DrunkEngineer

The vote came after its sponsor Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Bay Ridge) showed up to lobby his colleagues on its behalf. He made his standard pitch: The bill, which requires a speed-limiting device to be installed in the cars of motorists with six or more camera-issued speeding tickets in 12 months, is better than license suspension because everyone knows that drivers in a car-dependent state like ours will still drive even if their license is suspended.

It’s official. As my colleague David Dayen and I both predicted, enough Democratic senators have voted for a crypto “regulation” bill (called the GENIUS Act), basically written by the industry and Donald Trump’s minions, that it passed easily on Monday. If anything, it was even worse than I expected—just nine Democrats were needed to get to the necessary 60 votes, but 16 voted for it. (Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jerry Moran of Kansas, voted against it.)

This vote was technically for cloture, meaning the bill couldn’t be halted by a filibuster, but it’s the only vote that mattered. The official vote, now scheduled for Thursday, is only a formality, and I expect several of these senators to vote against it so they can pretend they aren’t monumentally corrupt.

The Crypto Sixteen are the following: Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who co-sponsored the bill, Adam Schiff (D-CA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Mark Warner (D-VA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), John Fetterman (D-PA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE). Every one of them ought to be primaried in their next election.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has more experience in financial regulation than anyone in Congress, outlined the problems in a speech on the Senate floor. First, the bill gives a clear green light to Trump’s world-historical corruption. “Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally. For crooks, it’s a two-for-one,” she said.

The AI-powered system uses 279 variables to score families for risk, based on cases from 2013 and 2014 that ended in a child being severely harmed. Some factors might be expected, like past involvement with ACS. Other factors used by the algorithm are largely out of a caretaker’s control, and align closely with socioeconomic status. The neighborhood that a family lives in contributes to their score, and so does the mother’s age. The algorithm also factors in how many siblings a child under investigation has, as well as their ages. A caretaker’s physical and mental health contributes to the score, too.

While the tool is new, both the data it’s built on and the factors it considers raise the concern that artificial intelligence will re-inforce or even amplify how racial discrimination taints child protection investigations in New York City and beyond, civil rights groups and advocates for families argue.

Joyce McMillan, executive director of Just Making A Change for Families and a prominent critic of ACS, said the algorithm “generalizes people.”

“My neighborhood alone makes me more likely to be abusive or neglectful?” she said. “That’s because we look at poverty as neglect and the neighborhoods they identify have very low resources.”

More than 100 Harvard researchers received termination notices for federally funded research projects on Thursday, as sweeping cuts to the majority of Harvard’s federal grants begin taking effect across the University’s labs.

The notices, delivered via email from Harvard’s Grants Management Application Suite, informed recipients that their projects had been terminated “per notice from the federal funding agency” and contained a list of terminated grants.

“You are receiving this e-mail because one (or more) of your projects have been terminated,” the emails read.

Harvard Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Programs Kelly Morrison and Chief Research Compliance Officer Ara Tahmassian had warned the researchers in a separate Wednesday email that the majority of Harvard’s awards from federal agencies were terminated.

“The University has received letters from most federal agencies indicating that the majority of our active, direct federal grants have been terminated,” they wrote to recipients.

Some of the terminated grants exceeded $1 million, funding entire research operations, including salaries for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and lab technicians.

Florida became the second state in the country after Utah to ban local governments from adding fluoride to their public water systems.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill at Simpson Lakes in Dade City -- about 38 miles northeast of Tampa -- on Thursday. The law is set to go into effect on July 1.

"We certainly now, in our society in 2025, we have the ability to deliver fluoride through toothpaste and all these other things," DeSantis said at an event for the signing of the bill. "You don't gotta force it and take away people's choices. But the whole crux of the issue is you should be able to make decisions on the basis of informed consent."

"Forcing this in the water supply is trying to take that away from people who may want to make a different decision rather than to have this in water," DeSantis added.

An exclusive report by the New York Post claims that on Monday evening between 18:30 to 21:30, flights out of Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) were handled by just one air traffic controller and a trainee. The report quotes a New York-based controller describing the situation as “pure insanity.” It also noted that an FAA spokesperson said that there were at least three controllers scheduled for each hour on Monday night but did not clarify how many of them were fully certified personnel.

The New York Times reported something similar, adding that four people familiar with the situation said that the number of fully certified controllers on duty to manage Newark’s air traffic was sometimes one or two. These figures are shocking because the target number of controllers for Newark to manage traffic in those hours is around 14-15.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced it will begin the process of pulling prescription fluoride drops and tablets for children off the market. The supplements are usually given to kids at high risk for cavities.

The federal government and some state legislatures are increasingly drawing attention to what they claim are the risks associated with fluoride, a mineral that’s been used for decades in community water systems, toothpastes and mouth rinses to prevent tooth decay.

Dentists fiercely contest the notion that the harms of fluoride outweigh the benefits.

Senior presidential adviser Kari Lake appears to have resolved any doubts about what she wants to do with the Voice of America.

Lake seeks for it to look and sound a lot like the far-right One America News Network: on Tuesday night she announced that she had struck a deal to serve up the pro-Trump outlet's news reports for Voice of America's foreign audiences, at no taxpayer cost.

Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.

The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice”.

Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.

On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times.

According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. "I'm almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable."

Ervin Wyatt’s history behind the wheel spreads across two pages of a recent court filing: Fleeing police. Fleeing police again. Running a red light. Causing a traffic collision. Driving without a license, four times. A dozen speeding tickets.

Yet the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued him a license in 2019. Wyatt promptly got three more speeding tickets, court records show. Prosecutors say he was speeding again in 2023 when he lost control and crashed into oncoming traffic, killing three women. He’s now facing murder charges in Stanislaus County.

The DMV routinely allows drivers like these — with horrifying histories of dangerous driving, including DUIs, crashes and numerous tickets — to continue to operate on our roadways, a CalMatters investigation has found. Too often they go on to kill. Many keep driving even after they kill. Some go on to kill again.