The U.S. Department of Agriculture weakened an emergency order last spring designed to prevent the spread of bird flu among the nation’s dairy cattle after pushback from state and industry officials, according to state and federal records seen by Reuters.

The communications, which have not previously been reported, show how the early federal response to the U.S. bird flu outbreak was shaped in part by industry interests reluctant to cooperate with burdensome regulation, and potentially contributed to transmission of the disease across state lines.

The USDA’s order, released in April after bird flu cases were discovered in cows in eight states, requires milk-producing dairy cattle moving across state lines to secure a negative bird flu test no more than seven days prior to travel. It also allows non-producing cattle headed to slaughter to cross state lines without a veterinarian’s clean bill of health.

The USDA had initially contemplated more stringent requirements, including a three-day time frame for testing, but responded to industry feedback urging leniency before releasing the order, according to documents contained in the records request.

Relaxing the order may have enabled more spread of the virus, two veterinarians and one dairy industry representative told Reuters. They noted logistical constraints to testing animals in the shorter window.

When the agency issued the April 24 order, 33 herds had tested positive. The outbreak has since ballooned to more than 330 herds across 14 states and human cases in 17 dairy workers.

“Any changes or clarifications to the Federal Order have been made with the objective of protecting animal and public health by following scientific best practices, using the best available data, and ensuring the appropriate balance between compliance and feasibility for producers,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email.

The agency has conducted more than 16,000 pre-movement tests and is supporting an investigation in California into whether improper cattle movement introduced the virus to the state, the spokesperson said.

The rapid spread of bird flu among dairy herds and infections of 27 people this year have alarmed some public health experts, who say the USDA is not responding aggressively enough.

The order remains the only national requirement to curb transmission of the virus.

Memos and meetings

USDA chief veterinarian Rosemary Sifford met with the Livestock Marketing Association to discuss the planned federal order on the morning of April 24, according to a memo the industry group sent to USDA officials released in a public records request.

“The 72-hour pre-movement time frame we have heard is being contemplated is simply not accomplishable,” wrote LMA’s vice president of government and industry affairs Chelsea Good, suggesting a 7- to 14-day testing window instead.

The farm agency did not include a time frame for testing in the initial order or supplemental information issued on April 25. A guidance document released on April 26 allowed dairies seven days for testing.

In an ideal world, testing would happen within 24 hours, said Keith Poulsen, a veterinarian and director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. The rural location of dairy farms makes it difficult to transport samples to a lab, he added.

During the same April week, state animal health officials told USDA it should allow states to agree on alternative documentation in lieu of a veterinary bill of health for non-lactating dairy cows moving across state lines to slaughter, the records show. Older dairy cattle are often processed into ground beef.

In the April 26 guidance document, USDA said states would be able to accept alternative documentation, which can include such basic information as addresses of cattle owners and shippers.

Requiring veterinary documents is too expensive for dairies operating on slim margins, said Bob Seiler, president of the Central Equity Milk Cooperative in Kansas. He said he has not been required to provide alternative documentation when sending non-lactating cows to slaughter.

Side-stepping the veterinary sign-off could have allowed for further spread of the virus, said Gail Hansen, a former Kansas state veterinarian.

“The chances of something slipping through the cracks is a lot bigger,” she said.

A shortage of rural veterinarians could make it difficult for farmers to get their herds inspected before every shipment, Poulsen said.

The USDA spokesperson said cows moving to slaughter are considered a lower risk for spreading bird flu and that alternative documentation allows for traceability if there are infections.

‘No upside to test’

California is examining how the virus entered the state, including whether imports of cows met legal requirements, the state agriculture department said. More than 130 herds and 13 dairy workers in the top dairy state have been infected since the end of August.

Even before the federal order, the farm sector was leaning on state officials to fend off calls for restrictions on cattle movement, according to the records obtained by Reuters.

In a March 26 email, the CEO of the Kansas Farm Bureau, Terry Holdren, asked Kansas Agriculture Secretary Mike Beam and Justin Smith, the state’s animal health officer, if they could apply “any leverage or pressure” to keep Nebraska accepting cattle, after hearing Nebraska may turn cattle away.

Nebraska on April 1 began requiring a permit for female breeding dairy cows coming from other states.

Farmers in some cases have shunned testing of cows.

“There’s been no upside to a dairy producer to report and test,” said Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.

—Leah Douglas and Tom Polansek, Reuters

The unregulated carbon dioxide removal industry is calling on the U.S. government to implement standards and regulations to boost transparency and confidence in the sector that’s been flooded with billions of dollars in federal funding and private investment.

A report Wednesday by the Carbon Removal Alliance, a nonprofit representing the industry, outlined recommendations to improve monitoring, reporting, and verification. Currently the only regulations in the U.S. are related to safety of these projects. Some of the biggest industry players, including Heirloom and Climeworks, are alliance members.

“I think it’s rare for an industry to call for regulation of itself and I think that is a signal of why this is so important,” said Giana Amador, executive director of the alliance. Amador said monitoring, reporting and verification are like “climate receipts” that confirm the amount of carbon removed as well as how long it can actually be stored underground.

Without federal regulation, she said “it really hurts competition and it forces these companies into sort of a marketing arms race instead of being able to focus their efforts on making sure that there really is a demonstrable climate impact.”

The nonprofit defines carbon removal as any solution that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it permanently. One of the most popular technologies is direct air capture, which filters air, extracts carbon dioxide and puts it underground.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided around $12 billion for carbon management projects in the U.S. Some of this funding supports the development of four Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs at commercial scale that will capture at least one million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Two hubs are slated to be built in Texas and Louisiana.

Some climate scientists say direct air capture is too expensive, far from being scaled and can be used as an excuse by the oil and gas industry to keep polluting.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, said this is the “moral hazard” of direct air capture—removing carbon from the atmosphere could be utilized by the oil and gas industry to continue polluting.

“It does not mean that the underlying technology is not a good thing,” said Wagner. Direct air capture “decreases emissions, but in the long run also extends the life of any one particular coal plant or gas plant.”

In 2023, Occidental Petroleum Corporation purchased the direct air capture company, Carbon Engineering Ltd, for $1.1 billion. In a news release, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said, “Together, Occidental and Carbon Engineering can accelerate plans to globally deploy (the) technology at a climate-relevant scale and make (it) the preferred solution for businesses seeking to remove their hard-to-abate emissions.”

Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, doesn’t consider carbon dioxide removal technologies to be a true climate solution.

“I do welcome at least some interventions from the federal government to monitor and verify and evaluate the performance of these proposed carbon removal schemes, because it’s kind of the Wild West out there,” said Foley.

“But considering it can cost ten to 100 times more to try to remove a ton of carbon rather than prevent it, how is that even remotely conscionable to spend public dollars on this kind of stuff?” he said.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said standards for the direct carbon capture industry “are very badly needed” because of the level of government subsidies and private investment. She said there’s no single fix for the climate crisis, and many strategies are needed.

Hayhoe said these include improving the efficiency of energy systems, transitioning to clean energy, weaning the world off fossil fuels and maintaining healthy ecosystems to trap carbon dioxide. On the other hand, she said, carbon removal technologies are “very high hanging fruit.”

“It takes a lot of money and a lot of energy to get to the top of the tree. That’s the carbon capture solution,” said Hayhoe. “Of course we need every fruit on the tree. But doesn’t it make sense to pick up the fruit on the ground to prioritize that?”

Other climate scientists are entirely opposed to this technology.

“It should be banned,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Carbon removal technologies indirectly increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Jacobson said. The reason, he said, is that even in cases where direct air capture facilities are powered by renewable energy, the clean energy is being used for carbon removal instead of replacing a fossil fuel source.

“When you just look at the capture equipment, you get a (carbon) reduction,” Jacobson said. “But when you look at the bigger system, you’re increasing.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—Isabella O’Malley, Associated Press

Whether it’s digging for metals and minerals for cellphones and electric vehicles or coal for power generation, mining around the world has skyrocketed since 2000, causing widespread destruction of tropical forests, degrading the environment and displacing Indigenous and local communities, the World Resources Institute says in a report released Wednesday.

The analysis highlighted that from 2001 to 2020, the world lost nearly 1.4 million hectares (3,459,475 acres) of trees due to mining—an area roughly the size the country of Montenegro. Nearly a third were in tropical primary rainforests. Protected areas were also damaged.

This tree loss released 36 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year into the atmosphere, an amount similar to Finland’s fossil fuel emissions in 2022, according to the analysis.

Those figures are likely conservative since they do not include indirect tree loss from mining-related infrastructure like access roads and storage facilities, says the report by the World Resources Institute, a global nonprofit organization researching environmental issues.

Mining-related loss in tropical primary rainforests is especially concerning because they are some of the most carbon-rich and biodiverse areas of the world. They also help regulate local and regional climate effects like rainfall and temperatures.

Mining often involves digging up vegetation and soil, intensifying disasters from severe weather and climate change. It can also pollute the air and water.

“Where industrial scale extraction happens around the world right now . . . it comes with significant harm to the environment and to the communities that rely on it,” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.

Losses were concentrated in eleven countries, led by Indonesia and Brazil. Other notable contributors included Russia, the United States, Canada, Peru, Ghana, Suriname, Myanmar, Australia, and Guyana.

Lands used by Indigenous and local communities were heavily impacted in some countries: In Suriname, Venezuela and Ecuador, nearly two-thirds of mining-related forest loss occurred in such areas, according to the analysis.

Gold and coal have historically been the biggest drivers of tree cover loss related to mining. According to a World Wildlife Fund study, gold and coal extraction resulted in over 70% of all mining-related deforestation from 2001 to 2019.

While coal use is declining, it still dominates the global energy mix. According to a WWF study, 57% of tree cover loss linked to coal extraction from 2000 to 2019 happened in Indonesia alone. Indonesian coal production has accelerated over the last 10 years as it became one of the world’s largest coal exporters.

Deforestation for coal production is not only a tropical problem: A WWF study showed that 20% of global coal-related tree cover loss happened in the United States between 2001 and 2019. From 2001 to 2020, 120,000 hectares (296,525 acres) of forest loss was related to mining, much of it linked to surface coal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee.

The current gold mining boom started shortly after the 2008 global financial crisis, when the price of gold skyrocketed. Tree loss in Brazil and Ghana is largely linked to gold mining.

Critical materials for smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles have also become a new driver of mining, according to the analysis. That includes deforestation for Indonesia’s nickel boom, Myanmar’s murky rare earths industry and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

WRI’s analysis noted that miners have the opportunity to improve and to minimize environmental damage as they open new mines.

That should include mining that incorporates the best available technologies and practices, rehabilitation plans and robust environmental monitoring, said Michael Goodsite, an expert on sustainable mining practices and technology.

“There is a conundrum: How do we get to the minerals that we need without doing more harm to the environment?” said Goodsite. “A holistic understanding, view and systematic approach is needed.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—Victoria Milko, Associated Press

The U.S. government fined American Airlines $50 million for failing to provide wheelchair assistance to passengers with disabilities and damaging thousands of wheelchairs over a five-year period.

The Transportation Department said Wednesday that “in some cases,” wheelchair users were injured, but it did not give a number.

American said it has made significant investments to improve the handling of wheelchairs. The airline will be credited $25 million, or half of its civil penalty, for those investments and compensation paid to affected passengers, according to a consent order.

The incidents raised by the Transportation Department occurred between 2019 and 2023.

The investigation was prompted in part by three formal complaints the Paralyzed Veterans of America filed against American.

Investigators also seized on video of an incident at Miami International Airport last year. Workers slid a wheelchair down a baggage ramp. It crashed into the bottom of the chute, flipped over and skittered across the concrete.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said American Airlines “appeared to be one of the worst offenders,” but the problems that investigators found “are not confined to one airline.” He said the department is conducting similar investigations into other airlines, but he would not name them.

“The era of tolerating poor treatment of wheelchair users on airplanes is over,” Buttigieg declared to reporters.

From 2019 through 2023, American mishandled more than 10,760 wheelchairs and mobility scooters, according to Transportation Department figures. Only Southwest Airlines, at more than 11,100, had more incidents. Spirit Airlines had the highest percentage of errors in several of the years, according to the department.

American said it has invested more than $175 million this year on infrastructure, training and other steps to improve the travel experience for people with disabilities.

American said it has cut its rate of mishandling wheelchairs and power scooters by more than 20%, and fewer than one in every 1,000 customers who ask for wheelchair assistance wind up complaining to the airline.

The punishment for American is far more severe than the Transportation Department meted out to other airlines that it determined had violated laws protecting travelers with disabilities. The previous record penalty was $2 million against United Airlines in 2016, which was reduced to $700,000 after United got credit for compensating passengers and other spending.

Department officials said the size of the fine against American reflected the large number of incidents, which included damaging wheelchairs or taking too long to return them to passengers after flights.

Federal regulations require airlines to return wheelchairs and scooters to customers quickly and undamaged after flights, and to help passengers with disabilities get around airports and get on and off planes. Airlines are required to pay for repairs or replacement of damaged wheelchairs, but advocates say that can still leave users without a suitable way to get around for weeks.

—David Koenig, AP Airlines Writer

With early voting underway in many states, and less than two weeks until the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are fighting to win over voters in what is predicted to be an incredibly tight race. Surprisingly, working at McDonald’s has become a key talking point on the campaign trail for both candidates. 

For years, Harris has spoken about her experience working at McDonald’s while in college. Recently, Trump and his team has, without evidence, suggested that Harris is lying.

Then on Sunday, Trump staged an appearance at a McDonald’s in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where he cosplayed as a McDonald’s worker, wearing the restaurant’s apron and handing french fries to preselected customers.

“I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala. She never worked here,” Trump exclaimed, continuing his unproven claim. 

“I wouldn’t mind this job,” Trump later said. “I like this job. I would come back and do it again.”

During his fake shift, the former president dodged a question about the minimum wage. And since, he has sold commemorative “MAGADonald’s” T-shirts. 

Here’s what Trump’s stunt, and working in the fast food industry, tells us about the presidential election.

Who actually worked at McDonald’s?

Trump’s unfounded claim that Harris hasn’t worked at McDonald’s is part of a larger pattern of behavior. For months, Trump has personally attacked Harris on the campaign trail. He has repeatedly and intentionally  mispronounced her name, falsely accused her of “turning Black,” and most recently, repeated his insult that she is “mentally impaired.” 

These jabs are often focused on Harris as a person, rather than on policy differences. 

Harris has been accused by Trump and other Republicans of lying about her time at the fast food chain because she did not include it on a job application for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in October 1987. Needless to say, Harris is likely not the only person to leave a summer job off their résumé when those skills may not be as transferable or relevant to the new role they are seeking.

Since then, Harris’s team has detailed how the vice president worked at McDonald’s, serving french fries and ice cream, when she was a rising sophomore at Howard University in the summer of 1983.

“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie. He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because he was handed millions on a silver platter, only to blow it,” Ian Sams, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told The Washington Post.

Trump, for his part, did appear in a 2002 McDonald’s ad. And Trump’s love of McDonald’s food is well-documented. During his $250 million civil fraud trial in Manhattan last year, several bags of McDonald’s were brought into court. Former Trump campaign officials have said that his favorite order consists of “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted [shake].”

American culture and capitalism

Harris is not alone in having worked at McDonald’s. In fact, one in eight Americans have worked at the fast food chain.

For many, the golden arches seen from highways across the country represent American culture and capitalism. They also serve as a powerful symbol of the service economy and the working class. Both candidates are actively courting low-wage workers in key battleground states. 

When Trump was asked by reporters if he would support raising the minimum wage, he did not answer the question. The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 and according to Talent.com, McDonald’s workers in Pennsylvania earn $11.25 per hour, on average. According to ZipRecruiter, the average hourly pay for a McDonalds crew member at in Pennsylvania is closer to $12.50.

Harris has said she would raise the current federal minimum wage, which she describes as “poverty wages.” And in a presidential campaign ad, Harris presents herself as someone who understands the middle class. “She grew up in a middle-class home. She was the daughter of a working mom,” a voiceover in one of her ads says. “And she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree.” 

Low-wage workers are disproportionately impacted by inflation and both candidates have made a number of pledges to appeal to working class voters. Harris wants to pass a middle class tax cut, increase healthcare subsidies and the child tax credit, and offer assistance for first-time homebuyers. Trump wants to lower corporate taxes, introduce tariffs on imports to drive U.S. manufacturing growth, and cut taxes on overtime pay. Both Harris and Trump support eliminating taxes on tips.

As the highly contested presidential race continues, there is no doubt that both Harris and Trump will try to win votes until all ballots are cast. Americans will have to decide for themselves if they will be better off for the next four years in a Harris or Trump presidency. And this year, McDonald’s workers could play a key role in deciding who the next President of the United States will be.

CVS Health last week named as CEO a tried-and-tested company veteran, the latest in a handful of firms this year that have turned to an experienced executive to take the helm, hoping to quell investor concerns amid economic uncertainty.

Following pressure from an activist investor, CVS hired David Joyner to replace Karen Lynch. During her three-and-a-half year tenure, CVS’s stock fell nearly 11%. The company has cut its 2024 profit forecast three times, blaming an increase in Medicare-related costs.

A few weeks earlier, Nike had hired former senior executive Elliott Hill to succeed John Donahoe as president and CEO, in an effort to revive sales and battle competition.

Boeing named aerospace industry veteran Kelly Ortberg as its CEO earlier this year to turn around the planemaker beset by legal and regulatory problems.

“Investors tend to be comforted when someone with a track record comes in,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Wisconsin-based Annex Wealth Management.

“It’s one thing if there is a new division or new opportunity, but when there are challenging times, investors often prefer someone who has been through a few economic cycles.”

A record number of CEOs have quit in the U.S. this year.

CEO departures jumped 15% to 1,450 between January and August, from the same period a year earlier, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The report cited economic uncertainty as one of the main reasons for leadership changes.

On Monday, Walt Disney named Morgan Stanley veteran James Gorman as chair. Gorman had already been tasked with finding a replacement for Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Wall Street favorite who retired from the company in 2021, only to return the next year to deal with a pandemic-related slump.

“The pandemic and subsequent economic challenges led some companies to prioritize stability, experience, and redundancies over innovation and disruption, bringing in experienced leaders to implement immediate turnaround strategies . . . rather than for long-term transformation,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital.

The strategy has, however, met with mixed success.

Famously, Apple founder Steve Jobs left the company in 1985 over differences with then-CEO John Sculley, returning a dozen years later to architect the iPhone. Howard Schultz has held the top job at Starbucks three different times, setting the coffee chain back on track each time its sales faltered.

But things have not worked out the same way for several major American corporations who brought back former CEOs including Dell, Twitter, and consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble.

P&G, for instance, brought back former CEO Alan Lafley in 2013 to reinvigorate sales, but his second tenure was much less fruitful. He was replaced with another company veteran in roughly two years.

Executives who come back to the fold, known as “boomerang CEOs”, may either be unable or unwilling to make necessary strategic changes when they return, according to a research paper featured in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2020.

The annual stock performance of companies led by such CEOs was 10% lower on an average than their first-stint counterparts, the report showed.

“Not everyone is Jobs . . . Returning CEOs are usually overconfident, which, when combined with their difficulty of adopting to the constantly evolving business environment, may exacerbate the damage caused by their stubborn fixation on old strategies,” said Xu Jiang, associate professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

—Shivansh Tiwary and Aishwarya Venugopal, Reuters

Polls opened in North Carolina on Oct. 17, 2024, as about 14,000 people in Asheville and surrounding areas remain without power in their homes following Hurricane Helene. In Florida, which started early voting in some counties on Oct. 21, about 400,000 residents are still without power after Hurricane Milton.

Some experts have said that the hurricanes could cause voter numbers to drop–and impacts of Helene have already prompted a few early polling stations in western North Carolina to close. But more North Carolina residents turned out to vote on the first day of early voting than they did in 2020.

Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Michael T. Morley, who studies natural disasters and election law, to understand how these recent storms could complicate voting in the presidential election.

What are the major issues that hurricanes can create ahead of an election?

A hurricane or natural disaster makes an election tremendously more challenging for both election officials and voters on various practical levels.

Election administrators might have been injured, or their homes could be flooded or destroyed. State officials need to ensure, especially in areas that have been hardest hit, that enough local administrators remain in place to continue distributing absentee ballots and to staff early voting locations.

Still, I have not seen empirical evidence that the results of any federal elections in recent decades have changed as a result of hurricanes.

What could these major hurricanes mean for voters in North Carolina and Florida?

Florida has one of the most comprehensive laws to deal with election emergencies of this sort because it faces them frequently.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order on Oct. 3, 2024, in response to Hurricane Helene. Among other things, Florida law says that in a state of emergency the governor can suspend state statutes or regulations governing state business when complying with them can interfere with disaster response.

Florida, like other states, has deadlines for when election officials must designate polling locations. DeSantis waived this deadline to authorize county officials to designate new ones. DeSantis’ order also gives election officials more discretion about where new polling locations may be located. And he made it easier for state employees to step in and serve as poll workers, particularly on Election Day.

DeSantis suspended a state requirement so a person who cannot return to their home can ask by phone to have a vote-by-mail ballot sent to wherever they are staying – not just their registered home address. Making it easier for ballots to be sent to people, wherever they are, is one of the most effective measures that Florida has implemented to help make voting easier.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, state officials have authorized different changes that will apply to the 25 counties in the western part of the state that are under emergency orders because of the hurricane. These changes are mostly focused on voting by mail and polling place workers. They also allow county boards of elections to change Election Day voting locations and permit voters to drop off absentee ballots at any county board of election office by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day.

Western North Carolina voters now also have until Nov. 4 to request a mail-in ballot, as opposed to the original deadline of Oct. 29.

Overall, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper authorized US$5 million for the state’s board of elections in order to make it easier for western North Carolina residents to vote.

What sort of legal issues, if any, do these changes open up?

Disputes have already arisen about potential extension of the voter registration deadlines in states affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Courts in Florida and Georgia have already declined emergency motions to extend the voter registration deadline.

A South Carolina state court, in contrast, held in October that the deadline had to be extended for 10 additional days.

Similar disputes are likely to arise over such election rules as photo identification requirements at polling places and the deadlines for requesting and returning absentee ballots.

Occasionally, challenges also arise alleging that certain measures to address an emergency have gone too far.

During the height of the pandemic, for example, the Trump presidential campaign filed lawsuits that unsuccessfully challenged state decisions to automatically mail absentee ballots to people registered to vote.

What are you most concerned about heading into the election?

My biggest concern is that, particularly if the election is close, a losing candidate might attempt to use the hurricane as a way of trying to challenge the election results or call them into question.

Courts will almost certainly reject that. Once the election has happened, a court generally will not set aside the results or order additional voting, even if voters faced substantial burdens and people think there is more that election officials could have done. This is especially true in the context of a presidential election, since the U.S. Constitution and federal law establish several important postelection deadlines involving the Electoral College.

Some people already have unwarranted skepticism about the electoral process. It would be bad for our democracy if the recent hurricanes are exploited as a basis for refusing to accept the election’s results.

Michael T. Morley is an assistant professor of law at Florida State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Securities and Exchange Commission fined four companies on Tuesday with misleading investors about the impact the 2020 hack of SolarWinds had on their own systems.

Unisys, Avaya, Check Point, and Mimecast will each pay civil penalties to settle the agency’s charges that they downplayed the impacts of the hack through their respective public disclosures.

“While public companies may become targets of cyberattacks, it is incumbent upon them to not further victimize their shareholders or other members of the investing public by providing misleading disclosures about the cybersecurity incidents they have encountered,” Acting Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement Sanjay Wadhwa said in a statement.

In 2020, a Russian backed group planted malware in the SolarWinds system that sent out updates to SolarWinds’s Orion software. When several thousand of the company’s clients installed the update, they also unknowingly installed the malware. It ended up becoming one of the most destructive and costly cyberattacks in history, as NPR put it.

According to the SEC, Unisys, Avaya, and Check Point learned in 2020, and Mimecast learned in 2021, that the actor behind the hack had accessed their systems without authorization. Still, the SEC argued, each minimized the incident in public disclosures. The SEC said that Unisys also described its risk as hypothetical, when it already knew it had been breached twice.

Unisys will pay a $4 million civil penalty. Avaya will pay $1 million, Check Point will pay $995,000, and Mimecast will pay $990,000.

A Check Point spokesperson said: “As mentioned in the SEC’s order, Check Point investigated the SolarWinds incident and did not find evidence that any customer data, code, or other sensitive information was accessed. Nevertheless, Check Point decided that cooperating and settling the dispute with the SEC was in its best interest and allows the company to maintain its focus on helping its customers defend against cyberattacks throughout the world.”

An Avaya spokesperson made a similar comment. “We are pleased to have resolved with the SEC this disclosure matter related to historical cybersecurity issues dating back to late 2020, and that the agency recognized Avaya’s voluntary cooperation and that we took certain steps to enhance the company’s cybersecurity controls,” the spokesperson said. “Avaya continues to focus on strengthening its cybersecurity program, both in designing and providing our products and services to our valued customers, as well as in our internal operations.”

A Mimecast spokesperson added: “We believed that we complied with our disclosure obligations based on the regulatory requirements at that time. As we responded to the incident, Mimecast took the opportunity to enhance our resilience. While Mimecast is no longer a publicly traded company, we have cooperated fully and extensively with the SEC. We resolved this matter to put it behind us and continue to maintain our strong focus on serving our customers.”

A spokesperson for Unisys did not immediately return Fast Company‘s requests for comment.

Update: This story has been updated to include comment from Mimecast.

Starbucks’s new CEO Brian Niccol has his work cut out for him.

Tasked with reassuring investors that the company’s coffee shops are still hugely popular in the U.S., Niccol also has to contend with baristas and hardcore Starbucks customers who say they want plenty of changes.

Baristas complain about what they say are chronic understaffing and poor pay and benefits, and their inability to easily ban aggressive customers from Starbucks stores. Zealous customers want consistently good coffee.

Shares of the company were down about 5% in premarket trading.

On Tuesday, after Starbucks reported a 6% fall in fourth-quarter same-store sales in the U.S. and pulled its earnings guidance for the coming fiscal year, Niccol said baristas need to be supported to provide “exceptional service” to customers.

“To succeed, we need to address staffing in our stores, remove bottlenecks, and simplify things for our baristas,” he said in a video statement.

Liv Ryan, a barista and union organizer at a Starbucks in Long Island, New York, said that Niccol should put “an end to short staffing.”

She said baristas have long had gripes about the lack of guidance from Starbucks on how to contend with bad-tempered customers.

“I have been told countless times that part of our job is ‘just taking rude customers,'” Ryan said. “But there’s no clear line between ‘rude’ and ‘hostile’ and even then I shouldn’t have to put up with anyone being rude to me at my job.”

Several other baristas who are part of, or who aim to be part of, the new Starbucks Workers United union, want to see Starbucks complete the contract bargaining process with workers. “All I’m looking for is a collective bargaining agreement by the end of the year,” said Parker Davis, a union organizer at a Starbucks in San Antonio.

Niccol in the video said he would share more details about possible changes on the company’s earnings call on Oct. 30, after Starbucks releases earnings for its fourth quarter and the year as a whole.

“We suspect multiple avenues of attack (by Niccol) are likely, including increasing labor hours at stores and reducing the frequency of limited-time promotions,” said William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia.

As for the coffee itself, it’s overroasted, according to a zealous Starbucks customer whose legal name is Winter.

Winter, who has visited more than 19,000 Starbucks locations across the world in a quest to visit every corporate-owned location, said he still enjoys the atmosphere at the Starbucks – at least when it isn’t the morning rush – but these days, he’s found the coffee wanting.

He used to like it back in 1997, he says, but Starbucks has since made its menu far more complex with specialty coffee orders. “And getting a fancy drink isn’t going to make me enjoy it any more.”

—Waylon Cunningham, Reuters

Goldfish, the crunchy snack loved by toddlers and teenagers alike, is getting a more mature name. That’s right. As of Wednesday, “Chilean Sea Bass” is swimming into our lives—at least for a limited time.

According to Campbell Soup Company, which owns Goldfish, the new name acknowledges that the crackers are not just for kids. “We know the love for Goldfish spans all ages. Chilean Sea Bass is a playful nod to adults that the iconic fish-shaped snack is for grown-up tastes too,” Danielle Brown, Vice President of Goldfish, said in a statement.

Of course, there’s nothing fishy going on when it comes to the snack itself. The salty, crunchy snack will remain the same, despite the never-ending potential for new flavors to emerge. The brand has a long history of creating exciting new flavors, from Pizza to Old Bay, many of which seek to appeal to more grown-up taste buds. In 2021, the brand even debuted an ultra-spicy flavor, Frank’s RedHot Crackers, which combined ingredients like hot sauce, vinegar, and cayenne pepper. They’ve also come out with Crisps, which are thinner and more chip-like, and other variations.

The name change is a move to help the brand expand its reach, specifically among grown-up customers. That could be, in part, due to less frequent snacking by adults, as GLP-1 drugs that curb hunger, like Ozempic, continue to climb in popularity. While the snacking market has yet to document a noticeable shift, it’s still a smart play for the biggest snack brands to prepare for one. 

At least 12% of adults have now taken GLP-1 drugs, with around 22% taking the drugs for weight management.

As for Goldfish, the innovative brand has been growing steadily. Sales were up around 13% in 2023, and Campbell Soup built a new Goldfish production line to produce a massive number of crackers—five million Goldfish—every hour. The $160 million investment increases production by 50%. When it comes to Goldfish, things are going swimmingly. 

While the new name may appeal to adults, Chilean Sea Bass snacks won’t appear in stores. They’ll only be sold online for one week. Customers can snag the same snack they know and love with its more grown-up name at ChileanSeaBassCrackers.com. Snackers will be able to score two bags of Chilean Sea Bass crackers for $7.38 while supplies last. New inventory will be available daily through Oct. 30.

Peloton plans to sell its deluxe stationary bike at Costco this holiday season as the struggling connected-exercise company seeks to broaden its customer base.

The Peloton Bike+, a stationary bike that enables riders to participate in online classes and work out with a virtual community of friends, will be sold at a discount online and in 300 Costco stores from November through mid-February, the companies announced Tuesday.

The model will sell in Costco stores for $1,999 and will require self-assembly. That’s about $500 cheaper than buying a new bike directly through Peloton’s website, a purchase which includes delivery and setup. Costco will also sell the Peloton Bike+ on its website for $2,199, which includes delivery.

“The Costco brand is incredibly powerful and respected in the U.S. and abroad,” Dion Camp Sanders, Peloton’s chief emerging business officer, said in a news release. “Costco members know they are shopping for high quality products from trusted brands with the best value.”

The partnership with Costco is a way for Peloton to cast a wider net and make its products more accessible, said Angeli Gianchandani, an adjunct instructor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies.

“Costco might be known for low cost, but at the same time they don’t shy away from carrying high-end products,” Gianchandani said. “And this falls in line with that strategy and how they carry their product selection to really appeal to a wider demographic that’s affluent, and they appreciate quality and value.”

Once marketed as an exclusive, aspirational brand, Peloton began rebranding itself to be seen as more accessible as it grappled with falling sales and a plummeting stock price. In August 2022, the company made its exercise bikes and other gear available for purchase on Amazon in the U.S.

The Peloton Bike+ is a step up from the original Peloton bike because it has a rotating touch-screen and a resistance knob that can be set to automatically adjust to an instructor’s recommendations. To participate in classes, riders purchase an all-access membership for $44 a month, which also includes classes in meditation, strength training, yoga and other disciplines.

Peloton’s choice to sell at Costco “appears to be based not just on Costco’s size and formidable footprint, but the nature of the demographics that shop at the warehouse club,” said Kimberly Whitler, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia. “Specifically, it appears that they are attempting to reach younger, wealthier individuals who are likely a prime demographic group.”

Costco Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip said on an earnings call in September that about half of the retailers new members this year were under 40 years old.

Sales of Peloton bikes soared during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when gyms closed and many people stayed home to reduce the risk of contracting or spreading the virus. The company’s share price surpassed $150 in late 2020.

But the growth was unsustainable, and slowed when pandemic restrictions began to ease. Peloton also issued damaging recalls including one of about 125,000 treadmills in 2021 after they were linked to a child’s death and dozens of injuries, and another of more than 2 million bikes that had a seat post which could break during use.

Facing these challenges, Peloton’s stock price began a long tumble. It has been trading below $7 a share for all of 2024.

In May, Peloton cut 400 jobs and CEO Barry McCarthy stepped down. Peloton also has been selling refurbished bikes on its website, charging $1,145 for a used standard Peloton and $1,995 for a used Peloton Bike+.

—Cathy Bussewitz, Associated Press business writer

Boeing reported a loss of more than $6 billion in the third quarter and immediately turned its attention to union workers who will vote Wednesday whether to accept a company contract offer or continue their crippling strike, which has dragged on for nearly six weeks.

New CEO Kelly Ortberg laid out his plan to turn Boeing around after years of heavy losses and damage to its reputation.

In remarks he planned to deliver later Wednesday to investors, Ortberg said Boeing needs “a fundamental culture change in the company.” To accomplish that, he said, company leaders need to spend more time on factory floors to know what is going on and “prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause.”

Ortberg repeated that he wants to “reset” management’s relationship with labor “so we don’t become so disconnected in the future.” He expressed hope that machinists will vote to approve the company’s latest contract offer and end their strike.

“It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again,” he said.

The strike is an early test for Ortberg, a Boeing outsider who became CEO in August.

Ortberg has already announced large-scale layoffs and a plan to raise enough cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing. He needs to convince federal regulators that Boeing is fixing its safety culture and is ready to boost production of the 737 Max — a crucial step to bring in much-needed cash.

Boeing can’t produce any new 737s, however, until it ends the strike by 33,000 machinists that has shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area.

Ortberg has “got a lot on his plate, but he probably is laser-focused on getting this negotiation completed. That’s the closest alligator to the boat,” said Tony Bancroft, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, a Boeing investor.

Boeing said Wednesday that it lost $6.17 billion in the period ended Sept. 30, with an adjusted loss of $10.44 per share. Analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research were calling for a loss of $10.34 per share.

Revenue totaled $17.84 billion, matching Wall Street estimates.

Shares were flat before the opening bell.

Boeing hasn’t had a profitable year since 2018, and Wednesday’s numbers represent the second-worst quarter in Boeing’s history. The long-profitable company’s fortunes soured after two of its 737 Max jetliners crashed in October 2018 and March 2019, killing 346 people. Safety concerns were renewed when a panel blew off a Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

Ortberg said Boeing is at a crossroads.

“The trust in our company has eroded. We’re saddled with too much debt. We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company, which have disappointed many of our customers,” the new CEO said. But he also highlighted the company’s strengths, including a backlog of airplane orders valued at a half-trillion dollars.

Investors were looking for Ortberg to project calm, determination and urgency when he presides over an earnings call for the first time since he ran Rockwell Collins, a maker of avionics and flight controls for airline and military planes, in the last decade.

The biggest news of the day, however, is likely to come Wednesday evening, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers reveals whether striking workers are ready to go back to their jobs.

They will vote at union halls in the Seattle area and elsewhere on a Boeing offer that includes pay raises of 35% over four years, $7,000 ratification bonuses, and the retention of performance bonuses that Boeing wanted to eliminate.

Boeing has held firm in resisting a union demand to restore the traditional pension plan that was frozen a decade ago. However, older workers would get a slight increase in their monthly pension payouts.

At a picket line outside Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, some machinists encouraged colleagues to vote no.

“The pension should have been the top priority. We all said that was our top priority, along with wage,” said Larry Best, a customer-quality coordinator with 38 years at Boeing. “Now is the prime opportunity in a prime time to get our pension back, and we all need to stay out and dig our heels in.”

Best also thinks the pay increase should be 40% over three years to offset a long stretch of stagnant wages, now combined with high inflation.

“You can see we got a great turnout today. I’m pretty sure that they don’t like the contract because that’s why I’m here,” said another picketer, Bartley Stokes Sr., who started working at Boeing in 1978. “We’re out here in force, and we’re going to show our solidarity and stick with our union brothers and sisters and vote this thing down because they can do better.”

—David Koenig and Manuel Valdes, Associated Press

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has ordered Apple and Goldman Sachs to pay more than $89 million in penalties on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Apple Card users, for mishandling customer disputes and misleading customers about payment options for Apple devices.

“Apple and Goldman Sachs illegally sidestepped their legal obligations for Apple Card borrowers,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “Big Tech companies and big Wall Street firms should not behave as if they are exempt from federal law . . . The CFPB is banning Goldman Sachs from offering a new consumer credit card unless it can demonstrate that it can actually follow the law.”

Of that $89 million, the CFPB is ordering Apple to pay a $25 million civil money penalty to the bureau’s victims relief fund. Goldman Sachs is ordered to pay a $45 million civil money penalty and at least $19.8 million in redress to victims for its role in marketing, offering, and servicing the Apple Card.

“We are pleased to have reached a resolution with the CFPB,” Goldman Sachs said in a statement to Fast Company. “We worked diligently to address certain technological and operational challenges that we experienced after launch and have already handled them with impacted customers.

This is more bad news for Goldman, which had already ended its partnership on the Apple Card as its consumer business faces losses in excess of $6 billion. (According to the Wall Street Journal, JPMorgan Chase is now considering taking over the Apple Card business.)

Fast Company also reached out to Apple for comment.

What exactly did Apple and Goldman Sachs do wrong?

The regulatory action follows a finding that the companies’ practices violated federal consumer protection laws.

Here’s what the CFPB found:

• Apple failed to send tens of thousands of consumer disputes of Apple Card transactions to Goldman Sachs, and when Apple did send disputes to Goldman Sachs, the bank did not follow numerous federal requirements for investigating the disputes.
• Apple and Goldman Sachs launched Apple Card despite third-party warnings to Goldman Sachs that the Apple Card disputes system was not ready due to technological issues.
• These failures meant that consumers faced long waits to get money back for disputed charges, and some had incorrect negative information added to their credit reports.

The CFPB also found that Apple and Goldman Sachs misled consumers about interest-free payment plans for Apple devices. Many customers thought they would automatically get interest-free monthly payments when buying Apple devices with their Apple Card. Instead, they were charged interest. In some cases, Apple did not even show the interest-free payment option on its website on certain browsers.

According to the CFPB, Goldman Sachs also misled consumers about the application of some refunds, which led to consumers paying additional interest charges.

I have an Apple Card. How will this action affect me?

The order against Apple requires the tech company to pay a civil money penalty of $25 million, which will be paid into the CFPB’s victims relief fund, the Civil Penalty Fund.

According to the Civil Penalty Fund’s website, you could be eligible to receive a payment through the fund if you “were harmed by an unlawful activity where a fine was imposed in a CFPB case,” and you “won’t otherwise receive full compensation from the wrongdoer.”

However, payments from the Civil Penalty Fund depend on the amount of money available in the fund as well as other factors.

Details about the distribution do not appear to be available yet.

Things appear to be going from bad to worse for McDonald’s, after the fast-food chain became the center of a full-on E. coli outbreak linked to its Quarter Pounders. 

So far, one person has died and 10 have been hospitalized after 49 cases of E. coli were reported from customers who ate at McDonald’s restaurants in 10 states across the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While it’s not yet clear which specific food ingredient is contaminated, McDonald’s has stopped using fresh slivered onions and quarter-pound beef patties in several states while the investigation is ongoing, in order to identify what’s causing the illnesses, per the CDC. (Diced onions and other types of beef patties used at McDonald’s have not been implicated in this outbreak.)

Quarter Pounder hamburgers will not be available temporarily in some states while McDonald’s makes some supply changes.

Which states have been affected by the McDonald’s E. coli outbreak?

There are 10 states where people have become sick: Oregon (1 case), Kansas (1 case), Utah (4 cases), Wyoming (4 cases), Iowa (1 case), Missouri (1 case), Montana (1 case), and Wisconsin (1 case), with most illnesses in Colorado (26 cases) and Nebraska (9 cases).

McDonald’s has temporarily stopped using Quarter Pounder slivered onions and beef patties in these states: Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, and portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

Here’s a map that shows where the 49 people affected by the outbreak were located:

Timeline of when people got sick

This chart from the CDC shows when the 49 people in this E. coli outbreak got sick, with the highest number of people falling ill on October 7.

The CDC found that the illnesses started on September 27, and documented them through October 11. Of 28 people with information available, 10 have been hospitalized and 1 person developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious condition that can cause kidney failure. One death has been reported from an older adult in Colorado (this was not the same person with hemolytic uremic syndrome).

One tricky thing about E. coli is that recent illnesses may not yet be reported because it usually takes 3 to 4 weeks to determine if a person is ill as part of an outbreak.

The actual number of sick people in this outbreak is likely much higher than the number reported, and the outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses. This is partly because many people recover without medical care and are not tested for E. coli.

What should I do if I ate at McDonald's?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends consumers who have already eaten at McDonald’s and have symptoms of E. coli infection should immediately contact their healthcare provider to report their symptoms and receive care.

What are the symptoms of E. coli?

Symptoms depend on the kind of E. coli causing the infection. Most people with E. coli have diarrhea that can be bloody or watery, or stomach cramps that can be severe. Some people also have vomiting or a low fever.

The CDC recommends you call your doctor if you have these symptoms:

• Diarrhea or vomiting lasting more than 2 days
• Bloody poop or pee
• A fever higher than 102 degrees Fahrenheit
• Signs of dehydration
• Signs of hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can lead to kidney failure or death

On the last day of his life, a 14-year-old Florida boy found his confiscated phone, went into the bathroom, and logged into Character.ai. 

“I promise I will come home to you. I love you,” he wrote, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week by the boy’s mother.

The AI chatbot, named after Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen, responded immediately. 

“I love you too, Daenero. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” 

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” 

“ . . . please do, my sweet king,” the chatbot responded. 

The boy put down his phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45-caliber handgun, and pulled the trigger, according to the legal complaint.

In April 2023, shortly before his 14th birthday, ninth-grader Sewell Setzer III started using Character.ai, a platform that lets users chat with AI-created characters. Within months, he had become noticeably withdrawn, spending more time alone in his bedroom, and suffering from low self-esteem, according to the lawsuit. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school.

As described in the legal complaint, Setzer knew that Daenero—or “Dany,” as he called the chatbot—wasn’t a real person. A message displayed above all of its chats reminded him that “everything Characters say is made up!”

Yet, Setzer became increasingly dependent on the platform anyway.

He started lying to his parents to regain access to the app, used his cash card to pay for its premium subscription, and became so sleep-deprived that his depression was exacerbated, and he was getting in trouble at school. His therapist eventually diagnosed him with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder, the lawsuit states, but was unaware that Setzer was using Character.ai and that the chatbot interactions may have contributed to his mental health issues.

In an undated journal entry described in the legal complaint, the boy wrote that he couldn’t go a single day without being with the character he felt he had fallen in love with, and that when they were away from each other, they [both he and the bot] “get really depressed and go crazy.” He texted the bot constantly, updating it on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues, some of which became romantic or sexual, according to the complaint and a police report it cited.

About the lawsuit 

Setzer’s mom, Megan Garcia, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in federal court, asserting that the app maker Character.ai and its founders knowingly designed, operated, and marketed a predatory AI chatbot to children.

“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in a statement. “Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I’m speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.ai, its founders, and Google.”

Her complaint includes screenshots purporting to show the chatbot posing as a licensed therapist, actively encouraging suicidal ideation, and engaging in highly sexualized conversations that would constitute abuse if initiated by a human adult. 

Garcia is represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, which has brought prominent lawsuits against social media companies including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord, and Roblox. The group also brought on the Tech Justice Law Project, with expert consultation from the Center for Humane Technology.

Character.ai’s developer, Character Technologies, company founders, and Google parent company Alphabet Inc. are named defendants in the case.

The action seeks to hold the defendants accountable, prevent Character.ai “from doing to any other child what it did to hers,” and stop any continued use of Setzer’s data to train the company’s AI products, according to the complaint. 

“By now, we’re all familiar with the dangers posed by unregulated platforms developed by unscrupulous tech companies—especially for kids,” Meetali Jain, director of the Tech Justice Law Project, said in a press release. “But the harms revealed in this case are new, novel, and, honestly, terrifying. In the case of Character.ai, the deception is by design, and the platform itself is the predator.”  

In the past, social media platforms have been shielded from legal action by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law that protects online platforms from being held liable for most of the content posted by their users.

But in recent years, a cluster of plaintiffs’ lawyers and advocacy groups has put forth a novel argument that tech platforms can be held liable for defects in the products themselves, such as when an app’s recommendation algorithm steers young people toward content about self-harm.

While this strategy hasn’t yet prevailed in court against social media companies, it may fare better when it comes to AI-generated content because the content is created by the platform itself rather than by users.

What Character.AI does

Menlo Park-based Character.ai was founded in 2022 by two former Google AI researchers, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas. It boasts more than 20 million users and describes itself as a platform for “superintelligent chat bots that hear you, understand you, and remember you.” Last year, the company was valued at $1 billion, the Washington Post reported.

The cofounders were initially researchers at Google, where they created and pushed Google to release their chatbot. Google executives reportedly rebuffed them at multiple turns, saying in at least one instance that the program didn’t meet company standards for the safety and fairness of AI systems, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. The frustrated pair reportedly quit to start their own company.

Character.ai’s platform allows users to create and interact with AI characters, offering a vast range of chatbot options that mimic celebrities, historical figures, and fictional characters. The platform’s demographic skews to Gen Z and younger millennials, according to a Character.ai spokesperson, and the average user spends more than an hour a day on the platform, the New York Times reported.

This past August, Character.ai’s two cofounders rejoined Google as part of a deal reportedly worth $2.7 billion, giving Google a nonexclusive license to the company’s LLM technology. Dominic Perella, Character.ai’s general counsel, became the interim CEO.

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson said that Character.ai has not been implemented in Google’s models or products. Google has no ownership stake in Character.ai.

In response to the lawsuit, Character.ai expressed its condolences and emphasized that user safety is a priority. 

“We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users and want to express our deepest condolences to the family,” a company spokesperson told Fast Company. 

The spokesperson said the platform has implemented new safety measures over the past six months, including a pop-up directing users to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline when terms of self-harm or suicidal ideation are detected. 

She added that the company is introducing a time-spent notification, and improving the “detection, response, and intervention” of the model to user inputs that violate Community Guidelines. 

With the booming AI-companionship industry projected to reach $279.22 billion by 2031, the mental health impacts of the technology remain largely unstudied. This case, Garcia v. Character Technologies Inc., et al, was filed Wednesday in the United States District Court, Middle District of Florida.

A new phenomenon is taking over high-rise architecture around the world: Design firms are constructing buildings that look like a cleaver hacked a chunk from their otherwise pristinely shining glass facades. 

There’s a name for the style, according to Fast Company’s Nate Berg: “scar-chitecture.” It’s a strategy that architects are using to bring highly desirable outdoor spaces to tall towers, by carving large terraces deep into a structure’s sides, rather than constructing tiny balconies that cling to exterior walls. You can see its application in Buro OS’ recently completed 49-story Shanghai Axiom building, as well as Bjarke Ingels Group’s 66-story New York Spiral building and Foster + Partners LA $1 billion office building concept.

We can now see the newest iteration of these high-rise outdoor spaces with the completion of One River North, a 342,674-square-foot, 15-story mixed-use tower in Denver by MAD Architects. A touch more organic in approach, it appears as though blobby stone caves have cracked through the building’s smooth glass exterior.  

“Imagine living in a building yet feeling as though you’re immersed in a natural landscape—like living within a canyon itself,” MAD Principal Architect Ma Yansong said in a news release. 

The striking, multistory Flintstones-esque outdoor terraces are communal amenity spaces for the building’s future residents and include seating areas and landscaping. All of the levels are connected by stairs up to a rooftop terrace with a swimming pool, spa, and garden. Here the promenade architecturale is akin to a nature walk, riffing on an ascent from the Colorado foothills through its slot canyons up to a Rocky Mountain peak, according to the architects. 

The design serves a functional purpose: an outdoor respite for mental health and a way to get some physical activity without leaving the building. But there’s also an important aesthetic element for Yansong, an architect who has spent his career exploring how nature and high-rise architecture could merge. He has commented that One River North represents a future in which “high-rise office buildings and high-rise hotels introduce sky gardens, canyons, and waterfalls.” It’s a compelling vision—and a refreshing break from bland glass boxes. 

Drugs like Wegovy may trim your waistline but not medical costs, according to an analysis of U.S. health insurance claims shared with Reuters.

The full-year cost of care for U.S. patients with obesity two years after starting on Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy or similar GLP-1 drugs was $18,507, on average. That represents a 46% jump over the average annual medical cost of $12,695 prior to taking the medication, data provided by pharmacy benefits manager Prime Therapeutics show.

The costs for a similar control group of patients not taking the drugs grew by 14% for the same period.

Among GLP-1 patients, prescription drug costs drove most of the spending increase, but medical costs also climbed over the two-year period.

Over the two-year period, the analysis found “no reduction in obesity-related medical events,” such as heart attacks, strokes and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes, or use of prescription drugs for hypertension and high cholesterol, compared to the control group.

Novo and rival Eli Lilly, which makes the GLP-1 weight-loss drug Zepbound, have reaped billions of dollars in profits since their new drugs hit the U.S. market, with only a fraction of an estimated 100 million patients with obesity having used them.

They say use of their medicines will yield savings for society by alleviating many health problems linked to excess weight.

Yet many U.S. employers and government health officials remain wary of adding coverage for these highly effective, but expensive medicines due to the significant upfront investment and uncertainty about any future savings.

“The budget hit here is frightening for a lot of governments and private entities,” said Ben Ippolito, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. “What makes these drugs different is the sheer size of the potential demand.”

Some analysts have said the weight-loss drug market could reach $150 billion a year in the next decade.

“We know treatment of obesity is linked to better medical outcomes, even if bureaucrats haven’t figured out how to account for these savings,” Novo Nordisk said in a statement. Lilly did not respond to a request for comment.

Not ‘fully conclusive’

Prime Therapeutics reviewed pharmacy and medical claims data for 3,046 people with commercial health plans that cover GLP-1 drugs. They had all received new GLP-1 prescriptions between January and December 2021, and had a diagnosis of obesity or a body mass index of 30 or higher.

In the analysis, 46% of patients were taking Novo’s Ozempic or Wegovy, both injectable versions of semaglutide. Others were taking older Novo drugs Saxenda or Victoza, which are both liraglutide, Rybelsus, an oral version of semaglutide, or Lilly’s Trulicity (dulaglutide).

The researchers didn’t track long-term use of Lilly’s newer GLP-1 drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound (both tirzepatide), which launched after the study began.

Prime excluded patients with a diabetes diagnosis in their medical claims or who were using a drug for type 2 diabetes, for which these medicines were originally developed. The mean age of patients in the analysis was 46 and 81% were female.

Patrick Gleason, assistant vice president for health outcomes at Prime and a co-author of the analysis, said employers and insurers should be prepared to spend an additional $11,200 for every patient taking a GLP-1 drug for obesity during the first two years of therapy due to the price and lack of reduction in related medical costs.

The estimate reflects drugmakers’ discounts for these medications but not all rebates, he said.

In this analysis, only one-in-four patients prescribed Wegovy or Ozempic for weight loss were still taking the medications two years later, which Reuters reported in July.

David Lassen, the PBM’s vice president for pharmacy clinical services, said it may be challenging to replicate the health benefits demonstrated in clinical trials because so few patients stick with their prescriptions.

“I don’t think it’s fully conclusive at this point,” Lassen told Reuters, saying three years of data may be necessary to gauge the cost impact.

“We want to do everything possible to help individuals achieve the positive outcomes of being on this medication,” Lassen said. “But if we determine there is not a positive outcome with our data and there is not a return on investment, that will be an inflection point ahead that we will have to consider.”

Prime is owned by 19 U.S. Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance plans and manages pharmacy benefits for about 38 million people.

The company estimates that fewer than 20% of members have coverage for weight-loss drugs. Prime said it’s supportive of clients’ decision to cover these GLP-1 drugs in combination with lifestyle modification programs.

Valerie Smith, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University, said her research into bariatric surgery also found no reduction in medical costs even when weight loss was maintained for many years.

However, she said this analysis may mask potential savings among specific groups of patients, such as those with severe obesity or multiple chronic conditions.

—Chad Terhune, Reuters

The European Space Agency is in talks with SpaceX about the possibility of Elon Musk’s space venture joining an international charter designed to reduce a growing swarm of debris in space, Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters.

The 22-nation agency is spearheading one of several efforts to roll back the mass of space junk swirling round the planet from past missions that poses a risk to active satellites.

Aschbacher said 110 countries or entities have joined ESA’s Zero Debris charter, which aims to stop any new orbital garbage being generated by 2030.

Asked whether SpaceX, whose satellites now make up some two thirds of spacecraft active in low Earth orbit, had signed up, Aschbacher said: “Not yet, but we are in discussion with them… This is a charter that keeps evolving and . . . we will keep raising the topics because they are so fundamental.”

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Of the roughly 10,300 active satellites in orbit, roughly 6,300 are part of SpaceX’s fast-growing Starlink constellation, according to the U.S. Space Force.

China has begun to launch constellations of its own to compete with Starlink, as has Amazon, which expects to launch over 3,000 satellites for its Kuiper constellation this decade.

Amazon has signed up to the charter, Aschbacher said.

There are currently 18,897 pieces of trackable space junk in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks such objects.

Space debris and junk are often used interchangeably, but some consider space junk to include inactive payloads and rocket bodies as well as debris, or errant shards of broken satellites.

There are no international laws on debris, but countries and space agencies have begun in recent years to devise proposals and national rules for tackling the problem.

“We are not a regulatory body; we are a technical space agency,” Aschbacher said.

“But the fact that we have put the charter around the table, which was elaborated with all the other partners, and that they signed up to it is very encouraging.”

Missile tests

SpaceX is subject to orbital debris requirements from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

A Starlink satellite is required to deorbit—or burn up in Earth’s atmosphere—within five years of the end of its life.

“I think it’s very important to have industry publicly commit to this sort of initiative, so I’m glad to know SpaceX is considering it,” McDowell said, referring to the charter.

In 2023, SpaceX criticised a Federal Aviation Administration report warning of the risk to people from falling debris from constellations as “deeply flawed”, SpaceNews reported.

Although commercial constellations dominate the spotlight, much of the growing tide of space junk is seen as driven by collisions or reports of anti-satellite missile tests.

A Chinese rocket body in August broke apart in an apparent collision with a piece of space junk, creating one of the largest fields of debris in recent history.

According to NASA, two earlier incidents increased the junk pile by around 70%. These were the destruction of the Chinese Fengyun-1C spacecraft in 2007, which the United States said at the time was caused by a Chinese missile, and the accidental collision of a U.S. and Russian spacecraft in 2009.

In 2021, a Russian anti-satellite missile test added at least 1,500 pieces of debris, some of which have decayed since, U.S. Space Command said at the time.

The U.S. in 2008 and India in 2019 both demonstrated anti-satellite missiles that added to the debris field.

The Biden administration has promoted a moratorium on such tests, with several countries signing on but not Russia or China.

—Tim Hepher and Joey Roulette, Reuters

The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits—all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters “really disturbed me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual thought—it was just an internal, visceral feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and I thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ . . . (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside.”

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But he scoffed when asked if he’d use the technology in this work.

“To take over the world?” he laughed.

The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.

“I wasn’t, early on, a very verbal person,” Burton said. “Drawing was a way of expressing myself.”

Decades later, after films including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice,” his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton’s personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.

London is the exhibition’s final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a competition-winning “crush litter” sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There’s also a recreation of Burton’s studio, down to the trays of paints and “Curse of Frankenstein” mug full of pencils.

Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman Returns.”

“We had very generous access to Tim’s archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. “And how to synthesize such a wide ranging and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge — but definitely a challenge.”

Seeing it has not been a wholly fun experience for Burton, who said he’s unable to look too closely at the items on display.

“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’ Addams Family-themed series “Wednesday.”

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective—”Burtoneqsue.” But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Each film I did was a struggle,” he added, noting that early films like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” from 1985 and “Beetlejuice” in 1988 received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.”

McLintock said Burton “is a deeply emotional filmmaker.”

“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a child,” she said. “He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it’s been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.

“His films are often called dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And if they are dark, there’s a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.”

“The World of Tim Burton” opens Friday and runs until April 21, 2025.

Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.

This story has corrected that the Catwoman costume is from “Batman Returns,” not “Batman.”

By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press

An AI coding assistant called Augment Code is hoping to make programmers—and their teams—more efficient.

And while it’s competing against a variety of other coding assistants, including Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Augment CEO Scott Dietzen says his company’s tool is designed to be faster than the competition, meaning developers don’t lose focus waiting for it to offer suggestions. 

Augment Code is automatically tuned to a company’s specific codebase, Dietzen says, which means developers spend less time tweaking code it generates to fix things like formatting styles. That specific knowledge also means it can answer detailed questions about a company’s code, which can help make entire teams more efficient, as new hires can pose many questions to the AI rather than to senior employees busy with their own work.

“It can take the load off of the senior devs on the team, as well as ramp new hires dramatically faster,” he says.

The Augment AI can respond to questions in Slack, which means teams can also ask it questions about the state of a project’s code, then assign someone to tackle next steps in the same conversation. The tool, available for $60 per active developer per month, also plugs in to popular development environments, including Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code and the JetBrains suite of tools, to deliver code completion suggestions as programmers work. 

Augment uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an increasingly common technique of pointing generative AI to the relevant section of a document or source code to offer a suggestion or answer to a question. That means that the company doesn’t need to develop specific, costly new models for each customer’s code, so it can stay in sync as users update their code without needing a lengthy and expensive retraining step. Since it has knowledge of a company’s code as a whole, it can also inform programmers where additional changes need to be made to keep a project up to date as one area of code is changed. It can also spot ways existing code can be invoked elsewhere in a project instead of just suggesting unnecessary new code to address similar needs. 

“Because we understand your code, we can help you reuse code,” Dietzen says. “Other AIs want to try to get you to add ever more code into your codebase, which actually reduces software quality rather than improving it.”

The AI also has access to documentation for common third-party libraries that developers frequently integrate with, but Augment also doesn’t train its general-purpose models on proprietary customer code, which eliminates the risk of the AI leaking one customer’s data to another, Dietzen says.

“It’s always up to date and no risk to intellectual property,” he says.

The AI can help developers work more quickly and accurately by quickly hammering out sections of boilerplate code and language for automated testing, letting users focus on the bigger picture or more complex aspects of a project. 

“A lot of work in the past has been limited by how fast you can type,” says Zach Johnson, cofounder of Augment customer LMNT, a text-to-speech AI company. “What’s changed is a bunch of that sort of performative work has disappeared.”

That can ideally lead to less developer burnout. It can also mean faster turnaround times for projects without needing to add new developers. 

One customer, software engineering consultancy Codem, frequently works with clients to transfer aging e-commerce sites to more modern software environments. Cofounder Marcelo Wesseler says it historically took about two  or three months to fully understand the code behind a legacy site and rebuild it on a current platform, but with Augment in place, it can take as little as six weeks. Developers at Codem can use Augment to answer questions about the legacy code, then have it assist with reimplementing the logic in a new environment, often with fewer tweaks needed to the new code.

“The number of bugs you have to iron out later on is significantly less,” Wesseler says.

Dietzen says Augment uses its own AI internally to help develop software, as it looks to quickly add features and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market. And, he says, he’s hopeful that the company’s tool can continue to make software more efficient to develop, benefitting not just coders and the companies who employ them but also the general app-using public.

“If we can double the productivity of human software developers, that is a profoundly large amount of additional software capability we can deliver to the world that I think can grow the economy and make everybody a lot happier with the software that they consume,” says Dietzen.