MicroWave

The use of automatic license plate readers has exploded across the country in recent years. The cameras on roads and freeways that take images of the back of passing cars are popular with police for solving crimes.

But as Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated in recent months, residents of various American cities are urging local leaders to stop using these cameras, citing fears of mass surveillance and concerns that local data could be aiding a federal deportation dragnet.

Many of the grassroots campaigns have targeted cameras made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Some cities have grappled with the issue and decided to keep their cameras due to public safety, but in a number of places, the pressure has worked.

Carr says the Federal Communications Commission has also opened an enforcement action into ABC’s the View

The chair of the US’s top media regulator claimed on Wednesday that journalists had been tricked into covering claims by the late-night host Stephen Colbert that he had been blocked by his network from interviewing a Texas Senate candidate.

Brendan Carr, the avowedly pro-Trump chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), made his comments after Colbert accused the Trump administration and CBS of censorship.

CBS has countered Colbert’s claims in a statement, saying it had not blocked him from interviewing James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, but had merely provided legal guidance that such an interview might trigger equal time regulations that would require him to also platform Talarico’s campaign rivals.

Officials previously blamed a staffer for a grotesquely racist video reposted by the president’s account earlier this month

Asked whether the president's latest Truth represented an official shift in American policy against the Chagos deal, Leavitt told reporters that Trump's post "should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration” because it had come “straight from the horse's mouth.”

“When you see it on Truth Social, you know it's directly from President Trump,” she said.

But Leavitt’s defense of the president’s latest social media activity directly contradicts what White House officials and Trump were saying just days ago after he posted a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

Dangerous days have nearly tripled in past 45 years – and increase largely driven by human-made warming

The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.

And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.

What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to wildfires because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke.

Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires, and help will not be as likely to come from neighbors busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.

The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified at a landmark trial of social media companies on Wednesday. Plaintiffs’ lawyers grilled Zuckerberg about internal complaints that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform.

A New Jersey Catholic diocese this week agreed to a $180 million settlement to resolve allegations of clergy sexual abuse, a figure far exceeding agreements in some large dioceses but still dwarfed by other massive settlements.

Bishop Joseph Williams of the Diocese of Camden, covering southern New Jersey and its Philadelphia suburbs, announced the settlement Tuesday in a letter.

“For the survivors of South Jersey, this day is long overdue and represents a milestone in their journey toward restored justice and the healing and recognition they have long sought and deserve,” Williams said.

There were once so many children at Frisha Moore’s Elk Grove preschool that families filled up the waitlist. Now, one of her playgrounds and two classrooms sit empty because one key group of kids has stopped coming.

Dozens of families in recent years have opted not to enroll their 4-year-olds at Moore Learning Preschool & Child Care Center, she said. Instead, they’re putting their children in transitional kindergarten, California’s new public pre-kindergarten grade.

Even though she provides a full day of preschool, compared with transitional kindergarten that lasts only about 3.5 hours, Moore can’t compete: Public school is free. She hasn’t broken even in months and thinks about closing the preschool, “every single day.” That would remove 91 licensed child care spots from the county, including 20 for children under age 2, for whom child care options are particularly scarce.

Transitional kindergarten’s expansion is one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature educational achievements and a key part of his legacy on how California cares for its youngest residents.

“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night called CBS’s denial of his claim that it blocked the broadcast of his interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico “crap” — and urged the network and its parent, Paramount Skydance, to stand up to the “bullies” in the Trump administration.

Colbert’s broadside came hours after CBS issued a statement on the controversy.

The host, whose show will end in May as it was canceled by CBS, held up a printed copy of the network’s statement about Talarico’s interview during his show Tuesday night and said, “I don’t even know what to do with this crap.”

More than a year after a 33-year-old woman froze to death on Austria's highest mountain, her boyfriend goes on trial on Thursday accused of gross negligent manslaughter.

Kerstin G died of hypothermia on a mountain climbing trip to the Grossglockner that went horribly wrong. Her boyfriend is accused of leaving her unprotected and exhausted close to the summit in stormy conditions in the early hours of 19 January 2025, while he went to get help.

The trial has sparked interest and debate, not just in Austria but in mountain climbing communities far beyond its borders.

Independent experts appointed by human rights council speak of ‘grave’ nature regarding scale of atrocities against women and girls

Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.

The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.

“So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said in a statement.

Wealthy Americans are dominating applications for New Zealand’s “golden visa”, driven by a love for the country’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit, as well a desire to escape Trump’s administration.

New rules for the Active Investor Plus visa came into effect in April 2025, lowering investment thresholds, removing English-language requirements and cutting the amount of time applicants must spend in the country to establish residency from three years to three weeks. Successful applicants can only purchase homes in New Zealand worth more than $5m.

Immigration New Zealand said the new scheme offering residency to wealthy foreigners has attracted 573 applications, representing 1,833 people. Before the changes, the visa attracted 116 applications over two-and-a-half years.