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States Target School Cell Phone Use At least four states have banned or severely restricted the use of smart phones in schools in the current legislative biennium. Florida became the first state to do...
Compounded Weight-Loss Drugs Creating Headaches for State Regulators With popular weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro, Ozempic and Wegovy in short supply, many doctors, pharmacies and other providers have...
In their seminal book on the American health care system, legendary investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele offered a disturbing metaphor for the illogical nature of medical pricing...
PA Lawmakers Pass Bill Regulating PBMs The Pennsylvania legislature passed a bill ( HB 1993 ) aimed at increasing oversight of pharmacy benefit managers. If signed by Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), the measure...
In a sign of the times, states have begun pursuing bills that require disclosure of the use of artificial intelligence. In March, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed SB 149 , making the state the first...
Amazon publicly disclosed last week that it was pausing corporate hiring due to economic uncertainty. The news came on the same day that ride-hailing company Lyft said it was laying off 13 percent, or about 650, of its workers, and payment processing platform Stripe said it was cutting 14 percent, or roughly 1,100, of its employees.
The announcements come after months of hiring slowdowns at big tech companies like Amazon and Meta, and layoffs at smaller ones like Robinhood and Coinbase. And more cuts are on the way, with Elon Musk having ordered cuts across the board at his newly acquired social media company, Twitter. (NEW YORK TIMES)
Twelve years after being created as a side project of a Mozilla researcher, a programming language known as Rust is gaining momentum. The thing that distinguishes Rust from other programming languages is that it’s designed to prevent developers from accidentally creating common types of security vulnerabilities when coding in it, which could ultimately raise baseline cybersecurity around the globe.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have been using Rust since 2019, and those three companies, together with Mozilla and Huawei, established the nonprofit Rust Foundation in 2020 to support the language. Last month Rust became an officially recognized language in Linux. And Android has also been investing in it.
“It’s going viral as a language,” said Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering for Android security and privacy. (WIRED)
After flocking to Facebook in previous election cycles, political advertisers are spending their money elsewhere in the 2022 midterms. Although the social media platform has been mired in controversy in recent years, including over its banning of former president Donald Trump following the Jan. 26, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Laura Carlson, digital director of the Democratic Governors Association, attributes the shift away from Facebook to privacy changes Apple made to iOS last year limiting political advertisers’ ability to target messages to a particular audience. (CNBC)
Utility giant PacifiCorp, which serves six western states, tentatively agreed last year to take ownership of nuclear energy developer TerraPower’s first-of-its-kind Natrium nuclear power facility in Wyoming after it begins operations in 2028. Now the utility company is considering building five “small modular reactors” where it’s planning to retire coal-fired power plants in Utah and Wyoming. (WYOFILE)
-- Compiled by KOREY CLARK