Inquirer.com – Zurich DR

Category: Wires

  • As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching

    As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching

    NEW YORK — College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

    Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity, and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic. A vast array of digital tools still are being used to track locations, collect data on task completion rates, and access work-issued smartphone and laptop cameras, raising concerns about how much privacy employees have relinquished, even in their own homes.

    Employers have always monitored workers, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science enable them to create extensive data sets or “dossiers” that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior, said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions.

    “Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,” Negrón said.

    Some of the most common workplace monitoring programs have shared names, email addresses, and other personal worker data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice, according to an investigation by Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University, and the University of California at Berkeley.

    Data privacy experts and workers who say they’ve been closely monitored spoke with the Associated Press about what they see as the risks of employer surveillance and the steps employees can take to protect their personal information.

    Team up with like-minded colleagues to advocate for yourself

    Pharmacist Lannie Duong’s job at a medical clinic involved meeting with patients who had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. She reviewed their medical histories, blood work, and symptoms, and adjusted their medications. She frequently enlisted interpreters to help her communicate with patients who had limited English language skills.

    Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments, and in performance evaluations questioned why she took so long with each patient.

    “Everything was counted. How many minutes you’re on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,” Duong said. “We’re just tasked to do what feels like the impossible.”

    Under what she described as unrelenting pressure, Duong felt “not trusted, not appreciated, almost completely hopeless. It was so depressing.” She eventually went on medical leave and began volunteering with other pharmacists to organize a union.

    “I spoke up, hoping others would voice their concerns as well, but that didn’t really pan out,” Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after the medical leave.

    Many of the employers using surveillance tools do so transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how the tools are used, Negrón said. But there are also employers tracking, ranking, and scoring employees in ways that are not transparent to workers, she said.

    “Workers are going to have to come together because the forces of centralizing this kind of tracking and monitoring are moving too fast,” Negrón said.

    Find out what kind of data your employer is collecting about you

    As awareness about surveillance tools grows, some workers are pushing back on tools that track how long it takes to fulfill tasks, saying such monitoring contributes to injuries, and questioning what personal information is being collected and how it’s being used, said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.

    “Unfortunately, if you are on a machine that’s been issued by your workplace, you should expect that there’s some type of monitoring,” Tsukayama said.

    Researching data collection and surveillance trends in your industry is a good idea, according to Negrón. Without that knowledge, workers may find themselves unprepared when confronted with information unearthed during surveillance.

    While teaching a college writing class, Arianna Anaya discovered that an administrator was reading the papers her students uploaded to the school’s learning management software and the comments Anaya made on the work. The students often wrote about intimate topics, including abuse, eating disorders, and family trauma.

    “The school essentially used the online learning system to allow administrators and staff to read student work that was often immensely private and personal, something we were specifically told students should not know about,” Anaya said.

    A colleague who printed out the comments criticized the casual tone Anaya used with students and accused her of not sticking to the course syllabus. A few months later, Anaya’s teaching contract wasn’t renewed, although she doesn’t know the exact reason.

    “It made me quite paranoid,” Anaya said. “It made me feel less safe in the world.”

    Check state laws to see what’s required of employers

    Some states, including Delaware, New York, Connecticut, and Maine, require employers to notify workers if they’re being monitored. Maine’s law goes further, prohibiting visual monitoring in employees’ homes or personal vehicles unless that kind of observation is required for the duties of the job, said Edward Halle, a privacy and AI compliance manager.

    “The question becomes, what does the law mean by ‘the duties of the job’?” Halle said. “A telehealth nurse needs a camera; the camera is the job. A productivity webcam bolted onto ordinary desk work almost certainly isn’t. Where that line falls is the first thing the Department of Labor will be asked to sort out.”

    If you work in a state without a notification requirement, it’s difficult to find out if an employer is using technology to monitor your performance.

    To raise the issue with managers, Tsukayama suggests coordinating with a union. If that’s not an option and you’re asking managers individually, approach the topic cautiously and take a curious tone, she advised. You could say you’ve noticed something on the computer and have questions, such as, “How is this information being used within the company? How might it get out of the company?” Tsukayama said.

    One place to start is asking what specific employee data your organization collects, said Aiha Nguyen, director of the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute studying the impacts of technology. If your manager doesn’t know, the information technology department may have answers, since the people working there often are the ones turning on the features, Nguyen said.

    Some common software programs such as Microsoft Office and Zoom have tools that can be used for tracking worker productivity, but the tracking features aren’t always activated. Knowing whether those tracking features are turned on can be difficult, because they’re built into the programs, Nguyen said.

    “It’s automatic. It’s considered something that employers have been able to say, ‘This is necessary for work. You have to use these tools,’” she said.

    To help safeguard personal information, don’t use work devices to handle family matters or sensitive personal information such as medical conditions, experts advise.

    “I think most people know that,” Nguyen said. ”But it can become tedious to switch between phones, or people don’t really think it’s that harmful. … You don’t want to potentially put yourself at risk.”

  • Why more homeowners across the U.S. are turning to an insurance that offers less coverage

    Why more homeowners across the U.S. are turning to an insurance that offers less coverage

    A last-resort insurance policy with fewer homeowner protections and less government oversight is booming, a Washington Post analysis finds, as traditional insurers continue to back away from areas of the country most vulnerable to extreme weather.

    The policies are growing fastest in California, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina because increasingly intensifying weather and massive disasters are putting more insurers on the hook for substantial claim payouts. Last year in California, insurance companies paid out $23 billion in homeowners claims, according to industry data.

    The amount of premiums written under what is known as “surplus” or “excess” insurance lines has nearly tripled nationwide in the past five years, from about $1.5 billion in 2021 to $4.1 billion in 2025, according to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) — which insurers submit to the organization — and analyzed by the independent firm Weiss Ratings and provided to the Post. The Post reviewed the data and the Weiss analysis.

    While this represents only a small share of the total $187 billion in premiums written in the United States each year, according to the Weiss data, industry experts say they reflect a problem where Americans living in the most weather-exposed places are becoming harder to insure.

    In 2025, the Treasury Department’s Federal Insurance Office released a report showing how, due to climate-related events, millions of Americans were finding it harder to obtain insurance and had to pay more for it.

    And as more insurers pull back or limit coverage, more Americans have struggled to find it and have sought out surplus line plans. Independent brokers often steer homeowners to surplus policies when they cannot obtain a traditional plan, though carriers also advertise directly to consumers.

    These once-niche policies, which date to the late 1800s, historically covered commercial, high-risk, or unusual properties.

    They can sometimes be more expensive and often have more limitations and restrictive clauses, including arbitration clauses stating that homeowners cannot select their own contractors or price adjusters.

    Experts said they have fewer consumer protections, prompting some advocates and state regulators to warn that homeowners may get lower payouts in the event of a disaster.

    California’s surplus line industry is expanding more than almost any other state, according to the Post and Weiss analysis of NAIC data, which only includes insurers based in the U.S. Since 2021, the amount of surplus premiums written in California increased tenfold from $135 million to nearly $1.3 billion, now accounting for 7% of all homeowners premiums in the state compared with just 1% five years ago.

    California’s insurance crisis has been spreading beyond wildfire-prone regions, according to new Stanford University research, which found that the number of residents having to get coverage from the state’s backup insurance option, the Fair Plan, has tripled since 2020.

    A Post review of domestically based surplus line carriers across the U.S. found that 10 companies account for slightly more than half of all premiums, most of which are owned by major insurance companies.

    Major insurance providers, such as Lloyd’s of London and Berkshire Hathaway, dominate the industry, but smaller companies have also been proliferating.

    Some industry experts say these policies fill a void created by carriers pulling out or limiting coverage, and that without them, markets would be in greater distress. These companies are exempt from certain rules, allowing them to change what their plans cover and how much they charge faster than standard carriers.

    “The industry is built on two things: freedom of rate and form,” said Benjamin McKay, CEO of the Surplus Line Association of California, a nonprofit organization that advises the California Department of Insurance on law and policy. “You can charge what you want to charge and then have the contract say whatever it needs to say. You can exclude and include whatever.”

    The push-pull with surplus lines, McKay explained, is that while they are needed, they are a “reactive function of what’s happening in the admitted market.”

    McKay said the “proper role” for these less-conventional homeowners plans is “as a safety valve, not becoming the default option. Bottom line: We just need a healthy market.”

    State officials also have less insight into surplus carriers’ financial conditions, because they are not subject to the same financial requirements and tests that states such as California impose on admitted carriers.

    However, surplus lines still have to follow California laws, said Michael Soller, deputy commissioner of the California Department of Insurance’s communications and public relations branch.

    The Post recently found that some major surplus line companies such as AIG had been including separate “wildfire deductibles” in their policies, which Soller said violated state consumer codes and warranted a review.

    AIG — which has three subsidiaries offering surplus line policies to high-net-worth properties, all of which are operating in California — stopped offering its standard, regulated insurance for high-end properties in the state due to what the company said in a statement was “part of AIG’s multi-year transformation to streamline its portfolio.” In 2021, nearly 8,000 wildfires burned nearly 2.6 million acres of land across California.

    Over the years, according to California insurance officials, AIG asked for rate increases that were substantially lower than what their own data reflected was necessary for its exposure to risk. In 2020, after the state approved two subsequent raises, AIG asked to bump rates by nearly 42% before withdrawing that request.

    One of its subsidiaries, Lexington Insurance Co., is the seventh-largest surplus line carrier nationally, a Post review of data shows. AIG said its plans for “high-net-worth homeowners’ insurance” are primarily issued through that company.

    From 2020 to 2025, AIG’s standard homeowners business plummeted to zero in California, according to data obtained by Weiss Ratings and reviewed by the Post. Meanwhile, its surplus line business grew from $24 million to $119 million, data shows. The carrier announced in January 2022 that it was pulling back coverage but would still offer surplus line insurance to high-net-worth, specialty clients.

    “AIG has switched its entire California homeowners business to surplus line insurance,” said Martin Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings.

    Over that six-year period, the insurance company’s surplus line premiums grew by 394% in California.

    “AIG has participated in California’s surplus lines market for more than 60 years, providing coverage for specialized risks that generally cannot be placed in the admitted market,” the company said. It added that while its surplus line business for high-net-worth homeowners has grown along with the rest of the market, “it represents less than one percent of total California homeowners insurance premiums.”

    Isaac Park, who runs the Los Angeles-based Excel Adjusters with his father, said he has seen an increased number of clients over the past decade shifting to the state-backed Fair Plan, who are then forced to get a second policy for risks such as water damage. Park added that he has also seen more surplus line firms operating in the state.

    “They have more limitations of coverage,” he said.

    Some consumer advocates worry that since surplus line carriers don’t participate in state guarantor funds, which help support policyholders if their insurer goes insolvent, people are at greater risk of bad-faith behavior or not getting paid out on their claims.

    Companies are paying out less to homeowners with surplus line policies compared with traditional ones, according to the NAIC data provided to the Post. In the past five years, surplus insurance lines paid out an average of 36 cents in claims for every dollar in premiums they collected, compared with 58 cents for admitted carriers. In 2024, carriers paid out 15 cents on each dollar of premiums they collected from surplus line policyholders.

    Payouts from surplus line insurers spiked in 2025 because of the L.A. fires, according to experts.

    “They are the perfect loophole for an insurer who wants to evade regulation,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders.

    Bach described surplus lines’ ability to avoid regulation as a “powder keg” for the industry. But she added, “They are also doing a good thing by providing protection that other insurers are not willing to provide.”

    A new report from Climate Cabinet Education, a nonprofit advocacy group, charts how this explosive growth happened. Most states, for example, require insurance agents and brokers to demonstrate that they made a “diligent effort” to place policyholders within the admitted market. In California, three carriers have to deny a resident before they can seek out a surplus line plan. But last year, Florida — where surplus lines in the homeowners market grew 74% between 2020 and 2025 to $888 million, according to the NAIC data — became the fifth state to scrap that requirement.

    Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the insurance reform advocacy group Unlocking America’s Future, said that several consumer advocacy groups are working with lawmakers in Texas and North Carolina on stronger regulations that could include barring insurers from removing some protections from basic coverage.

    Park, the public adjuster who helps represent Californians in battles with their carriers over claims, said that even before last year’s fires in L.A., he was seeing “a lot of insurance companies dropping my clients after just one claim.” Now the landscape seems even more dire.

    Ben Taggart lives in Oakland Hills, Calif., near the site of a massive fire in 1991 and a community identified as a high-risk zone for wildfires. He found his current surplus line insurer two years ago, which aggregator sites identified as the only other option aside from the state-backed Fair Plan.

    Taggart said in an email that he wished he could get a policy through an insurer admitted into the California market, and that he is reluctant to file any claims given that his deductible is $10,000 and he worries the company would drop him if he made a claim.

    “The only people I know on our block who are still with admitted insurers are boomers who have been in their house a really long time,” he said. “Everyone who moved here recently is on surplus or Fair.”

  • Gene Bertoncini, 89, jazz guitarist who dazzled with subtlety

    Gene Bertoncini, 89, jazz guitarist who dazzled with subtlety

    Gene Bertoncini, a prolific jazz guitarist celebrated for his bountiful lyricism and driving swing, for accompanying celebrated singers including Tony Bennett and Lena Horne, and for performances and arrangements that blurred the line between jazz and classical music, died on Saturday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 89.

    His niece Nina Collins confirmed the death.

    Throughout a career that began in a duo with his older brother, Renny, an accordionist, playing in restaurants and catering halls near their childhood home in the Bronx, Mr. Bertoncini was heralded as a sensitive accompanist and innovative leader.

    In a sideman role, he worked with many of the greatest jazz singers of the 20th century, including Bennett, Horne, and Nancy Wilson, and with instrumentalists as varied as Benny Goodman, Wayne Shorter, and Michel Legrand.

    Mr. Bertoncini was equally at home with the Great American Songbook, the European classical repertoire, and, in advance of his fellow jazz guitarists, Brazilian works in the bossa nova style composed by such colleagues as Antonio Carlos Jobim and his close friend Joao Gilberto.

    Mr. Bertoncini was in his early 20s when he played his first major date with a nationally known headliner, Buddy Rich, and passed muster with the notoriously temperamental drummer and bandleader.

    “Buddy really liked the way I played rhythm with him,” Mr. Bertoncini said in an interview last year. “He liked that he didn’t have to tell me anything. I was able to lock into the beat with him, which was amazing, because he was such a dominant force.”

    In the early 1960s, Mr. Bertoncini found plentiful work in New York studios, not least because his facility with nylon-string classical guitar technique lent itself to bossa nova at a time when few established guitarists could play it.

    During those years, he played on Ahmad Jamal’s 1963 album Macanudo; formed a trio with pianist Monty Alexander and bassist Bob Cranshaw; performed on two albums by the trumpeter Clark Terry; and became a regular in the Tonight Show band until that late-night program moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1972.

    Over the next several decades, Mr. Bertoncini played thousands of studio dates. Some teamed him with bassist Ron Carter, and Mr. Bertoncini gave his last major performance in New York, at Mezzrow, with Carter in December.

    Gene Joseph Bertoncini, the younger of two sons, was born in the Bronx on April 6, 1937, to Italian immigrants Mario and Anita (Ori) Bertoncini.

    Mario Bertoncini, a waiter who later owned and operated a diner called Joe’s on Third Avenue in Manhattan, also taught his sons to play the music of the old country.

    At 17, Mr. Bertoncini accepted a scholarship to study architecture at Notre Dame, which seemed like a safer career bet than the itinerant life of a musician. During the five-year program, he also played in student ensembles and directed the school’s swing band.

    Upon returning to New York after graduating in 1959, Mr. Bertoncini took an entry-level position in the architecture firm of David Henken, a prominent disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, and moonlighted in big bands. In the middle of one show with a dance band led by Richard Maltby, Mr. Bertoncini later said, he had an epiphany after he hit a wrong note, which was a shock to his system at the time.

    “Probably nobody noticed but me, but I couldn’t live with that,” he said. “I attributed it to the fact that I hadn’t been practicing enough.” He decided to quit his day job and commit full-time to the guitar.

    Discographer Glenn Broadhead compiled a listing of 188 known albums featuring Bertoncini — 32 as leader and 156 as sideman — but even that was far from an exhaustive list, considering the guitarist’s work on thousands of sessions for pop albums and singles, and film and TV soundtracks.

    In the jazz world especially, it’s largely acknowledged that Mr. Bertoncini — who never married and left no immediate survivors — influenced legions of guitarists through his music.

  • A mistrial is declared in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy. Here’s what could happen next

    A mistrial is declared in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy. Here’s what could happen next

    The trial to decide if Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible when she strangled her three children in 2023 ended in a mistrial Friday after jurors were unable to reach a consensus after weeks of conflicting testimony about her postpregnancy mental health and seven days of deliberations.

    What happens now?

    Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, remains charged with murder and will continue to be held in a psychiatric hospital until the case is resolved. Attorneys on both sides have a few options when it comes to the next steps.

    A hearing later this month could determine the path forward

    Judge William Sullivan set a hearing for Sept. 29. During that proceeding, defense attorney Kevin Reddington will likely ask the judge to declare Clancy not guilty. It’s a long shot move and very unlikely to succeed.

    That hearing could also reveal whether prosecutors will move to put Clancy on trial for a second time. They could also choose to seek a plea deal or even drop the case entirely, though that option is unlikely.

    Sullivan suggested that everyone involved in the case, from attorneys to witnesses to court administrators, would need to look at their calendars to find a suitable time for a new trial, if one is held.

    Clancy doesn’t deny strangling her children at their home south of Boston, but says postpartum psychosis led to her actions. After the killings, her husband found her badly injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed from the waist down.

    Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing.

    Prosecutors will weigh many factors as they decide on a new trial

    Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said there would not be an immediate decision about a second trial, but he emphasized that his goal was always “getting justice for those three little babies.”

    “This case was about Lindsay Clancy and what she did … the cruel and calculated killing of three innocents,” Cruz said shortly after court ended on Friday. He later continued, “Children were murdered and it’s our job to seek justice.”

    Still, prosecutors typically consider a lot of things when determining whether to retry a case, said New York Law School professor Heather Ellis Cucolo, including the potential expense and the likely outcome.

    “I know the prosecutor stated openly that he would not allow public opinion to sway his decision, which is accurate, but the prosecution serves the public,” Cucolo said. “If it is believed that justice must be served by another trial, that is something the prosecutor’s office will take into account and weigh very heavily.”

    A conviction could mean life in prison for Clancy, while an acquittal might lead to confinement in a mental health facility.

    Clancy’s defense will likely push to drop the charges

    Cucolo said the defense attorney will likely push for the charges to be dropped entirely, and might also be open to a plea deal.

    “But if the prosecution chooses to move forward with a trial, there’s no way to prevent that from happening,” Cucolo said.

    Reddington said in court that he believed Clancy’s constitutional rights were violated when the judge declined to remove one juror after the other jurors suggested that he was not following the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt. But a mistrial isn’t subject to an appeal, Cucolo said, because it’s not a final judgment.

    The impact on family members is another consideration, said Randy Gioia, a Boston-based defense lawyer who formerly supervised public defenders across the state.

    Gioia said prosecutors should not put Clancy through another trial. He said he accepts Reddington’s disclosure that Clancy was extremely close to an acquittal, based on a note presented to the judge by the jury foreperson.

    “Why put everyone through the trauma again: 16 to 18 jurors, all the witnesses, Patrick Clancy,” Gioia said, referring to Lindsay Clancy’s former husband. “What’s to be served here when we’ve had a long trial and long deliberations? You don’t have a strong case. You almost lost the case.”

    Attorneys on both sides could tweak their approach in a retrial

    It’s not clear exactly how the jury reached an impasse, but Reddington suggested that just one juror stood in the way of an acquittal, and said the other jurors were “robbed.”

    “They know they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors that were so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful,” he said outside the courthouse. “You could see how defeated they were sitting there. I got a funny feeling they would have gone on for another week if they had to. So I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

    Jurors are under no obligation to speak to attorneys on either side of the case, but it’s common for the attorneys to see if any are open to talking about their experience, Cucolo said. Prosecutors can then use any information they get to reassess and fine-tune their approach, she said, perhaps focusing more on specific evidence or witnesses.

    A retrial would have rippling impacts

    David Meier, a lawyer who represents Patrick Clancy in a lawsuit over his former wife’s mental health treatment, released a statement about the emotional burden of the case, saying “there will never be closure” from the loss of the children.

    “The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful — for Patrick, for his family, and for all of us,” Meier said.

    The statement didn’t indicate whether Patrick Clancy would support a second trial.

    Lindsay Clancy has also filed a lawsuit over her mental health treatment. A retrial would likely force those civil cases to be put on hold, Cucolo said.

    “They would not be able to move forward for now because of concerns of possible Fifth Amendment violations,” Cucolo said, because anything Clancy says in a civil case could potentially be used against her in the criminal case. That means the lawsuits could remain in legal limbo for a year or more, she said.

  • Trump moves to allow ranchers and hunters to kill gray wolves

    Trump moves to allow ranchers and hunters to kill gray wolves

    President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the Interior Department to begin the process of removing endangered-species protections for gray wolves, again intervening in a long-running fight between conservationists and ranchers who say the predators threaten their operations.

    Trump also ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to make it easier for ranchers to kill the wolves if necessary. The measures, long sought by GOP lawmakers from Western states, elicited a swift rebuke from animal rights groups and could draw legal challenges.

    “You’re not allowed to protect yourself, right? Or your company, your cattle,” Trump said at an Oval Office event, flanked by ranchers who shared stories of watching wolves tear through their herds. “So how do you like the idea that I’m letting you do that?”

    Under Trump’s order, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will prepare a recommendation to fully delist or downlist the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf under the Endangered Species Act. The order also includes other measures intended to give states, ranchers, and hunters greater latitude to kill the animals.

    “Rolling back federal protections now — or setting that process in motion — would jeopardize decades of recovery and open the door for brutal killing,” Kitty Block, president and CEO of Humane World for Animals, said in a statement.

    The gray wolf and several subspecies were first listed as endangered under federal rules in the 1960s and 1970s, after centuries of westward settlement and government-backed eradication campaigns reduced their historical range in the Lower 48 states by an estimated 95%.

    Federal protections and reintroduction efforts helped lift that population from about 1,000 during the early listings to more than 6,000 by 2020, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

    But that recovery has fueled a long-running dispute over whether the wolves still deserve strict protections. Presidents of both parties have moved to lift at least some protections, only to have those efforts stymied, and sometimes overturned, in court.

    The Trump administration in 2020 stripped gray wolves of their endangered-species designation in the Lower 48 states, declaring the species recovered. A federal judge vacated that rule in 2022, and the wolves remain officially endangered in much of the country.

    Congress has also entered the fray. The GOP-led House in December passed a bill to end gray wolf protections. The Senate is still considering the legislation.

    “The science has been clear for years: Gray wolves are fully recovered, and their resurgence deserves to be celebrated as a true conservation success story,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Colorado.), who authored the legislation, said in a statement after her bill passed the House. “It’s long past time to delist them and empower states to set their own management policies.”

    Ranchers on Friday discussed their frustrations with the status quo.

    “The problem is, because they’re on the Endangered Species List, they can’t shoot them. They have to sit and watch them destroy their herd,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the Oval Office.

    “But you can shoot them as of today,” Trump mused, to laughter.

    “Well, Secretary Burgum has to do a project, but, yes,” Rollins responded.

  • U.N. approves African proposal for a new world map

    U.N. approves African proposal for a new world map

    The United Nations General Assembly on Friday endorsed a world map that depicts the size of Africa more accurately than the map most commonly used now.

    The assembly approved a resolution favoring the Equal Earth projection, a map that supporters say shows the true size of countries, over the familiar Mercator projection, which shrinks regions near the equator. It passed with 164 votes in favor and 6 abstentions, according to the United Nations.

    The only nation that voted against the resolution was the United States, which said the map promoted an “ideological agenda” and was a distraction from the “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations.”

    The new map has supporters in Africa, who say the Mercator projection has contributed to a historical bias that has minimized tropical and equatorial regions and exaggerated the size of countries near the poles.

    The U.N. resolution does not outlaw the Mercator projection or require the use of the Equal Earth map. But it is part of a campaign to raise awareness of the effects of visual representations of the Earth on how people view the world.

    Here’s what to know about the debate.

    What is the Mercator projection?

    The projection, one of many ways to represent the spherical Earth on a flat plane, was designed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 to help sailors navigate.

    It was created by projecting the Earth’s features onto a cylinder, then flattening that into a rectangle.

    The map was invaluable for seafaring: Any straight line drawn on the map represents a compass direction that sailors can use to determine which way to go. The projection has since become widely used in books, classrooms, and online services like Google Maps.

    Why do critics want to move away from it?

    Every map projection makes sacrifices, like shape, size, or distance: You can’t flatten a round object without somehow stretching, shrinking, or tearing it. The Mercator projection reflects true directions but distorts the size of landmasses.

    If you had a Mercator projection on your classroom wall, you might have grown up believing that Greenland, for example, is as big as Africa, even though it is 1/14th its size. You might also think that Alaska is bigger than Mexico, when it is 25% smaller.

    Critics have argued that the Mercator map creates a subtle bias whereby northern nations, including some of the world’s wealthiest, appear large and equatorial regions, home mostly to developing countries, are depicted as small. Some cartographers say it reinforces a Eurocentric and colonial worldview.

    The Equal Earth projection — created in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Savric, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson — sacrifices straight-line directions in order to render landmasses in their correct proportions. It has rounded edges to account for the Earth’s spherical shape instead of a rectangle.

    Advocacy groups in Africa have campaigned to replace the Mercator map since April 2025. The African Union endorsed the campaign in August that year, urging its 55 member states to adopt the Equal Earth map in schools and public communications. The West African nation of Togo sponsored the U.N. resolution, backed by other countries in the African Union.

    “A map is never neutral,” Robert Dussey, the foreign minister of Togo, said Thursday, promoting the U.N. resolution. “It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood, and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”

    What does the U.N. resolution do?

    The resolution calls on the more than 190 U.N. member states to update their educational materials and educate students about the accurate sizes of countries and the limitations of different map projections.

    It also urges major digital map providers to discuss the issue with governments and adopt more accurate cartographic representations.

    The resolution is not binding. But the push to replace the Mercator map has made progress in other ways.

    Google, which used a Mercator-based map for more than a decade, shifted in 2018 to showing the Earth as a globe when zoomed out on the desktop platform. “Greenland’s projection is no longer the size of Africa,” the company said on social media.

    Some schools have begun replacing Mercator maps. Boston Public Schools in 2017 began purchasing maps with the Peters projection, which shows countries in their correct proportional sizes to one another at the cost of stretching and squashing their outlines.

    The shift was part of the district’s effort to “decolonize the curriculum,” Colin Rose, then a district administrator, told the Boston Globe.

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Judge orders Trump officials to divulge names of those who set up $1.8 billion fund

    Judge orders Trump officials to divulge names of those who set up $1.8 billion fund

    A federal magistrate judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to reveal the identities of the people who devised a contentious plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who believed they were wronged by political prosecutions.

    The order by the magistrate judge, Ivan D. Davis, could shed further light on how the fund was put together. The plan to create the fund, which could have funneled taxpayer money to the president’s allies, drew repeated scrutiny. It prompted a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans, and imperiled the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

    Blanche has repeatedly said the fund is dead, but President Donald Trump has been more circumspect, indicating his support for compensating people including the rioters who were prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    Davis’ order, issued in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., came as part of a lawsuit challenging the legality of the fund and another measure by the Justice Department that benefited Trump. That provision granted the president, his family, and his businesses expansive protections against all past tax investigations.

    Both the fund and the tax immunity deal emerged from backroom negotiations between Trump’s personal lawyers and senior Justice Department officials. The measures were made public after Trump agreed to dismiss a lawsuit he had filed against the IRS, seeking damages for claims that the agency had failed to stop the release of some of his tax returns to news organizations.

    A federal judge in Florida later excoriated both the suit and the way in which it was dismissed. She said the suit was an improper exercise in self-dealing because the president had brought claims against a federal agency that he himself controlled. She also asserted that the dismissal had been worked out with the intent to evade judicial oversight.

    The suit seeking to kill the fund and the tax immunity deal was brought in Virginia by a group of plaintiffs that includes a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Trump administration after working on Jan. 6-related cases. The group has claimed that the program was unfairly designed to help only supporters of the president.

    The union representing IRS workers later joined the suit, claiming that the tax provisions were illegal and could put its employees in the untenable position of carrying out unlawful orders.

    Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the decision.

    “Today’s order granting discovery is a significant step in getting to the bottom of the slush fund,” said Aman George, a lawyer for Democracy Forward, which filed the suit.

    The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the ruling.

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Kennedy Center board renews call for Trump-backed shutdown after part of a ceiling collapses

    Kennedy Center board renews call for Trump-backed shutdown after part of a ceiling collapses

    WASHINGTON — A chunk of ceiling fell inside a main hallway of the Kennedy Center, according to a spokesperson who said the damage underscores the need to shut down the historic arts venue for renovations sought by President Donald Trump.

    No one was injured when a piece of the ceiling inside the Kennedy Center’s grand foyer collapsed Friday evening, said Roma Daravi, the center’s vice president for public relations.

    Photos provided by the center showed a large hole in the high ceiling and debris littering the red carpet in part of the hallway that connects the Kennedy Center’s three main performance auditoriums. The damage occurred during stormy weather in Washington.

    The Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned board is fighting in court to move forward with plans to add Trump’s name to the building’s facade and to close the center for two years as it undergoes $250 million in renovations.

    Daravi called the partial ceiling collapse Friday “another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization, as our Chairman President Trump has championed.”

    “This structural failure stems from decades of neglect and deferred maintenance by the previous leadership, and there’s no justification for further delays in restoring America’s cultural center,” Daravi said in a statement.

    Trump’s efforts to add his name and make other big changes to the center established to honor President John F. Kennedy following his assassination are just part of Trump’s broader second-term agenda to reshape Washington.

    Trump already has demolished the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom. He also plans a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and a renovated golf course along the Potomac River.

    U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in May that Trump’s name had been added to the Kennedy Center illegally and ordered that it be taken down. He also blocked the administration from closing the venue for renovations.

    Now before the judge is an August vote by the Kennedy Center’s board to return Trump’s name to the facade so it reads: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.” Justice Department lawyers have argued donations for renovations will dry up without Trump’s name on the building.

    Other changes have moved forward. Last week, the Kennedy Center took down a large stick figure sculpture known as Blue that had stood outside the center since 2019. The Kennedy Center gave no reason for its removal, but said in a statement “we are honored to have been stewards” of the late sculptor Joel Shapiro’s work.

    Grace Terpstra of Keep the KC, a community group fighting the Kennedy Center’s closure, said she suspects the board will seize on what appears to be limited ceiling damage “to make the point that the whole thing needs to be shut down, that it’s going to fall on everybody.”

    “I think they’ll try to make it into a bigger thing and show that they’ve found a lot of other things,” said Terpstra, the group’s founder.

  • U.S. military hits 3 Iranian oil tankers after saying Navy ships were targeted with missiles

    U.S. military hits 3 Iranian oil tankers after saying Navy ships were targeted with missiles

    CAIRO — U.S. forces struck three Iranian oil tankers after Navy warships were targeted with missiles, the American military said Saturday, warning that it would “if necessary, destroy Iran’s limited and exposed oil fleet.”

    The strikes — a day after U.S. President Donald Trump sought to minimize the conflict as “small potatoes” — keep up a new tilt back toward fighting after six months of on-again, off-again war that began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on the country on Feb. 28. Both sides have sought to inflict both military and economic pain, and negotiations have collapsed.

    The military’s statement said that an American aircraft carrier and a destroyer evaded “multiple unprovoked Iranian attacks” while patrolling in the region and no U.S. personnel were hurt. It said that two Iranian oil carriers were “permanently disabled” and the third, unladen one, was destroyed.

    The U.S. statement said that the tankers were part of a shadow network helping to fund Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard and its armed proxies in the region.

    There was no immediate Iranian response.

    Iran had reported a strike near Kharg Island

    Earlier, Iranian state television had said that four U.S. missiles struck a tanker about 6 miles from Kharg Island, home to a terminal through which the country exports most of its oil. Kharg Island has been repeatedly targeted during the war, including U.S. strikes on military sites there in March.

    The U.S. said that one tanker was struck off Kharg Island and another was struck near Jask, east of the Strait of Hormuz. The unladen tanker was hit in the Gulf of Oman, and the U.S. said its crew had been “directed to abandon ship.” The statement shared what it called video footage of the strikes.

    After the U.S. statement, Iran’s state broadcaster reported the two other tankers attacked, saying their crews had evacuated.

    “We will not hesitate to defend American forces, and if necessary, destroy Iran’s limited and exposed oil fleet,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command.

    The strikes came nearly a week after the U.S. and Iran resumed attacks following a month of relative calm, with the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian communities along it again being targeted. At least five people were killed earlier in the week during a U.S. bombardment of southern Iran. One strike hit a wedding.

    Masoumeh Zarei, 13, was wounded in the attack. She spoke to the Associated Press at a hospital while being treated for injuries to her abdomen.

    She said that the wedding celebration had already begun when she set out to join it. She never made it there. She was knocked unconscious when a telecommunications tower was struck. Her next memory was of waking up in a hospital.

    “The party had just started, and we wanted to go there,” Zarei said, her voice hoarse. “I had made my nails really pretty for the party, but everything changed.”

    Her friend, 14-year-old Kiana Karimi, also was wounded and in intensive care. She told the AP that she heard five explosions.

    “The first three explosions at the telecommunications tower threw us to the ground,” Karimi said. “I quickly got up to pick my brothers up off the ground. Then there were two more explosions, and after that I don’t remember anything.”

    U.S. had tried to turn to economic pressure

    The resumption of fighting in the past week came after new U.S. efforts to apply economic pressures on Tehran, whose hard-line new senior leaders have signaled the willingness to dig in after weathering decades of sanctions. The elected government of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, however, has said that it favors a negotiated end to the war.

    Iran has found ways over the years to circumvent sanctions — and now a U.S. blockade of its ports — and get its oil to buyers to help ease growing economic pressures. That relies in part on a shadow fleet transporting its oil.

    Meanwhile, the issue that helped lead to the war — Iran’s nuclear program — was meant to be addressed in negotiations that fell apart soon after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding in mid-June. Now diplomats say the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany seek to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for failure to comply with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations.

    Instead, Tehran’s new leverage focuses on the strait that is crucial to global oil and natural gas shipments and was seen as an international waterway before the war began.

    The U.S. military has been helping to guide ships through the strait as Tehran asserts control and targets some vessels, but overall traffic remains low.

  • Companies can tell investors less under proposed SEC rules

    Companies can tell investors less under proposed SEC rules

    The Trump administration has aggressively expanded its push for financial deregulation, raising concerns that the changes could facilitate another Wall Street crisis, sooner or later.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission this summer proposed two big changes to how publicly traded companies report their finances. The first, and most eye-catching, one would let companies file earnings reports only twice a year instead of quarterly, slashing a rule that has existed for more than half a century.

    The second one, which has flown under the radar, would exempt most companies the SEC regulates from having to bring in outside auditors to verify a company’s internal books and processes for avoiding errors and fraud.

    The rollback would weaken regulations passed by Congress in 2002, after the collapse of Enron, an energy trading company, and the implosion of Arthur Andersen, its accounting firm, revealed how easily companies could hide financial problems, or cook their books, without independent oversight.

    Some money managers are asking whether either change would improve the investment environment. And public interest groups worry the changes could enable another costly scandal like Enron’s failure, or something worse.

    “If the quality of reporting information from the financial system deteriorates, then that absolutely leads to financial sector risks of the kind that have bitten us before, as in 2008 and other crises,” said Simon Johnson, a Nobel laureate economist and a co-chair of the Systemic Risk Council at the CFA Institute, which administers the industry’s chartered financial analyst credential.

    In the past three decades, the number of publicly traded companies active in the U.S. stock market has fallen by half. The number of initial public offerings has also greatly decreased in comparison with past business cycles.

    Trump administration officials say onerous regulations and audits for public companies have made going public less attractive and increased the allure of less regulated private markets. This, in turn, has resulted in fewer opportunities for smaller investors to participate in the growth of early-stage companies the way large private investors can.

    “Under my chairmanship, we’re out to change that,” Paul Atkins, the Trump-appointed chair of the SEC, said in a statement. “As part of my ‘make IPOs great again’ agenda, we’re advancing a modernized regulatory framework that will reduce friction and increase certainty for both issuers and investors and streamline the path for companies to go and remain public.”

    Smaller public companies are already given more breathing room by U.S. regulators, which are sensitive to overburdening them with compliance costs that bigger companies can more easily afford. Now, however, the SEC wants to make a categorical shift that would bump the share of companies operating under lighter rules to about 80% from 50%.

    The riskiest consequence, according to watchdogs like Americans for Financial Reform, would be to exempt those companies from more thorough independent audits to help ensure that the financial statements companies provide to investors and the SEC are accurate. That more stringent external vetting was a requirement Congress instituted under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to prevent accounting frauds such as those at Enron and WorldCom, which led to bankruptcies, mass layoffs, and billions of dollars lost by investors.

    The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents some of America’s largest companies, has supported the SEC moves on auditing and quarterly reporting, echoing concerns about the costs of independent auditor reviews and extra legal counsel. But a broad range of former and current executives have criticized the SEC’s deregulatory proposals, which remain provisional until they are made final.

    The SEC received a lopsided response to the semiannual reporting proposal during its formal public comment period, which closed last month. Of the hundreds of thousands of comments submitted, more than 97% opposed the change.

    The Managed Funds Association, which represents hedge funds and private credit funds, has said less frequent reporting could increase market volatility and harm transparency, raising the risk of insider trading. Institutional asset managers at banks and pension funds also say they rely on standardized quarterly statements to accurately value assets.

    “What is the big problem that we need to solve?” said Rebecca Patterson, a former chief investment officer of Bridgewater, a hedge fund.

    “U.S. firms today are highly profitable overall, and they are still able to make longer-term strategic business decisions,” she added. “They are nicely walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

    With respect to the debate over financial audits, market analysts have questioned the SEC chair’s diagnosis that burdensome audit rules are to blame for the decline in IPOs or publicly traded stocks.

    Matt Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, an investment adviser, said the enormous growth in fundraising options outside publicly traded stock markets had been the key force keeping more private companies private.

    Not too long ago, Kennedy explained, a company might have gone public after a “Series A, B, or C” round of funding. But in recent years, he joked, “we’re almost running out of the alphabet,” as venture capitalists, private equity, private credit, and angel investors have queued up for privately traded stakes in companies.

    “I don’t think it’s compliance costs keeping them from going public,” he said.

    Industry experts note that companies would still need audits of their financial statements. But 80% of publicly traded companies would no longer need auditors to separately attest and certify that a firm’s internal financial processes were aboveboard.

    Other rollbacks the SEC proposed this summer have raised some concerns, too, including a rule change that would make federal regulatory laws “preempt,” or overrule, state-level financial regulations; another that would do away with the need for companies to report their “climate risk”; and a proposal to cut a requirement for companies to report ratios about disparities in pay.

    The SEC is expected to finalize the proposed rule changes despite the opposition. Although the exact timeline remains unclear, agency leadership, including Atkins, has signaled reluctance to make concessions to critics in public remarks.

    “I really don’t get it,” said Ben Carlson, the director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth. “In a world where information is becoming more and more important, why would you want less of it?”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.