Tag: safety

Judge Blocks DHS From Obtaining 17 Million Commercial Driver’s License Records

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security from obtaining 17 million Commercial Driver’s License records.

US District Judge Anthony Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, entered an administrative stay and prevented the Trump Administration from obtaining the records it subpoenaed.

Judge Trenga also ordered the DHS to immediately return any subpoenaed documents and not inspect the records.

The judge said he needs more time to consider the motion to quash the subpoenas.

On Friday, 21 Democrat state attorneys general and DC filed lawsuits challenging the records request.

The blue state attorneys general sued the Department of Transportation (DOT), the DHS and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Last month, President Trump unveiled his “Freedom Haulers” initiative to license veteran truck drivers and crack down on illegal alien truck drivers.

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Cyberattack Cripples California City’s 911 System, Forces Emergency Shutdown

A Northern California city of roughly 30,000 residents was forced to shut down its entire computer network Friday after a cyberattack knocked out its 911 system, the latest sign of how vulnerable American municipalities remain to digital assaults.

Suisun City, located about 45 miles from San Francisco, declared a state of emergency Saturday after malicious software infiltrated its network shortly before 6 p.m. Friday, the California Post reported.

“Officials shut down the entire network to stop the threat from spreading and protect evidence for a federal investigation,” the outlet reported.

City officials scrambled to prevent the outage from endangering residents, rerouting 911 calls through the Solano County dispatch center. Police and fire personnel remained active and able to respond to calls for service despite the loss of the city’s own systems.

The breach reached well beyond emergency dispatch.

City services including building permits and other municipal records were rendered inaccessible, and residents were unable to pay bills online while the network remained offline.

The Suisun City Council voted unanimously to pull the plug on the network and declare a state of emergency during a special meeting Saturday morning, an extraordinary step that underscores the severity of the threat local officials believed they were facing.

The incident lands amid heightened concern over foreign cyber threats to American infrastructure since the outbreak of the Iran war.

U.S. authorities issued an “urgent warning” in April that hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were actively working to disrupt critical American computer networks, a threat national security officials have long cautioned could extend to local governments with limited cybersecurity resources.

It remains unclear whether the Suisun City attack is connected to Iran-backed hacking operations.

Investigators are still working to determine how the malicious software breached the network and who is responsible, according to news reports.

City officials have not said when full network functionality is expected to be restored.

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New Orleans Becomes First Major U.S. City To Let AI Answer 911

New Orleans is testing just how much Americans are willing to trust artificial intelligence when the stakes are considerably higher than writing an email or ordering dinner, according to the New York Post.

The city has begun allowing an AI system to field certain 911 calls, apparently making it the first major U.S. municipality to put a bot directly between emergency callers and human operators.

The idea is largely about volume. New Orleans’ emergency communications center receives more than 1,000 calls on a typical day, and officials believe automation can clear some of the clutter while dispatchers concentrate on genuine emergencies.

The technology isn’t supposed to take over the entire 911 operation. Instead, it can deal with situations that appear redundant or relatively routine when human operators are tied up. A flood of calls about the same already-reported car accident, for example, could potentially be filtered through the automated system rather than occupying multiple dispatchers.

The Post writes that city officials insist humans remain at the center of the operation. But skeptics say emergency calls are precisely the kind of messy, unpredictable interactions computers may struggle to interpret.

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Four Kids “Safety” Bills, Supporting Online Digital ID Agenda, Hit Senate Floor

The CHATBOT Act says that nothing in it shall be construed to require a company to “implement an age gating or age verification” system, or to “affirmatively collect any personal data with respect to the age of any individual that the covered entity is not already collecting in the normal course” of its business. The Kids Online Safety Act carries a version of the same promise, ruling out “the affirmative collection of any personal data with respect to the age of users” that a platform doesn’t already gather.

But now read the rest of the same bills…

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee sent four children’s online safety bills to the Senate floor, with parents who attribute the harm of their children to social media sitting right there in the room. KOSA went through on a unanimous voice vote. This obviously wasn’t a place for a debate. The Youth AI Privacy Act from Senator Ed Markey advanced. So did the CHATBOT Act from Senator Ted Cruz, with Senators Schatz, Curtis and Schiff as co-sponsors. Senator Tammy Duckworth’s bill makes four, and it orders the FTC and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to study AI-enabled toys, which turns on nothing a company has to know about a user. A fifth, the SCREEN Act, got a tally and no result, which we’ll come back to.

KOSA passed the Senate in 2024 by 91 to 3, but the House never took it up. KOSA’s “duty of care” is the provision that gets the attention. It requires platforms to “exercise reasonable care” in design features to prevent and mitigate a listed set of harms to minors, with the FTC enforcing, and the harms run from conditions with “clinically diagnosable symptoms” through patterns of use “that indicate compulsive” behavior to sexual exploitation. The House stripped it out. The Senate sponsors called that version dead on arrival.

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FAA Investigating Air Traffic Safety Incident Involving Marine One While Trump Was Onboard

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating an air traffic safety incident involving Marine One while President Trump was onboard.

The incident happened on Tuesday while President Trump was traveling to Joint Base Andrews for a trip to Southern California.

“The president’s Marine One helicopter took off from the White House Tuesday afternoon, but air-traffic controllers hadn’t halted commercial flights at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as required under safety protocols, people familiar with the matter said,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to Reuters, a commercial flight departed Reagan Airport one minute after Marine One lifted off from the Ellipse.

Per Reuters:

Trump’s helicopter lifted off from the Ellipse near the White House around 2:33 p.m. (1833 GMT), on his ​way to Joint Base Andrews for a trip to Los Angeles, according to a pool report.

A source told Reuters that Envoy ​Air 3742 — a regional E170 jet bound for Pensacola, Florida — departed at 2:34 p.m. and was involved in the apparent loss of separation incident with Marine One. Envoy is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Airlines (AAL.O), which did not immediately comment.

FAA rules require aircraft to remain separated by at least ​1.5 miles horizontally and 500 feet vertically around airports. The sources said it appeared Marine One and the plane did ​not maintain separation. One said it appears they were not converging during the incident.

Video of the safety incident shows Marine One over East Potomac Park near a commercial flight.

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What Does Glyphosate Have to Do With Cheap Factory Farm Meat? Plenty.

For years, Bayer and the biotech giant it purchased, Monsanto, have faced allegations that glyphosate, the active ingredient in its popular herbicide Roundup, causes cancer.

The saga has resulted in over 100,000 lawsuits, billions of dollars in settlement funds, a U.S. Supreme Court case and several actions by the Trump administration.

But amidst the flurry of legal activity, few have stopped to ask a fundamental question: Why are we spraying so much glyphosate in the first place?

The answer, in many cases, is animal agriculture. In the U.S., a significant amount of applied glyphosate is used to grow crops to feed farm animals, not humans. While President Donald Trump has defended glyphosate as crucial to maintaining food security, that’s an overly broad characterization.

In truth, glyphosate has largely made meat production cheaper, as fewer weeds lower the cost of feed production for livestock. Some studies have found glyphosate also reduces greenhouse gas emissions from feed crops by enabling no-till agriculture.

In June, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling in favor of Monsanto regarding glyphosate. A Missouri gardener who’d been using Roundup for about two decades developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and sued Monsanto for not including a cancer risk warning label on its Roundup products, arguing that it breaks a state failure-to-warn law.

The lower court ordered the company to pay him over a million dollars in damages, but the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, citing the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).

Under FIFRA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has final authority, superseding states, over what pesticide product labels are required to say.

Because the EPA had already ruled that glyphosate isn’t a carcinogen and therefore doesn’t require a cancer warning, the Supreme Court overturned the state court’s determination that Monsanto erred by not including such a warning on Roundup sold in Missouri.

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Waymo Robotaxi Crash Rate 68% Lower Than Human Drivers, Study Finds

Though they’ve have racked up quite a few troubling anecdotes on America’s roads, Waymo robotaxis have achieved a crash rate that’s far lower than what’s observed when humans are driving, according to a recent study published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. A private scientific organization funded by insurance companies, IIHS is regarded by many as a superior font of accurate scientific conclusions compared to the government-run and lobbyist-vulnerable National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. 

According to the July IIHS study, “Rise of the Machines: Crash Experiences of Highly Automated Vehicles and Human Drivers,” Waymo vehicles in autonomous mode posted “police-reportable crash involvement rates” fully 68% lower than human-operated vehicles in the same areas and years. Researchers studied crash rates in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco. Importantly, the IIHS studied data from 2021 to 2024; to the extent Waymo has improved its programming, the current relative performance may be even better. 

The Waymo edge was highest in Phoenix and Los Angeles (76% and 71% lower crash rates, respectively). San Francisco’s Waymos posted a 35% lower crash rate. In a bit of a headscratcher in terms of the being a huge outlier, Waymo had a 4% higher crash rate in Austin. The study’s authors note that the sample size in Austin was smaller for both Waymo and human drivers. 

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The Pentagon’s Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care

Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family’s oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you’d think it was written in 2022. It wasn’t. That’s the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.

I’ve spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn’t actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn’t. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn’t outsource the duty.

Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon’s books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers’ Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.

Fort Stewart’s housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company’s employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn’t earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was “a consequence of BBC’s broken corporate culture” that put profit ahead of servicemembers’ welfare.

Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn’t stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour’s post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.

Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty’s. Fort Benning’s housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization’s Villages of Benning. Ossoff’s report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren’t. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.

The government’s own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD’s oversight of privatized housing, including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO’s most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.

This is the same structural failure I’ve written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn’t delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon’s relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle, even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator’s staff does the job for it.

That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC’s work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn’t answer to the landlord closes that loophole.

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New Forever Chemicals Coming to US Farms

If the goal is truly to Make America Healthy Again, then the latest decision from the Environmental Protection Agency raises serious questions. According to the article you sent, the EPA has approved two new fluorinated pesticides, diflufenican and epyrifenacil, for use on some of America’s most important crops, including corn, soybeans, and wheat. Neither chemical has previously been approved for use in American agriculture.

Environmental groups argue these compounds qualify as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” under internationally recognized scientific definitions because they can persist in the environment and eventually degrade into trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an extremely persistent fluorinated compound found in groundwater around the world. The EPA disputes that characterization, maintaining the products do not meet its regulatory definition of PFAS and that they can be used safely according to their labels.

Diflufenican has already become controversial in Europe. Denmark banned its use in part because of concerns that it contributes to TFA contamination of groundwater, while German monitoring has detected TFA in a large percentage of tested wells. Epyrifenacil has reportedly never received approval for agricultural use within the European Union. Whether those regulatory decisions ultimately prove right or wrong, they demonstrate that this is hardly an uncontested scientific issue. Governments around the world are reaching different conclusions about the same chemicals, yet American consumers are expected to assume there is nothing to debate.

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How Demographics are Driving America’s Long-Term Fiscal Illness

Stomach Bugs and Systemic Debt

If it’s not a bizarre new geopolitical crisis, it’s a terrifying headline about the safety of our  food supply. 

This, no doubt, is an age of constant, low-grade dread. Every time you open your phone, there’s a fresh, steaming pile of bad news waiting to greet you.

But while the mainstream media loves to keep your anxiety levels on a gentle simmer, we prefer to look at the bigger picture. The absurdity of modern life is what we’re after.

Lately, two seemingly unrelated outbreaks have been competing for the spotlight. There’s a microscopic parasite making its way through America’s salad bowls. A healthy lunch has suddenly turned into poison.

At the same time, there’s a massive, systemic failure quietly brewing in Washington. One that’s growing so rapidly it makes a stomach bug look like a walk in the park. While one threatens to disrupt your digestive tract for a week, the other quietly promises to derail the economic security of several generations.

In truth, both of these crises suffer from the exact same fundamental problem. A complete failure of basic hygiene. Whether we’re talking about food safety or fiscal responsibility, ignoring the fundamentals eventually catches up to you. And when it does, the results are always messy, painful, and incredibly hard to clean up.

How is it that a nation seemingly obsessed with clean living managed to let both its fresh produce and its national checkbook rot from the inside out?

Today, we are diving headfirst into two of the most uncomfortable, stomach-churning epidemics sweeping across the nation. One of them is currently lingering on your unwashed spinach. The other is eating away at the very foundations of your financial future.

Explosive Diarrhea

Many strange and unpleasant things are being reported these days. We don’t know if they are really new. But the way they are reported makes them sound new and nasty.

Without question, explosive diarrhea has been around since Adam bit the apple. However, this new description for a stomach bug, like using polar vortex or heat dome to describe winter or summer weather, makes it sound especially alarming.

If you’ve somehow missed the many headlines, there’s a disease spreading across the USA that’s being reported to cause explosive diarrhea. This disease stems from a stomach parasite that is hiding in contaminated food.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is the microscopic parasite behind the outbreak. The infection it causes is formally called cyclosporiasis, and nasty is an understatement. We’ll spare you the ghastly details. From what we gather, unlike your standard 24-hour stomach bug, this uninvited guest can hijack your gut for weeks, sometimes teasing you by fading away only to make a miserable, unexpected comeback. 

Right now, the epicenter of this outbreak is the Midwest, with Michigan getting hit the hardest by a massive surge that has shattered its typical caseload. Major spikes are also popping up in Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Texas. In total, health officials have tracked cases across more than 30 states. They’re all tied to people eating contaminated food without ever leaving the country.

The parasite hitches a ride on fresh, raw produce – things like raspberries, basil, cilantro, and spinach. Because it is incredibly sticky, it thrives in the tiny cervices of your favorite summer greens, making it tough to spot and even tougher to dislodge.

Certainly, this sounds awful. But we’re confident it’s controllable and will soon disappear from the reporting cycle. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for explosive debt…

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