Nearly a year ago, I wrote that impending tariff policies seemed poised to turn American consumerism upside down. In the months since, many people have said that Donald Trump’s tariffs — and the higher costs passed on to shoppers — could force people to buy less stuff they didn’t need in the first place. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, even sky high tariffs might not be enough to break the habit for good.
Writer and disability advocate Alice Wong has died. She founded the Disability Visibility Project and participated in many other initiatives designed to amplify disabled voices in literature, journalism, politics, and more.
In 2015, she became the first person to visit the White House and meet the president via telepresence robot. She also had a recurring role in Netflix’s Human Resources playing a fictionalized version of herself. She was 51.
ProPublica writes that Paul “Nazi Streak” Ingrassia — the White House’s Department of Homeland Security liaison — told customs officials to return devices they’d seized from the influencer and alleged rapist and sex trafficker, possibly hindering an investigation and alarming DHS officials, who described the act as “handing out favors” to Tate.
Documents released by the House Oversight Committee shed light on Epstein’s day-to-day, largely via email — including his preoccupation with his Google presence.
Lawmakers who passed the bill that should have banned TikTok by now are staying quiet about how it’s played out.
Engineers at Google, Meta, and Microsoft have noticed less follow-up from federal officials about potentially illegal materials, The New York Times reports in a Department of Homeland Security deep dive. Newly public data confirms a drop in time spent on child exploitation cases early in the Trump administration, as The Verge has written.
[The New York Times]
Advocates worry that weakening the ban will derail the march to a carbon-free future.
After being fined $3.5 billion by the EU for ad tech abuse, the search giant is, begrudgingly, proposing changes:
For example, we are giving publishers the option to set different minimum prices for different bidders when using Google Ad Manager [... and] increasing the interoperability of our tools to give publishers and advertisers more choice and flexibility.
