pelespirit

A federal website for information on reproductive rights and healthcare access is suddenly down, following Donald Trump’s inauguration yesterday. Reproductiverights.gov seemed to be offline as of last night, CBS reports.

The Biden administration launched the website in 2022 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. On top of information about abortion rights, the website also included resources on accessing preventative care, including breast and cervical cancer screenings, prenatal care, and HIV screening. (The Internet Archive has a snapshot of what the website looked like as recently as January 15th.)

A union representing workers across dozens of federal agencies sued the Trump administration late Monday over an executive order stripping many career civil servants of protections designed to insulate them from political pressure.

The lawsuit was filed by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) shortly after President Donald Trump signed an order that reinstated, with some amendments, the "Schedule F" measure he implemented at the tail end of his first White House term—an action that former President Joe Biden reversed.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

Health experts fear that a US withdrawal from the agency would significantly diminish the agency's resources and capabilities, leave the world more vulnerable to health threats, and isolate the US, hurting its own interests and leaving the country less prepared to respond to another pandemic. The New York Times noted that a withdrawal would mean that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would lose, among many things, access to global health data that the WHO compiles.

The CBP One app used for processing migrants trying to enter the U.S has been ended by the Trump administration. NBC News’ Julia Ainsley reports on what will happen to appointments already scheduled through the app, which was set up under the Biden administration.

Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem with Instagram which results in a "results hidden" message when users search for the terms "Democrat" or "Democrats".

Some social media users have accused the company of political bias, pointing out the issue has been occurring after President Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, which was attended by Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta has insisted that is not the case, saying it is a technical problem which has also affected other hashtags, including a Republican one.

However, social media expert Matt Navarra said it was "embarrassing" for Instagram regardless.

"In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship," he said.

The maker of the video game Genshin Impact has agreed to pay $20 million and to block children under 16 from making in-game purchases without parental consent to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations the company violated a children’s privacy law and deceived children and other users about the real costs of in-game transactions and odds of obtaining rare prizes.

“Genshin Impact deceived children, teens, and other players into spending hundreds of dollars on prizes they stood little chance of winning,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Companies that deploy these dark-pattern tactics will be held accountable if they deceive players, particularly kids and teens, about the true costs of in-game transactions.”

What do these privacy violations have in common? They share a source of data that’s shockingly pervasive and unregulated: the technology powering nearly every ad you see online.

Each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called “real-time bidding” (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads—it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you’ve never heard of.

If a strike goes ahead, 56 of the company’s warehouse stores across five states would be affected after 85% of Teamster members voted to authorize the action over wages and benefits.

The Teamsters said Costco had rejected proposals dealing with seniority pay, paid family leave, bereavement policies, sick time, and safeguards against surveillance. The union represents around 8% of Costco’s 219,000, mostly un-unionized, employees.

Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM) that has been generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they have already arrested their first suspect—a 49-year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist named Darrin Bell.

The new law, which you can read here, declares that AI-generated CSAM is harmful, even without an actual victim. In part, says the law, this is because all kinds of CSAM can be used to groom children into thinking sexual activity with adults is normal. But the law singles out AI-generated CSAM for special criticism due to the way that generative AI systems work.

"The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."

Edit: Bolded out certain parts to clarify why they're doing it.

I'm locking this thread because I won't have time to watch it.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.