiving and unarchiving, making it easier for all app stores to implement it.
Apps with the REQUEST_DELETE_PACKAGES permission can call the PackageInstaller requestArchive method to request archiving a currently installed app package, which removes the APK and any cached files, but persists user data. Archived apps are returned as displayable apps through the LauncherApps APIs; users will see a UI treatment to highlight that those apps are archived. If a user taps on an archived app, the responsible installer will get a request to unarchive it, and the restoration process can be monitored by the ACTION_PACKAGE_ADDED broadcast.
App-managed profiling
Android 15 includes the all new ProfilingManager class, which allows you to collect profiling information from within your app. We're planning to wrap this with an Android Jetpack API that will simplify construction of profiling requests, but the core API will allow the collection of heap dumps, heap profiles, stack sampling, and more. It provides a callback to your app with a supplied tag to identify the output file, which is delivered to your app's files directory. The API does rate limiting to minimize the performance impact.
Better Braille
In Android 15, we've made it possible for TalkBack to support Braille displays that are using the HID standard over both USB and secure Bluetooth.
This standard, much like the one used by mice and keyboards, will help Android support a wider range of Braille displays over time.
Key management for end-to-end encryption
We are introducing the E2eeContactKeysManager in Android 15, which facilitates end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in your Android apps by providing an OS-level API for the storage of cryptographic public keys.
The E2eeContactKeysManager is designed to integrate with the platform contacts app to give users a centralized way to manage and verify their contacts' public keys.
Secured background activity launches
Android 15 brings additional changes to prevent malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground, elevating their privileges, and abusing user interaction, aiming to protect users from malicious apps and give them more control over their devices. Background activity launches have been restricted since Android 10.
App compatibility
With Android 15 now in beta, we're opening up access to early-adopter users as well as developers, so if you haven't yet tested your app for compatibility with Android 15, now is the time to do it. In the weeks ahead, you can expect more users to try your app on Android 15 and raise issues they find.
To test for compatibility, install your published app on a device or emulator running Android 15 beta and work through all of your app's flows. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. After you've resolved any issues, publish an update as soon as possible.
To give you more time to plan for app compatibility work, we’re letting you know our Platform Stability milestone well in advance.
At this milestone, we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and also final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2024, and from that time you’ll have several months before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.
Get started with Android 15
Today's beta release has everything you need to try the Android 15 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Now that we've entered the beta phase, you can enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android Beta updates over-the-air. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio. If you're already in the Android 14 QPR beta program on a supported device, or have installed the developer preview, you'll automatically get updated to Android 15 Beta 1.
For the best development experience with Android 15, we recommend that you use the latest version of Android Studio Jellyfish (or more recent Jellyfish+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:
Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview and beta program. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by changes in Android 15; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 15 and extensively test it.
We’ll update the beta system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 15 release cycle. Read more here.
Dupont Circle, DC’s historic epicenter of LGBTQ+ life, has long been the backdrop for the annual Capital Pride Parade—until this year. The 2024 parade on Saturday, June 8 will begin at 14th and T Sts., NW, the same location as last year. However, instead of moving toward Dupont, revelers will continue down 14th Street to […]
Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google.
"Having a unified team across Platforms & Devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners," writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster — as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making."
Google also justifies the decision the same way it does most decisions nowadays: by saying it's AI-related. The announcement is a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging post by Pichai, titled, "Building for our AI future," and the new division is taking a chunk of Google Research along with it, specifically the group that has been working on computational photography. Pichai wants the team to live in "the intersection of hardware, software, and AI."
Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)
Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.
User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:
While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.
Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.
Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.
A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.
But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.
A kidney transplant team in Nice, France. | BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Giving a kidney saves a life. Paying donors could fix the shortage.
What if I told you there was a way that the US could prevent 60,000 deaths, save American taxpayers $25 billion, and pay a deserving group of people $50,000 each? Would you be interested? Would you wonder why I’m pitching this to you like I’m the host of a late-night basic cable infomercial?
I am not a spokesman. I am simply a fan and supporter of the End Kidney Deaths Act, a bill put together by a group of kidney policy experts and living donors that would represent the single biggest step forward for US policy on kidneys since … well, ever.
The plan is simple: Every nondirected donor (that is, any kidney donor who gives to a stranger rather than a family member) would be eligible under the law for a tax credit of $10,000 per year for the first five years after they donate. That $50,000 in total benefits is fully refundable, meaning even people who don’t owe taxes get the full benefit.
Elaine Perlman, a kidney donor who leads the Coalition to Modify NOTA, which is advocating for the act, based the plan on a 2019 paper that estimated the current disincentives to giving a kidney (from travel expenses to lost income while recovering from surgery to pain and discomfort) amounted to about $38,000. That’s almost $50,000 in current dollars, after the past few years’ inflation.
The paper also found that removing disincentives by paying this amount to donors would increase the number of living donors by 11,500 a year. Because the law would presumably take a while to encourage more donations, Perlman downgrades that to about 60,000 over the first 10 years, with more donations toward the end as people become aware of the new incentives. But 60,000 is still nothing to sneeze at.
Due to a law signed by Richard Nixon, the US has single-payer health care for only one condition: kidney failure. Medicare picks up the bill for most patients with kidney failure, including for the main treatment of dialysis, in which an external machine replicates the functions of a kidney.
Dialysis is not only worse for patients than a transplant, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment; it’s more expensive too. In 2021, Medicare spent $33.4 billion, or almost 7 percent of its overall budget, on patients with kidney failure, much of it on dialysis treatment. Getting people transplants saves both lives and money: At about $416,000 in estimated savings each, those 60,000 transplants made possible by donor incentives over the first 10 years would save taxpayers about $25 billion.
I write about a lot of government programs, and usually there’s a tradeoff: You can do more good, but you’re going to have to spend a lot more money. Win-win scenarios where the government saves money while saving lives are virtually unheard of. We’d be foolish not to leap at this one.
The kidney problem, explained
The End Kidney Deaths Act is trying to solve a fundamental problem: Not nearly enough people are donating their kidneys.
In 2021, some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed with end-stage renal disease, meaning they would need either dialysis or a transplant to survive. That year saw only 25,549 transplants. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead within five years. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Most people who do get kidney transplants get them from deceased donors. There’s more we can do to promote that: One study found that about 28,000 organs annually, including about 17,000 kidneys, could be recovered from deceased donors but are not, largely because organ procurement groups and surgeons have strong incentives to reject less-than-perfect organs. People are working hard on fixing that problem, but they’d be the first to tell you we need more living donors too.
The gap between kidneys needed and kidneys available is about 10 times larger than that 17,000-a-year figure. Kidneys from living donors also last longer than those from deceased donors, and the vast majority of those who die (96.7 percent by one study’s estimate) are not even eligible to donate their organs, usually because the prospective donor is too sick or too old.
So we should be recovering the organs that are eligible. But it won’t get us all the way. We need living donors too.
But we don’t have enough — particularly enough nondirected donors. These are donors giving to a stranger, and thus donors whose kidneys can be directed to the person with the most need. While I and others have done our best to evangelize for nondirected donation, our ranks are pretty thin. In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger.
The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold. Perlman told me the Coalition to Modify NOTA is open to supporting donors who give to family or friends as well, or even providing benefits to families of deceased donors. But in part because nondirected donations are so rare, starting out by just subsidizing them saves money upfront. The act is meant as a first step toward a system of more broadly compensating donors; if it proves this approach can work, we can always expand eligibility.
The moral case for compensating kidney donors
The most common objection to compensating kidney donors is that it amounts to letting people “sell” their kidneys, a phrasing that even some proponents of compensation adopt. For opponents, this feels dystopian and disturbing, violating their sense that the human body is sacred and should not be sold for parts.
But “selling kidneys” in this case is just a metaphor, and a bad one at that. The End Kidney Deaths Act would not in any sense legalize the selling of organs. Rich people would not be able to outbid poor people to get organs first. There would be no kidney marketplace or kidney auctions of any kind.
What the proposal would do is pay kidney donors for their labor. It’s a payment for a service — that of donation — not a purchase of an asset. It’s a service that puts some strain on our bodies, but that’s hardly unusual. We pay a premium to people in jobs like logging and roofing precisely because they risk bodily harm; this is no different.
When you think of donor compensation as payment for work done, the injustice of the current system gets a lot clearer.
When I donated my kidney, many dozens of people got paid. My transplant surgeon got paid; my recipient’s surgeon got paid. My anesthesiologist got paid; his anesthesiologist got paid. My nephrologist and nurses and support staff all got paid; so did his. My recipient didn’t get paid, but hey — he got a kidney. The only person who was expected to perform their labor with no reward or compensation whatsoever was me, the donor.
This would outrage me less if the system weren’t also leading to tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily every year. But a system that refuses to pay people for their work, and in the process leads to needless mass death, is truly indefensible.
The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.
"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."
Enlarge / BYD electric cars stand at a BYD dealership on April 05, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese manufacturer that went from making solar panels to electric cars. The company is seeking to gain a foothold in the German auto market. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) has called on US President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the US automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy."
Brown's letter to the president is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.
The EU probe won't wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute.
Enlarge / Generic, non-Western Digital SD cards. (credit: Getty)
Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week.
Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association's Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward "complex media and entertainment workflows," such as those involving cameras and laptops that use high-resolution video with high framerates, the announcement said.
The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second. It will support minimum write speeds of 10 MB/s, AnandTech reported. Minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s, the publication said.
A month after our report about The Block potentially going dark at Pike & Rose, employees inside the four-year-old food hall tell us they’re expecting it to close at the end of April. Originally planned as an all-Asian food hall with a central bar, The Block cycled through a number of different food vendors and eventually added tacos, cheesesteaks and other cuisines to the lineup. It’s not clear what’s next for this space, but we’re hearing rumors that a Japanese restaurant is moving in. Federal Realty, which owns Pike & Rose, declined to comment.
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?"
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