International

International


How removing unpaid medical bills from credit reports could help consumers

NEW YORK (AP) — Lenders will no longer be able to consider unpaid medical bills as a credit history factor when they evaluate potential borrowers in the U.S. for mortgages, car loans or business loans, according to a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized Tuesday. Removing medical debts from consumer credit reports is expected […]

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Tesla data helped police after Las Vegas truck explosion, but experts have wider privacy concerns

NEW YORK (AP) — Your car is spying on you. That is one takeaway from the fast, detailed data that Tesla collected on the driver of one of its Cybertrucks that exploded in Las Vegas earlier this week. Privacy data experts say the deep dive by Elon Musk’s company was impressive, but also shines a spotlight on a difficult question […]

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Myanmar’s military rulers enact cybersecurity law with wide-ranging censorship provisions

BANGKOK (AP) — Military-ruled Myanmar, already notorious for cracking down on free speech, has enacted a new cybersecurity law with wide-ranging controls on the flow of information, according to a text of the measure published Friday in state-run newspapers. Existing restrictions on freedom of expression under the ruling military have generally involved charges under broadly […]

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Tennessee is refusing to release its new execution manual. Here is why it matters

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Just days after Tennessee announced it had a new manual for executing death row inmates, the state’s top prison officials said they aren’t going to release the document to the public. The Tennessee Department of Correction last week told The Associated Press to file a public records request to obtain a […]

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Treasury says Chinese hackers remotely accessed workstations, documents in ‘major’ cyber incident

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents after compromising a third-party software service provider, the agency said Monday. The department did not provide details on how many workstations had been accessed or what sort of documents the hackers may have obtained, but it said in a letter […]

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Rhode Islanders’ data was leaked from a cyberattack on state health benefits website

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Cybercriminals who hacked Rhode Island’s system for health and benefits programs have released files to a site on the dark web, a scenario the state has been preparing for, Gov. Daniel McKee said Monday. The state has an outreach strategy to encourage potentially impacted Rhode Islanders to protect their personal information, […]

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Tennessee has a new execution method, 2.5 years after last scheduled execution abruptly halted

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — More than 2 years after Tennessee abruptly halted the execution of inmate Oscar Smith — admitting that correction officials were not following their own execution protocols — the state has announced a new method that could allow it to resume executions halted since May 2022. But that won’t happen right away. […]

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Court rules Georgia lawmakers can subpoena Fani Willis for information related to her Trump case

ATLANTA (AP) — A judge has ruled that the Georgia state Senate can subpoena Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as part of a inquiry into whether she has engaged in misconduct during her prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump but is giving Willis the chance to contest whether lawmakers’ demands are overly broad. Fulton County […]

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Biden will decide on US Steel acquisition after influential panel fails to reach consensus

WASHINGTON (AP) — A powerful government panel on Monday failed to reach consensus on the possible national security risks of a nearly $15 billion proposed deal for Nippon Steel of Japan to purchase U.S. Steel, leaving the decision to President Joe Biden, who opposes the deal. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, […]

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Ex-OpenAI engineer who raised legal concerns about the technology he helped build has died

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26. Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded […]

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Takeaways from The Associated Press’ reporting on prison labor in Alabama

DADEVILLE, Ala. (AP) — No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration. […]

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Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s but deems them too dangerous for parole

DADEVILLE, Ala. (AP) — A storm was looming when the inmate serving 20 years for armed robbery was assigned to transport fellow prisoners to their jobs at private manufacturers supplying goods to companies like Home Depot and Wayfair. It didn’t matter that Jake Jones once had escaped or that he had failed two drug and […]

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