In 2022, the world axed a disease name seen as racist. US just switched back.
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In 2022, the world axed a disease name seen as racist. US just switched back.

Switching names In November 2022, the WHO decided to change the name. The United Nations health agency noted that it had received reports from individuals and countries about the “racist and stigmatizing language online, in other settings, and in some communities.” The WHO decided to switch to the name “mpox” with a one-year grace period....

Starbase City-SpaceX
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Starbase hires Cameron County to police its streets and jail its offenders

Starbase is a city without a police department, but not without police. For months, Cameron County sheriff’s deputies have patrolled the roads and beaches surrounding SpaceX’s sprawling rocket facility in South Texas. Now, less than a year after Starbase residents voted to incorporate, the city has signed formal agreements making those deputies its de facto...

DoorDash’s New Delivery Robot Rolls Out Into the Big, Cruel World
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DoorDash’s New Delivery Robot Rolls Out Into the Big, Cruel World

App-based companies have publicly spoken for years about the money-saving potential of autonomous vehicles. These firms have poured billions of dollars into recruiting and managing the independent contractors who do the delivering and driving for them, and millions more ensuring they’ll stay independent contractors and not employees. What if the firms could skip all that?...

a photo of Ted Cruz, speaking to the Senate on Sept. 29, as seen on C-Span
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Ted Cruz blocks bill that would extend privacy protections to all Americans

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has blocked an effort to pass legislation that would have extended data privacy protections for federal lawmakers and public officials to everyone in the United States. On Monday night, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked the U.S. Senate for unanimous consent from fellow senators to pass his legislation, S.2850. Wyden’s bill, if...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom looks on during a bill signing event related to redrawing the state’s congressional maps on August 21, 2025
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California’s newly signed AI law just gave Big Tech exactly what it wanted

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act into law, requiring AI companies to disclose their safety practices while stopping short of mandating actual safety testing. The law requires companies with annual revenues of at least $500 million to publish safety protocols on their websites and report incidents to...

Everything Amazon Announced Today at Its Fall Hardware Event (2025)
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Everything Amazon Announced Today at Its Fall Hardware Event (2025)

It’s a big year for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. It got a large language model power-up earlier this year in the form of Alexa+ (a paid upgrade for non-Amazon Prime subscribers), and now, Amazon has fresh hardware to take advantage of the assistant’s new capabilities. At an event in New York City, Amazon senior vice...