As a mist of rain sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford bemoaned how expensive it had been running a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his five-acre farm — and how bad it was for the planet. Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar-powered pump to periodically saturate…
Alvin Hellerstein, a federal judge who for decades oversaw some of the country’s most high-profile cases, counting among his defendants presidents and CEOs, has died, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York confirmed Wednesday. He was 92. At the time of his death, he was presiding over the criminal case of one former…
Beijing — ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming reclaimed the top spot on a list of China’s richest people, driven by his company’s push into artificial intelligence. The rankings released by The Hurun Research Institute on Tuesday reflected that the country’s high-tech sectors were rising while others, like the consumer sector and real estate, were under pressure….
A cadre of elite techies, financiers, and high-level Trump administration officials have spent a year quietly charting an extraordinary and rapid campaign to persuade Americans to use apps and other artificial intelligence-powered tools to manage their healthcare and medical records. As that campaign has unfolded, administration officials have granted tech companies an unusual opportunity to…
One startup uses artificial intelligence to help winemakers better predict crop yields. Another uses insights gleaned from AI to enable earlier detection of skin cancer, while a third develops a seaweed-based hydrogel fire suppressant that’s free of “forever chemicals.” The entrepreneurs behind these tech-forward startups have one thing in common: They started the companies from…
A law designed to protect patients from surprise medical bills succeeded in eliminating unexpected charges, but spawned a lucrative arbitration industry with providers and specialized middlemen extracting payments far above benchmark billing rates. The practice is ultimately driving up healthcare costs for consumers, a CBS News investigation found. The arbitration system Congress created to settle…
An AI model downloaded over 3 billion times and used by U.S. firms like Airbnb and Uber is embedded with China-friendly narratives and programmed for censorship, new research shows. Qwen, a freely available model made by Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, doesn’t acknowledge the violent suppression of protests in Hong Kong in 2019 or Tiananmen Square in…
Faced with recent questions about the privacy costs of its technology, the surveillance camera startup Flock Safety and its CEO have deployed a tidy statistic to tout its benefits. “Last year we helped clear just over a million crimes in America,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a March 2026 podcast interview. “Over a million…
Hundreds of thousands of people packed Paris’ iconic Champs-Élysées Avenue for Pope Leo XIV’s big outdoor Mass on Saturday, a sign of the Catholic Church’s enduring appeal in the once staunchly Catholic but officially secular country. The Vatican estimated that 700,000 people came out for the Mass — more than the 600,000 who had registered…
OpenAI disclosed Friday that its artificial intelligence agents had interacted with several U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, as part of an ongoing review into the company’s models’ unanticipated behavior. The AI giant’s models accessed publicly available information on two websites operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as U.S. Census Bureau data,…
