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Lenders will no longer be able to see whether American borrowers have unpaid medical debt in their credit history, according to a new rule from the outgoing Biden administration.

The vice-president, Kamala Harris, announced early on Tuesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was removing $49bn of existing unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of 15 million Americans and will ban the inclusion of medical debt on credit reports.

“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Harris said in a statement. “This will be life changing for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan or a small-business loan.”

Tesla is the target of yet another federal safety probe, the fourth currently open by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation. Today's trouble concerns the automaker's "Smart Summon" and "Actually Smart Summon" features, which allow Tesla drivers to remotely control their vehicles via a smartphone app.

At least in theory, that is. In practice, NHTSA says it's aware of multiple crash allegations "where the user had too little reaction time to avoid a crash, either with the available line of sight or releasing the phone app button, which stops the vehicle’s movement."

Worse yet, Tesla has failed to report any of these incidents to the safety regulator, which has a standing general order that requires any automaker or operator of autonomous or partially automated vehicles to report crashes involving such systems that occur on publicly accessible roads.

The evidence was overwhelming from the time it all began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage park, with a witness who dialed 911 and described the attack as it was happening. A police officer hoisting the suspect from atop one of the victims, the suspect’s pants still around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime.

Yet in Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to finally go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went with the passage of time — a series of six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and long after the COVID-19 pandemic paused jury trials across the state. At hearing after hearing, talks concerned scheduling, not the facts of the case.

For the two women Hurley was charged with assaulting, justice delayed meant justice denied in their lifetimes. Both died before the case ever reached the jury.

The bodies of two people were found in a landing gear compartment of a JetBlue plane at the Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida, according to the company.

The Airbus flight came in from New York's John F Kennedy International Airport, departing at about 20:00 local time (01:00 GMT) on Monday and landing at about 23:00.

Local police are investigating how the two people accessed the plane, while a medical examiner's office is performing autopsies to determine their causes of death, according to the BBC's US partner CBS News.

But as Dorsey worked on the Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner across the 1990s and 2000s as more manufacturing was outsourced, he said things began to unravel, leading to “chaos” filtering down the chain of command and “substandard work” being accepted.

But in 1997, Dorsey said that upper management was thrown into disarray upon Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace and defense company before the acquisition.

A broad swathe of leadership ranks were filled by McDonnell Douglas veterans – not Boeing executives – many of whom had backgrounds in finance rather than engineering.

The Social Security Fairness Act rolls back the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO), provisions that curbed Social Security benefits for those receiving retirement benefits from public service jobs.

The repeal of the two provisions means roughly 3 million teachers, firefighters, and other public-sector workers will see increases to their Social Security benefits. While the Social Security Fairness Act received significant bipartisan support, 71 Republicans in the House and 20 in the Senate voted against it, including new Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).

North Dakota was one of the last states in the country to form an ethics oversight agency. The 2018 amendment set some ethical rules for public officials and empowered the commission to both create more rules and investigate alleged violations related to corruption, elections, lobbying and transparency.

But the amendment also gave the legislature a role to play, directing it “to provide adequate funds” for the commission. The amendment did not spell out how the commission would operate, and amid that ambiguity, lawmakers took it upon themselves to pass laws governing the commission’s operations and investigations.

Watch: Moment avalanche barrels down Utah mountain

Heavy snowfall in Utah caused an avalanche that was captured on camera from a nearby vehicle in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Local media reported that up to five inches (12.7cm) of snow fell in the area, causing the avalanche and stranding skiers for a while.

Seven US states have declared a state of emergency as Storm Blair sweeps through.

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.

To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.

Law enforcement could charge people for the "estimated cost" of processing the video — and you would have to pay before the footage is released.

Governments could charge up to $75 an hour for work, with a fee cap of $750 per request.

Legal experts said this could affect access to video from dash and body cameras, as well as surveillance video from inside jails, which are public records in Ohio.

Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered.

All four of these posters have pages on both Facebook and Instagram with mirrored content and all four have post histories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have the blue verified check marks and a label indicating that they’re an AI “managed by Meta.” Users can block them on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message them across all of Meta’s platforms, including WhatsApp.

Biden said he ultimately decided to block the proposed acquisition because he believes that "a strong domestically owned and operated steel industry represents an essential national security priority and is critical for resilient supply chains."

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal committee that has the power to review certain transactions involving foreign investment in the United States to evaluate a deal's impact on national security, decided to forgo making a formal recommendation about whether the deal should be allowed to proceed last week.