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pornhub-is-urging-tech-giants-to-enact-device-based-age-verification

Pornhub is urging tech giants to enact device-based age verification

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The company is pushing for an alternative way to keep minors from viewing porn.

In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.

The letters were sent following the continued adoption of age verification laws in the US and UK, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content; often this requires using third-party services. Currently, 25 US states have passed some form of ID verification, each with different provisions.

Pornhub has experienced an enormous dip in traffic as a result of its decision to pull out of most states that have enacted these laws. The platform was one of the few sites to comply with the new law in Louisiana but doing so caused traffic to drop by 80 percent. Similarly, since implementation of the Online Safety Act, Pornhub has lost nearly 80 percent of its UK viewership.

The company argues that it’s a privacy risk to leave age verification up to third-party sites and that people will simply seek adult content on platforms that don’t comply with the laws.

“We have seen an exponential surge in searches for alternate adult sites without age restrictions or safety standards at all,” says Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub.

She says she hopes the tech companies and Aylo are able to find common ground on the matter, especially given the recent passage of the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) in California. “This is a law that’s interesting because it gets it almost exactly right,” she says. Signed into law in October, it requires app store operators to authenticate user ages before download.

According to Google spokesperson Karl Ryan, “Google is committed to protecting kids online, including by developing and deploying new age assurance tools like our Credential Manager API that can be used by websites. We don’t allow adult entertainment apps on Google Play and would emphasize that certain high-risk services like Aylo will always need to invest in specific tools to meet their own legal and responsibility obligations.”

Microsoft declined to comment, but pointed WIRED to a recent policy recommendation post that said “age assurance should be applied at the service level, target specific design features that pose heightened risks, and enable tailored experiences for children.”

Apple likewise declined to comment and instead pointed WIRED to its child online safety report and noted that web content filters are turned on by default for every user under 18. A software update from June specified that Apple requires kids who are under 13 to have a kid account, which also includes “app restrictions enabled from the beginning.” Apple currently has no way of requiring every single website to integrate an API.

According to Pornhub, age verification laws have led to ineffective enforcement. “The sheer volume of adult content platforms has proven to be too challenging for governments worldwide to regulate at the individual site or platform level,” says Kekesi. Aylo claims device-based age verification that happens once, on a phone or computer, will preserve user privacy while prioritizing safety.

Recent Studies by New York University and public policy nonprofit the Phoenix Center suggest that current age verification laws don’t work because people find ways to circumvent them, including by using VPNs and turning to sites that don’t regulate their content.

“Platform-based verification has been like Prohibition,” says Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition. “We’re seeing consumer behavior reroute away from legal, compliant sites to foreign sites that don’t comply with any regulations or laws. Age verification laws have effectively rerouted a massive river of consumers to sites with pirated content, revenge porn, and child sex abuse material.” He claims that these laws “have been great for criminals, terrible for the legal adult industry.”

With age verification and the overall deanonymizing of the internet, these are issues that will now face nearly everyone, but especially those who are politically disfavored. Sex workers have been dealing with issues like censorship and surveillance online for a long time. One objective of Project 2025, MAGA’s playbook for President Trump’s second term, has been to “back door” a national ban on porn through state laws.

The current surge of child protection laws around the world is driving a significant change in how people engage with the internet, and is also impacting industries beyond porn, including gaming and social media. Starting December 10 in Australia, in accordance with the government’s social media ban, kids under 16 will be kicked off Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Ultimately, Stabile says that may be the point. In the US, “the advocates for these bills have largely fallen into two groups: faith-based organizations that don’t believe adult content should be legal, and age verification providers who stand to profit from a restricted internet.” The goal of faith-based organizations, he says, is to destabilize the adult industry and dissuade adults from using it, while the latter works to expand their market as much as possible, “even if that means getting in bed with right-wing censors.”

But the problem is that “even well-meaning legislators advancing these bills have little understanding of the internet,” Stabile adds. “It’s much easier to go after a political punching bag like Pornhub than it is Apple or Google. But if you’re not addressing the reality of the internet, if your legislation flies in the face of consumer behavior, you’re only going to end up creating systems that fail.”

Adult industry insiders I spoke to in August explained that the biggest misconception about the industry is that it is against self-regulation when that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Keeping minors off adult sites is a shared responsibility that requires a global solution,” Kekesi says. “Every phone, tablet, or computer should start as a kid-safe device. Only verified adults should unlock access to things like dating apps, gambling, or adult content.” In 2022, Pornhub created a chatbot that urges people searching for child sexual abuse content to seek counseling; the tool was introduced following a 2020 New York Times investigation that alleged the platform had monetized videos showing child abuse. Pornhub has since started releasing annual transparency reports and tightened its verification process of performers and for video uploads.

According to Politico, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and Pinterest all supported the California bill. Right now that law is limited to California, but Kekesi believes it can work as a template for other states.

“We obviously see that there’s kind of a path forward here,” she says.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com

Photo of WIRED

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Flying with whales: Drones are remaking marine mammal research

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In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest marine oil spills ever. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the area to study how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialized darts at the animals to collect pencil eraser-sized tissue samples.

It wasn’t going well. Each time his boat approached a whale surfacing for air, the animal vanished beneath the waves before he could reach it. “I felt like I was playing Whac-A-Mole,” he says.

As darkness fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. That unpleasant experience gave Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by somehow flying over the whale? Researchers can glean much information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, its sex, whether it is pregnant, and the makeup of its microbiome.

After many experiments, Kerr’s idea turned into what is today known as the SnotBot: a drone fitted with six petri dishes that collect a whale’s snot by flying over the animal as it surfaces and exhales through its blowhole. Today, drones like this are deployed to gather snot all over the world, and not just from sperm whales: They’re also collecting this scientifically valuable mucus from other species, such as blue whales and dolphins. “I would say drones have changed my life,” says Kerr.

S’not just mucus

Gathering snot is one of many ways that drones are being used to study whales. In the past 10 to 15 years, drone technology has made great strides, becoming affordable and easy to use. This has been a boon for researchers. Scientists “are finding applications for drones in virtually every aspect of marine mammal research,” says Joshua Stewart, an ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.

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How Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion—and what it reveals about AI

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On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth 88 million euros ($101 million). The theft from Paris’ Louvre Museum—one of the world’s most surveilled cultural institutions—took just under eight minutes.

Visitors kept browsing. Security didn’t react (until alarms were triggered). The men disappeared into the city’s traffic before anyone realized what had happened.

Investigators later revealed that the thieves wore hi-vis vests, disguising themselves as construction workers. They arrived with a furniture lift, a common sight in Paris’s narrow streets, and used it to reach a balcony overlooking the Seine. Dressed as workers, they looked as if they belonged.

This strategy worked because we don’t see the world objectively. We see it through categories—through what we expect to see. The thieves understood the social categories that we perceive as “normal” and exploited them to avoid suspicion. Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems work in the same way and are vulnerable to the same kinds of mistakes as a result.

The sociologist Erving Goffman would describe what happened at the Louvre using his concept of the presentation of self: people “perform” social roles by adopting the cues others expect. Here, the performance of normality became the perfect camouflage.

The sociology of sight

Humans carry out mental categorization all the time to make sense of people and places. When something fits the category of “ordinary,” it slips from notice.

AI systems used for tasks such as facial recognition and detecting suspicious activity in a public area operate in a similar way. For humans, categorization is cultural. For AI, it is mathematical.

But both systems rely on learned patterns rather than objective reality. Because AI learns from data about who looks “normal” and who looks “suspicious,” it absorbs the categories embedded in its training data. And this makes it susceptible to bias.

The Louvre robbers weren’t seen as dangerous because they fit a trusted category. In AI, the same process can have the opposite effect: people who don’t fit the statistical norm become more visible and over-scrutinized.

It can mean a facial recognition system disproportionately flags certain racial or gendered groups as potential threats while letting others pass unnoticed.

A sociological lens helps us see that these aren’t separate issues. AI doesn’t invent its categories; it learns ours. When a computer vision system is trained on security footage where “normal” is defined by particular bodies, clothing, or behavior, it reproduces those assumptions.

Just as the museum’s guards looked past the thieves because they appeared to belong, AI can look past certain patterns while overreacting to others.

Categorization, whether human or algorithmic, is a double-edged sword. It helps us process information quickly, but it also encodes our cultural assumptions. Both people and machines rely on pattern recognition, which is an efficient but imperfect strategy.

A sociological view of AI treats algorithms as mirrors: They reflect back our social categories and hierarchies. In the Louvre case, the mirror is turned toward us. The robbers succeeded not because they were invisible, but because they were seen through the lens of normality. In AI terms, they passed the classification test.

From museum halls to machine learning

This link between perception and categorization reveals something important about our increasingly algorithmic world. Whether it’s a guard deciding who looks suspicious or an AI deciding who looks like a “shoplifter,” the underlying process is the same: assigning people to categories based on cues that feel objective but are culturally learned.

When an AI system is described as “biased,” this often means that it reflects those social categories too faithfully. The Louvre heist reminds us that these categories don’t just shape our attitudes, they shape what gets noticed at all.

After the theft, France’s culture minister promised new cameras and tighter security. But no matter how advanced those systems become, they will still rely on categorization. Someone, or something, must decide what counts as “suspicious behavior.” If that decision rests on assumptions, the same blind spots will persist.

The Louvre robbery will be remembered as one of Europe’s most spectacular museum thefts. The thieves succeeded because they mastered the sociology of appearance: They understood the categories of normality and used them as tools.

And in doing so, they showed how both people and machines can mistake conformity for safety. Their success in broad daylight wasn’t only a triumph of planning. It was a triumph of categorical thinking, the same logic that underlies both human perception and artificial intelligence.

The lesson is clear: Before we teach machines to see better, we must first learn to question how we see.

Vincent Charles, Reader in AI for Business and Management Science, Queen’s University Belfast, and Tatiana Gherman, Associate Professor of AI for Business and Strategy, University of Northampton.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonkers Bitcoin heist: 5-star hotels, cash-filled envelopes, vanishing funds

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Bitcoin mining hardware exec falls for sophisticated crypto scam to tune of $200k

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.

As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4 million worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.

When Halliburton arrived at the Rosewood Hotel, he found Even and Maxim perched in a booth. They struck him as playboy, high-roller types—particularly Maxim, who wore a tan three-piece suit and had a highly manicured look, his long dark hair parted down the middle. A Rolex protruded from the cuff of his sleeve.

Over a three-course lunch—ceviche with a roe garnish, Chilean sea bass, and cherry cake—they discussed the contours of the deal and traded details about their respective backgrounds. Even was talkative and jocular, telling stories about blowout parties in Marrakech. Maxim was aloof; he mostly stared at Halliburton, holding his gaze for long periods at a time as though sizing him up.

As a relationship-building exercise, Even proposed that Halliburton sell the family office around $3,000 in bitcoin. Halliburton was initially hesitant, but chalked it up as a peculiar dating ritual. One of the guys slid Halliburton the cash-filled envelope and told him to go to the bathroom, where he could count out the amount in private. “It felt like something out of a James Bond movie,” says Halliburton. “It was all very exotic to me.”

Halliburton left in a taxi, somewhat bemused by the encounter, but otherwise hopeful of closing the deal with the family office. For Sazmining, a small company with around 15 employees, it promised to be transformative.

Less than two weeks later, Halliburton had lost more than $200,000 worth of bitcoin to Even and Maxim. He didn’t know whether Sazmining could survive the blow, nor how the scammers had ensnared him.

Directly after his lunch with Even and Maxim, Halliburton flew to Latvia for a Bitcoin conference. From there, he traveled to Ethiopia to check on construction work at the data center facility.

While Halliburton was in Ethiopia, he received a WhatsApp message from Even, who wanted to go ahead with the deal on one condition: that Sazmining sell the family office a larger amount of bitcoin as part of the transaction, after the small initial purchase at the Rosewood Hotel. They landed on $400,000 worth—a tenth of the overall deal value.

Even asked Halliburton to return to Amsterdam to sign the contracts necessary to finalize the deal. Having been away from his family for weeks, Halliburton protested. But Even drew a line in the sand: “Remotely doesn’t work for me that’s not how I do business at the moment,” he wrote in a text message reviewed by WIRED.

Halliburton arrived back in Amsterdam in the early afternoon on August 16. That evening, he was due to meet Maxim at a teppanyaki restaurant at the five-star Okura Hotel. The interior is elaborately decorated in traditional Japanese style; it has wooden paneling, paper walls, a zen garden, and a flock of origami cranes that hang from string down a spiral staircase in the lobby.

Halliburton found Maxim sitting on a couch in the waiting area outside the restaurant, dressed in a gaudy silver suit. As they waited for a table, Maxim asked Halliburton whether he could demonstrate that Sazmining held enough bitcoin to go through with the side transaction that Even had proposed. He wanted Halliburton to move roughly half of the agreed amount—worth $220,000—into a bitcoin wallet app trusted by the family office. The funds would remain under Halliburton’s control, but the family office would be able to verify their existence using public transaction data.

Halliburton thumbed open his iPhone. The app, Atomic Wallet, had thousands of positive reviews and had been listed on the Apple App Store for several years. With Maxim at his side, Halliburton downloaded the app and created a new wallet. “I was trying to earn this guy’s trust,” says Halliburton. “Again, a $4 million contract. I’m still looking at that carrot.”

The dinner passed largely without incident. Maxim was less guarded this time; he talked about his fondness for watches and his work sourcing deals for the family office. Feeling under the weather from all the travel, Halliburton angled to wrap things up.

They left with the understanding that Maxim would take the signed contracts to the family office to be executed, while Halliburton would send the $220,000 in bitcoin to his new wallet address as agreed.

Back in his hotel room, Halliburton triggered a small test transaction using his new Atomic Wallet address. Then he wiped and reinstated the wallet using the private credentials—the seed phrase—generated when he first downloaded the app, to make sure that it functioned as expected. “Had to take some security measures but almost ready. Thanks for your patience,” wrote Halliburton in a WhatsApp message to Even. “No worries take your time,” Even responded.

At 10: 45 pm, satisfied with his tests, Halliburton signaled to a colleague to release $220,000 worth of bitcoin to the Atomic Wallet address. When it arrived, he sent a screenshot of the updated balance to Even. One minute later, Even wrote back, “Thank yiu [sic].”

Halliburton sent another message to Even, asking about the contracts. Though previously quick to answer, Even didn’t respond. Halliburton checked the Atomic Wallet app, sensing that something was wrong. The bitcoin had vanished.

Halliburton’s stomach dropped. As he sat on the bed, he tried to stop himself from vomiting. “It was like being punched in the gut,” says Halliburton. “It was just shock and disbelief.”

Halliburton racked his brain trying to figure out how he had been swindled. At 11: 30 pm, he sent another message to Even: “That was the most sophisticated scam I’ve ever experienced. I know you probably don’t give a shit but my business may not survive this. I’ve worked four years of my life to build it.”

Even responded, denying that he had done anything wrong, but that was the last Halliburton heard from him. Halliburton provided WIRED with the Telegram account Even had used; it was last active on the day the funds were drained. Even did not respond to a request for comment.

Within hours, the funds drained from Halliburton’s wallet began to be divided up, shuffled through a web of different addresses, and deposited with third-party platforms for converting crypto into regular currency, analysis by blockchain analytics companies Chainalysis and CertiK shows.

A portion of the bitcoin was split between different instant exchangers, which allow people to swap one type of cryptocurrency for another almost instantaneously. The bulk was funneled into a single address, where it was blended with funds tagged by Chainalysis as the likely proceeds of rip deals, a scam whereby somebody impersonates an investor to steal crypto from a startup.

“There’s nothing illegal about the services the scammer leveraged,” says Margaux Eckle, senior investigator at Chainalysis. “However, the fact that they leveraged consolidation addresses that appear very tightly connected to labeled scam activity is potentially indicative of a fraud operation.”

Some of the bitcoin that passed through the consolidation address was deposited with a crypto exchange, where it was likely swapped for regular currency. The remainder was converted into stablecoin and moved across so-called bridges to the Tron blockchain, which hosts several over-the-counter trading services that can be readily used to cash out large quantities of crypto, researchers claim.

The effect of the many hops, shuffles, conversions, and divisions is to make it more difficult to trace the origin of funds, so that they can be cashed out without arousing suspicion. “The scammer is quite sophisticated,” says Eckle. “Though we can trace through a bridge, it’s a way to slow the tracing of funds from investigators that could be on your tail.”

Eventually, the trail of public transaction data stops. To identify the perpetrators, law enforcement would have to subpoena the services that appear to have been used to cash out, which are widely required to collect information about users.

From the transaction data, it’s not possible to tell precisely how the scammers were able to access and drain Halliburton’s wallet without his permission. But aspects of his interactions with the scammers provide some clue.

Initially, Halliburton wondered whether the incident might be connected to a 2023 hack perpetrated by threat actors affiliated with the North Korean government, which led to $100 million worth of funds being drained from the accounts of Atomic Wallet users. (Atomic Wallet did not respond to a request for comment.)

But instead, the security researchers that spoke to WIRED believe that Halliburton fell victim to a targeted surveillance-style attack. “Executives who are publicly known to custody large crypto balances make attractive targets,” says Guanxing Wen, head of security research at CertiK.

The in-person dinners, expensive clothing, reams of cash, and other displays of wealth were gambits meant to put Halliburton at ease, researchers theorize. “This is a well-known rapport-building tactic in high-value confidence schemes,” says Wen. “The longer a victim spends with the attacker in a relaxed setting, the harder it becomes to challenge a later technical request.”

In order to complete the theft, the scammers likely had to steal the seed phrase for Halliburton’s newly created Atomic Wallet address. Equipped with a wallet’s seed phrase, anyone can gain unfettered access to the bitcoin kept inside.

One possibility is that the scammers, who dictated the locations for both meetings in Amsterdam, hijacked or mimicked the hotel Wi-Fi networks, allowing them to harvest information from Halliburton’s phone. “That equipment you can buy online, no problem. It would all fit inside a couple of suitcases,” says Adrian Cheek, lead researcher at cybersecurity company Coeus. But Halliburton insists that his phone never left his possession, and he used mobile data to download the Atomic Wallet app, not public Wi-Fi.

The most plausible explanation, claims Wen, is that the scammers—perhaps with the help of a nearby accomplice or a camera equipped with long-range zoom—were able to record the seed phrase when it appeared on Halliburton’s phone at the point he first downloaded the app, on the couch at the Okura Hotel.

Long before Halliburton delivered the $220,000 in bitcoin to his Atomic Wallet address, the scammers had probably set up a “sweeper script,” claims Wen, a type of automated bot coded to drain a wallet when it detects a large balance change.

The people the victim meets in-person in cases like this—like Even and Maxim—are rarely the ultimate beneficiaries, but rather mercenaries hired by a network of scam artists, who could be based on the other side of the globe.

“They’re normally recruited through underground forums, and secure chat groups,” says Cheek. “If you know where you’re looking, you can see this ongoing recruitment.”

For a few days, it remained unclear whether Sazmining would be able to weather the financial blow. The stolen funds equated to about six weeks’ worth of revenue. “I’m trying to keep the business afloat and survive this situation where suddenly we’ve got a cash crunch,” says Halliburton. By delaying payment to a vendor and extending the duration of an outstanding loan, the company was ultimately able to remain solvent.

That week, one of the Sazmining board members filed reports with law enforcement bodies in the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. They received acknowledgements from only UK-based Action Fraud, which said it would take no immediate action, and the Cyber Fraud Task Force, a division of the US Secret Service. (The CFTF did not respond to a request for comment.)

The incredible volume of crypto-related scam activity makes it all but impossible for law enforcement to investigate each theft individually. “It’s a type of threat and criminal activity that is reaching a scale that’s completely unprecedented,” says Eckle.

The best chance of a scam victim recovering their funds is for law enforcement to bust an entire scam ring, says Eckle. In that scenario, any funds recovered are typically dispersed to those who have reported themselves victims.

Until such a time, Halliburton has to make his peace with the loss. “It’s still painful,” he says. But “it wasn’t a death blow.”

This story originally appeared on Wired.

Photo of WIRED

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Oracle hit hard in Wall Street’s tech sell-off over its huge AI bet

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“That is a huge liability and credit risk for Oracle. Your main customer, biggest customer by far, is a venture capital-funded start-up,” said Andrew Chang, a director at S&P Global.

OpenAI faces questions about how it plans to meet its commitments to spend $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. It has struck deals with several Big Tech groups, including Oracle’s rivals.

Of the five hyperscalers—which include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta—Oracle is the only one with negative free cash flow. Its debt-to-equity ratio has surged to 500 percent, far higher than Amazon’s 50 percent and Microsoft’s 30 percent, according to JPMorgan.

While all five companies have seen their cash-to-assets ratios decline significantly in recent years amid a boom in spending, Oracle’s is by far the lowest, JPMorgan found.

JPMorgan analysts noted a “tension between [Oracle’s] aggressive AI build-out ambitions and the limits of its investment-grade balance sheet.”

Analysts have also noted that Oracle’s data center leases are for much longer than its contracts to sell capacity to OpenAI.

Oracle has signed at least five long-term lease agreements for US data centers that will ultimately be used by OpenAI, resulting in $100 billion of off-balance-sheet lease commitments. The sites are at varying levels of construction, with some not expected to break ground until next year.

Safra Catz, Oracle’s sole chief executive from 2019 until she stepped down in September, resisted expanding its cloud business because of the vast expenses required. She was replaced by co-CEOs Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia as part of the pivot by Oracle to a new era focused on AI.

Catz, who is now executive vice-chair of Oracle’s board, has exercised stock options and sold $2.5 billion of its shares this year, according to US regulatory filings. She had announced plans to exercise her stock options at the end of 2024.

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Scientist pleaded guilty to smuggling Fusarium graminearum into US. But what is it?

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Even with Fusarium graminearum, which has appeared on every continent but Antarctica, there is potential for introducing new genetic material into the environment that may exist in other countries but not the US and could have harmful consequences for crops.

How do you manage Fusarium graminearum infections?

Fusarium graminearum infections generally occur during the plant’s flowering stage or when there is more frequent rainfall and periods of high humidity during early stages of grain production.

How Fusarium graminearum risk progressed in 2025. Yellow is low risk, orange is medium risk, and red is high risk. Fusarium Risk Tool/Penn State

Wheat in the southern US is vulnerable to infection during the spring. As the season advances, the risk from scab progresses north through the US and into Canada as the grain crops mature across the region, with continued periods of conducive weather throughout the summer.

Between seasons, Fusarium graminearum survives on barley, wheat, and corn plant residues that remain in the field after harvest. It reproduces by producing microscopic spores that can then travel long distances on wind currents, spreading the fungus across large geographic areas each season.

In wheat and barley, farmers can suppress the damage by spraying a fungicide onto developing wheat heads when they’re most susceptible to infection. Applying fungicide can reduce scab and its severity, improve grain weight, and reduce mycotoxin contamination.

However, integrated approaches to manage plant diseases are generally ideal, including planting barley or wheat varieties that are resistant to scab and also using a carefully timed fungicide application, rotating crops, and tilling the soil after harvest to reduce residue where Fusarium graminearum can survive the winter.

Even though fungicide applications may be beneficial, fungicides offer only some protection and can’t cure scab. If the environmental conditions are extremely conducive for scab, with ample moisture and humidity during flowering, the disease will still occur, albeit at reduced levels.

Fusarium Head Blight with NDSU’s Andrew Friskop.

Plant pathologists are making progress on early warning systems for farmers. A team from Kansas State University, Ohio State University, and Pennsylvania State University has been developing a computer model to predict the risk of scab. Their wheat disease predictive model uses historic and current environmental data from weather stations throughout the US, along with current conditions, to develop a forecast.

In areas that are most at risk, plant pathologists and commodity specialists encourage wheat growers to apply a fungicide during periods when the fungus is likely to grow to reduce the chances of damage to crops and the spread of mycotoxin.

Tom W. Allen, associate research professor of Plant Pathology, Mississippi State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Waymo to roll out driverless taxis on highways in three US cities

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Mawakana added her company did not think in terms of “how many [incidents] are allowable” and the challenge was ensuring the “bar on safety” was high enough.

Highway routes will initially be available to users who have opted in to early access for new features, before being rolled out more widely.

Passengers will be able to travel to and from the airport in San Jose, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company already serves Phoenix airport but will now be able to access it on the highway.

Waymo, which launched its paid driverless taxi services in 2020, operates more than 250,000 rides a week. It has a fleet of more than 2,000 vehicles across its five US markets, primarily made up of Jaguar Land Rover electric I-Pace vehicles kitted out with its bespoke sensors and computing system.

Tesla, its main US rival, in September expanded services to the public as part of its robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, while Amazon-owned Zoox recently began services in Las Vegas.

Waymo said its vehicles would exit the highways in the event that they encountered technical issues. It also said it had partnered with highway patrol to prepare for circumstances where the vehicle would need to pull over.

The company has reported more than 1,250 collisions involving its vehicles since 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This has included accidents with passenger vehicles, trucks, and other objects, including a closing gate.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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mark-zuckerberg’s-illegal-school-drove-his-neighbors-crazy

Mark Zuckerberg’s illegal school drove his neighbors crazy

Features, mark zuckerberg, Meta, Policy, syndication, ZOning / /

Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic.

An entrance to Mark Zuckerberg’s compound in Palo Alto, California. Credit: Loren Elliott/Redux

The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbors as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

WIRED obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute—including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails—through a public record request filed to the Palo Alto Department of Planning and Development Services. (Mentions of “Zuckerberg” or “the Zuckerbergs” appear to have been redacted. However, neighbors and separate public records confirm that the property in question belongs to the family. The names of the neighbors who were in touch with the city were also redacted.)

The documents reveal that the school may have been operating as early as 2021 without a permit to operate in the city of Palo Alto. As many as 30 students might have enrolled, according to observations from neighbors. These documents also reveal a wider problem: For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking.

Over time, neighbors became fed up with what they argued was the city’s lack of action, particularly with respect to the school. Some believed that the delay was because of preferential treatment to the Zuckerbergs. “We find it quite remarkable that you are working so hard to meet the needs of a single billionaire family while keeping the rest of the neighborhood in the dark,” reads one email sent to the city’s Planning and Development Services Department in February. “Just as you have not earned our trust, this property owner has broken many promises over the years, and any solution which depends on good faith behavioral changes from them is a failure from the beginning.”

Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor told WIRED that the city “enforces zoning, building, and life safety rules consistently, without regard to who owns a property.” She also refuted the claim that neighbors were kept in the dark, claiming that the city’s approval of construction projects at the Zuckerberg properties “were processed the same way they are for any property owner.” She added that, though some neighbors told the city they believe the Zuckerbergs received “special treatment,” that is not accurate.

“Staff met with residents, conducted site visits, and provided updates by phone and email while engaging the owner’s representative to address concerns,” Horrigan-Taylor said. “These actions were measured and appropriate to abate the unpermitted use and responsive to neighborhood issues within the limits of local and state law.”

According to The New York Times, which first reported on the school’s existence, it was called “Bicken Ben School” and shared a name with one of the Zuckerbergs’ chickens. The listing for Bicken Ben School, or BBS for short, in a California Department of Education directory claims the school opened on October 5, 2022. This, however, is the year after neighbors claim to have first seen it operating. It’s also two and a half years after Sara Berge—the school’s point of contact, per documents WIRED obtained from the state via public record request—claims to have started her role as “head of school” for a “Montessori pod” at a “private family office” according to her LinkedIn profile, which WIRED viewed in September and October. Berge did not respond to a request to comment.

Between 2022 and 2025, according to the documents Bicken Ben filed to the state, the school grew from nine to 14 students ranging from 5 to 10 years old. Neighbors, however, estimated that they observed 15 to 30 students. Berge similarly claimed on her LinkedIn profile to have overseen “25 children” in her job. In a June 2025 job listing for “BBS,” the school had a “current enrollment of 35–40 students and plans for continued growth,” which the listing says includes a middle school.

In order for the Zuckerbergs to run a private school on their land, which is in a residential zone, they need a “conditional use” permit from the city. However, based on the documents WIRED obtained, and Palo Alto’s public database of planning applications, the Zuckerbergs do not appear to have ever applied for or received this permit.

Per emails obtained by WIRED, Palo Alto authorities told a lawyer working with the Zuckerbergs in March 2025 that the family had to shut down the school on its compound by June 30. A state directory lists BBS, the abbreviation for Bicken Ben School, as having operated until August 18, and three of Zuckerberg’s neighbors—who all requested anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the family—confirmed to WIRED in late September that they had not seen or heard students being dropped off and picked up on weekdays in recent weeks.

However, Zuckerberg family spokesperson Brian Baker tells WIRED that the school didn’t close, per se. It simply moved. It’s not clear where it is now located, or whether the school is operating under a different name.

In response to a detailed request for comment, Baker provided WIRED with an emailed statement on behalf of the Zuckerbergs. “Mark, Priscilla and their children have made Palo Alto their home for more than a decade,” he said. “They value being members of the community and have taken a number of steps above and beyond any local requirements to avoid disruption in the neighborhood.”

“Serious and untenable”

By the fall of 2024, Zuckerberg’s neighbors were at their breaking point. At some point in mid-2024, according to an email from then mayor Greer Stone, a group of neighbors had met with Stone to air their grievances about the Zuckerberg compound and the illegal school they claimed it was operating. They didn’t arrive at an immediate resolution.

In the years prior, the city had received several rounds of complaints about the Zuckerberg compound. Complaints for the address of the school were filed to 311, the nationwide number for reporting local non-emergency issues, in February 2019, September 2021, January 2022, and April 2023. They all alleged that the property was operating illegally under city code. Both were closed by the planning department, which found no rule violations. An unknown number of additional complaints, mentioned in emails among city workers, were also made between 2020 and 2024—presumably delivered via phone calls, in person, or to city departments not included in WIRED’s public record request.

In December 2020, building inspection manager Korwyn Peck wrote to code enforcement officer Brian Reynolds about an inspection he attempted to conduct around the Zuckerberg compound, in response to several noise and traffic complaints from neighbors. He described that several men in SUVs had gathered to watch him, and a tense conversation with one of them had ensued. “This appears to be a site that we will need to pay attention to,” Peck wrote to Reynolds.

“We have all been accused of ‘not caring,’ which of course is not true,” Peck added. “It does appear, however, with the activity I observed tonight, that we are dealing with more than four simple dwellings. This appears to be more than a homeowner with a security fetish.”

In a September 11, 2024, email to Jonathan Lait, Palo Alto’s director of planning and development services and Palo Alto city attorney Molly Stump, one of Zuckerberg’s neighbors alleged that since 2021, “despite numerous neighborhood complaints” to the city of Palo Alto, including “multiple code violation reports,” the school had continued to grow. They claimed that a garage at the property had been converted into another classroom, and that an increasing number of children were arriving each day. Lait and Stump did not respond to a request to comment.

“The addition of daily traffic from the teachers and parents at the school has only exacerbated an already difficult situation,” they said in the email, noting that the neighborhood has been dealing with an “untenable traffic” situation for more than eight years.

They asked the city to conduct a formal investigation into the school on Zuckerberg’s property, adding that their neighbors are also “extremely concerned” about the school, and “are willing to provide eyewitness accounts in support of this complaint.”

Over the next week, another neighbor forwarded this note to all six Palo Alto city council members, as well as then mayor Stone. One of these emails described the situation as “serious” and “untenable.”

“We believe the investigation should be swift and should yield a cease and desist order,” the neighbor wrote.

Lait responded to the neighbor who sent the original complaint on October 15, claiming that he’d had an “initial call” with a “representative” of the property owners and that he was directing the city’s code enforcement staff to reexamine the property.

On December 11, 2024, the neighbor claimed that since one of their fellow neighbors had spoken to a Zuckerberg representative, and the representative had allegedly admitted that there was a school on the property, “it seems like an open and shut case.”

“Our hope is that there is an equal process in place for all residents of Palo Alto regardless of wealth or stature,” the neighbor wrote. “It is hard to imagine that this kind of behavior would be ignored in any other circumstance.”

That same day, Lait told Christine Wade, a partner at SSL Law Firm—who, in an August 2024 email thread, said she was “still working with” the Zuckerberg family—that the Zuckerbergs lacked the required permit to run a school in a residential zone.

“Based on our review of local and state law, we believe this use constitutes a private school use in a residential zone requiring a conditional use permit,” Lait wrote in an email to Wade. “We also have not found any state preemptions that would exclude a use like this from local zoning requirements.” Lait added that a “next step,” if a permit was not obtained, would be sending a cease and desist to the property owner.

According to several emails, Wade, Lait, and Mark Legaspi, CEO of the Zuckerberg family office called West 10, went on to arrange an in-person meeting at City Hall on January 9. (This is the first time that the current name of the Zuckerberg family office, West 10, has been publicly disclosed. The office was previously called West Street.) Although WIRED did not obtain notes from the meeting, Lait informed the neighbor on January 10 that he had told the Zuckerbergs’ “representative” that the school would need to shut down if it didn’t get a conditional use permit or apply for that specific permit.

Lait added that the representative would clarify what the family planned to do in about a week; however, he noted that if the school were to close, the city may give the school a “transition period” to wind things down. Wade did not respond to a request for comment.

“At a minimum, give us extended breaks”

There was another increasingly heated conversation happening behind the scenes. On February 3 of this year, at least one neighbor met with Jordan Fox, an employee of West 10.

It’s unclear exactly what happened at this meeting, or if the neighbor who sent the September 11 complaint was in attendance. But a day after the meeting with Fox, two additional neighbors added their names to the September 11 complaint, per an email to Lait.

On February 12, a neighbor began an email chain with Fox. This email was forwarded to Planning Department officials two months later. The neighbor, who seemingly attended the meeting, said they had “connected” with fellow neighbors “to review and revise” an earlier list of 14 requests that had been reportedly submitted to the Zuckerbergs at some previous point. The note does not specify the contents of this original list of requests, but of the 19 neighbors who originally contributed to it, they claimed that 15 had contributed to the revised list.

The email notes that the Zuckerbergs had been “a part of our neighborhood for many years,” and that they “hope that this message will start an open and respectful dialogue,” built upon the “premise of how we all wish to be treated as neighbors.”

“Our top requests are to minimize future disruption to the neighborhood and proactively manage the impact of the many people who are affiliated with you,” the email says. This includes restricting parking by “security guards, contractors, staff, teachers, landscapers, visitors, etc.” In the event of major demolitions, concrete pours, or large parties, the email asks for advance notice, and for dedicated efforts to “monitor and mitigate noise.”

The email also asks the Zuckerbergs to, “ideally stop—but at a minimum give us extended breaks from—the acquisition, demolition and construction cycle to let the neighborhood recover from the last eight years of disruption.”

At this point, the email requests that the family “abide by both the letter and the spirit of Palo Alto” by complying with city code about residential buildings.

Specifically, it asks the Zuckerbergs to get a use permit for the compound’s school and to hold “a public hearing for transparency.” It also asks the family to not expand its compound any further. “We hope this will help us get back the quiet, attractive residential neighborhood that we all loved so much when we chose to move here.”

In a follow-up on March 4, Fox acknowledged the “unusual” effects that come with being neighbors with Mark Zuckerberg and his family.

“I recognize and understand that the nature of our residence is unique given the profile and visibility of the family,” she wrote. “I hope that as we continue to grow our relationship with you over time, you will increasingly enjoy the benefits of our proximity—e.g., enhanced safety and security, shared improvements, and increased property values.”

Fox said that the Zuckerbergs instituted “a revised parking policy late last year” that should address their concerns, and promised to double down on efforts to give advanced notice about construction, parties, and other potential disruptions.

However, Fox did not directly address the unpermitted school and other nonresidential activities happening at the compound. She acknowledged that the compound has “residential support staff” including “childcare, culinary, personal assistants, property management, and security,” but said that they have “policies in place to minimize their impact on the neighborhood.”

It’s unclear if the neighbor responded to Fox.

“You have not earned our trust”

While these conversations were happening between Fox and Zuckerberg’s neighbors, Lait and others at the city Planning Department were scrambling to find a solution for the neighbor who complained on September 11, and a few other neighbors who endorsed the complaint in September and February.

Starting in February, one of these neighbors took the lead on following up with Lait. They asked him for an update on February 11, and heard back a few days later. He didn’t have any major updates, “but after conversations with the family’s representatives, he said he was exploring whether a “subset of children” could continue to come to the school sometimes for “ancillary” uses.

“I also believe a more nuanced solution is warranted in this case,” Lait added. Ideally, such a solution would respond to the neighbors’ complaints, but allow the Zuckerbergs to “reasonably be authorized by the zoning code.”

The neighbor wasn’t thrilled. The next day, they replied and called the city’s plan “unsatisfactory.”

“The city’s ‘nuanced solution’ in dealing with this serial violator has led to the current predicament,” they said (referring to the nuanced solution Lait mentioned in his last email.)

Horrigan-Taylor, the Palo Alto spokesperson, told WIRED that Lait’s mention of a “nuanced” solution referred to “resolving, to the extent permissible by law, neighborhood impacts and otherwise permitted use established by state law and local zoning.”

“Would I, or any other homeowner, be given the courtesy of a ‘nuanced solution’ if we were in violation of city code for over four years?” they added.

“Please know that you have not earned our trust and that we will take every opportunity to hold the city accountable if your solution satisfies a single [redacted] property owner over the interests of an entire neighborhood,” they continued.

“If you somehow craft a ‘nuanced solution’ based on promises,” the neighbor said, “the city will no doubt once again simply disappear and the damage to the neighborhood will continue.”

Lait did not respond right away. The neighbor followed up on March 13, asking if he had “reconsidered” his plan to offer a “‘nuanced solution’ for resolution of these ongoing issues by a serial code violator.” They asked when the neighborhood could “expect relief from the almost decade long disruptions.”

Behind the scenes, Zuckerberg’s lawyers were fighting to make sure the school could continue to operate. In a document dated March 14, Wade argues that she believed the activities at “the Property” “represent an appropriate residential use based on established state law as well as constitutional principles.”

Wade said that “the Family” was in the process of obtaining a “Large Family Daycare” license for the property, which is legal for a cohort of 14 or fewer children all under the age of 10.

“We consistently remind our vendors, guests, etc. to minimize noise, not loiter anywhere other than within the Family properties, and to keep areas clean,” Wade added in the letter. Wade also attached an adjusted lease corresponding with the address of the illicit school, which promises that the property will be used for only one purpose. The exact purpose is redacted.

On March 25, Lait told the neighbor that the city’s June 30 deadline for the Zuckerbergs to shut down the school had not changed. However, the family’s representative said that they were pursuing a daycare license. These licenses are granted by the state, not the city of Palo Alto.

The subtext of this email was that if the state gave them a daycare licence, there wasn’t much the city could do. Horrigan-Taylor confirmed with WIRED that “state licensed large family day care homes” do not require city approval, adding that the city also “does not regulate homeschooling.”

“Thanks for this rather surprising information,” the neighbor replied about a week later. “We have repeatedly presented ideas to the family over the past 8 years with very little to show for it, so from our perspective, we need to understand the city’s willingness to act or not to act.”

Baker told WIRED that the Zuckerbergs never ended up applying for a daycare license, a claim that corresponds with California’s public registry of daycare centers. (There are only two registered daycare centers in Palo Alto, and neither belongs to the Zuckerbergs. The Zuckerbergs’ oldest child, Maxima, will also turn 10 in December and consequently age out of any daycare legally operating in California.)

Horrigan-Taylor said that a representative for the Zuckerbergs told the city that the family wanted to move the school to “another location where private schools are permitted by right.”

In a school administrator job listing posted to the Association Montessori International website in July 2022 for “BBS,” Bicken Ben head of school Berge claims that the school had four distinct locations, and that applicants must be prepared to travel six to eight weeks per year. The June 2025 job listing also says that the “year-round” school spans “across multiple campuses,” but the main location of the job is listed as Palo Alto. It’s unclear where the other sites are located.

Most of the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. However, the ones that did clearly indicated that they would not be forgetting the Bicken Ben saga, or the past decade of disruption, anytime soon.

“Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said, when reached by WIRED via landline. “Except for noise and construction debris.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

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“it’s-only-a-matter-of-time-before-people-die”:-trump-cuts-hit-food-inspections

“It’s only a matter of time before people die”: Trump cuts hit food inspections

fda, food inspections, health, syndication / /

American inspections of foreign food facilities hit historic lows this year.

Credit: Biswa1992/iStock via Getty Images

American inspections of foreign food facilities—which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the US market—have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers.

About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.

The stakes are high: Foreign products have been increasingly linked to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered disturbing lapses in facilities producing food bound for American supermarkets. In Indonesia, cookie factory workers hauled dough in soiled buckets. In China, seafood processors slid crawfish along cracked, stained conveyor belts. Investigators have reported crawling insects, dripping pipes, and fake testing data purporting to show food products were pathogen free.

In 2011, Congress—concerned about the different standards of overseas food operations—gave the FDA new authority to hold foreign food producers to the same safety standards as domestic ones. Although the agency’s small team remained unable to visit every overseas facility, inspections rose sharply after the mandate—sometimes doubling or tripling previous rates.

Now, the US is on track to have the fewest inspections on record since 2011, except during the global pandemic.

Inspections began to decline early in the administration, after 65 percent of the staff in the FDA divisions responsible for coordinating travel and budgets left or were fired in the name of government efficiency.

Investigators suddenly had to book their own flights and hotels, obtain diplomatic passports and visas, and coordinate with foreign authorities, former and current FDA staffers told ProPublica. After workers tasked with processing expenses were laid off, investigators waited as a backlog of unfulfilled reimbursements climbed to more than $1 million, a former staffer said. (Investigators are responsible for paying off their own credit cards.) Senior investigators close to retirement also took the opportunity to get out.

Played out on a large scale, this combination of firings and voluntary departures has left the agency scrambling to make up for the loss of 1 out of every 5 of its workers responsible for ensuring the safety of America’s food and drugs.

Susan Mayne, the former director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health, expressed alarm at the drop in foreign inspections.

“It’s very concerning that we are seeing these kinds of reductions,” said Mayne, who emphasized the administration’s cuts have hamstrung an agency that has long struggled to retain investigators who conduct both foreign and domestic inspections. In an attempt to maintain its numbers, the agency had been working on initiatives to elevate pay and adopt specialized training for investigators. “The plans that were in place to address staffing have now been undermined.”

The gutting of the workforce coincides with other actions the administration has taken that are poking holes in the nation’s food safety net. In March, the FDA announced it was delaying compliance with a rule to speed up the identification and removal of harmful products in the food system, to give more time for companies to follow the rules. The next month, it suspended a quality control program that ensured consistency and accuracy across its 170 pathogen and contaminant labs as a result of staffing cuts.

Then in July, the administration quietly scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, also known as FoodNet, shrinking its surveillance to just two pathogens: salmonella and a common type of E. coli. The program—a partnership between the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Agriculture, and state health departments—was responsible for the critical monitoring of eight foodborne illnesses, including infections caused by the deadly bacteria Listeria. In response to the change, a CDC spokesperson previously claimed that the program’s surveillance had been duplicative.

The administration did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about these actions.

“There are going to be things that fall through the cracks, and these things aren’t negligible,” said a current FDA investigations official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal. The same was true of other current and former agency staffers; those who still had jobs risked losing them, while former employees worried about their chances of being rehired or the security of their severance or retirement packages.

The Department of Health and Human Services refused to respond to any of ProPublica’s questions about the decrease in foreign food inspections, citing the government shutdown. “Responding to ProPublica is not considered a mission-critical activity,” said Emily Hilliard, the department’s press secretary. The FDA and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.

“Basic regulatory oversight functions have been decimated,” said Brian Ronholm, the director of food policy at Consumer Reports. “There’s an enhanced risk of more outbreaks.”

An agency already struggling

The FDA has long been one of the main protectors of the American food supply. The federal agency oversees about 80 percent of what people eat, including fruits, vegetables, processed goods, dairy products and infant formula, and most seafood and eggs. It regulates more than 220,000 farms, food plants, and distributors, inspecting facilities, testing for pathogens, tracing outbreaks, and issuing recalls.

Only 40 percent of the facilities that the FDA regulates are within the nation’s borders. While the agency examines some products at ports of entry, those reviews are often cursory; workers cannot manually inspect every import or uncover whether a foreign plant properly cleans its equipment, conducts adequate salmonella testing, or has a rat infestation. In-person facility inspections are necessary for that kind of insight.

For example, in 2023, an FDA investigator inspected a Chinese manufacturer of soy protein powder, a common additive in shakes and other beverages. While the company had previously imported its products into the United States without scrutiny, the investigator’s thorough visit found numerous violations, according to an agency report obtained through a federal records request.

Live insects crawled through the facility’s production workshop, while dead ones lay on the floor. Condensation from rust-covered pipes dripped into a water tank waiting to be mixed with raw ingredients. Just outside the plant, the investigator found processing waste and stagnant water coated with a green biofilm, attracting a swarm of bugs too numerous to count.

When the investigator reviewed the firm’s bacteria testing records, which purportedly verified the products were free of salmonella and E. coli, he discovered the company was providing fake data to “satisfy the customer specifications,” according to his inspection report.

Company officials also tried to obstruct his inspection, blocking him from entering a packaging room when he tried to photograph the pest infestation. After the three-day review, the federal agent censured the company, Pingdingshan Tianjing Plant Albumen Co. Ltd., which promised to take corrective actions. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

If investigators find a foreign food facility is unable to comply with American safety requirements or refuses to permit the FDA to inspect its establishment, the agency can block its products from entering the country.

These crucial foreign inspections are neither easy nor cheap. They typically last longer than domestic ones and cost nearly $40,000 a visit, and they can require months of logistical planning, special visas, and diplomatic approval from the host country.

In part because of these challenges, there was a time when the FDA conducted only a few hundred foreign inspections annually.

Then Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, which set firm targets for the agency: It needed to conduct more than 19,000 foreign food inspections annually by 2016 and increase the number of food field staff to no fewer than 5,000 workers.

The FDA has never fulfilled this congressional mandate. Even before the second Trump administration, the agency was inspecting less than 10 percent of its target each year.

Dr. Stephen Ostroff, a former acting commissioner of the FDA who also served as the deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said that the agency’s foreign food inspections have long been hindered by a lack of resources.

“It’s not because the agency isn’t interested in doing more overseas inspections—they are,” said Ostroff, who retired from the agency in 2019. “They simply don’t have the resources to be able to meaningfully do large numbers of overseas inspections.”

One major obstacle has been a lack of financial support. “Congressional appropriators have never provided the funding that FDA has determined it would need to do those foreign inspections,” said Mayne, who retired from the agency in 2023. Before the food safety act passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the agency would need about $1.4 billion over five years to comply with the new requirements, which included the expansion of field staff and foreign inspections. But lawmakers approved only a fraction of that amount.

As of last year, the agency had about 430 employees conducting both foreign and domestic food inspections, with only 20 investigators dedicated solely to international assignments.

With such limitations, the agency’s inspections have often been reactive instead of proactive. In 2023, for example, FDA investigators did not descend on a Mexican strawberry farm until about 20 people had been hospitalized with hepatitis A, a highly contagious infection that causes liver inflammation and, in some cases, liver failure and death.

Hepatitis A is spread through the consumption of small or even microscopic bits of feces. Farm workers can shed the virus when picking fruit, or it can be transmitted through contaminated water.

At the Mexican berry farm, federal investigators found significant safety violations, including sanitation facilities with hand-washing water that was dirty, gray, and leaking throughout the growing area; one toilet offered no ability to wash one’s hands. The FDA censured the company, citing 11 violations of American food safety regulations. According to public data, the agency did not reinspect the farm to ensure it had made corrections even as its products kept entering the United States.

In January, less than two weeks before the second Trump administration came in, a report by the Government Accountability Office rebuked the FDA for consistently falling short of its foreign food inspection targets. The oversight office, recognizing the vital importance of the FDA’s food safety mission, urged Congress to direct the agency to assess how many foreign inspections are needed to keep the country’s food supply safe.

The FDA said in response that, in 2025, it would increase staffing levels and prioritize the training and development of investigators.

Then Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Reversing a decade of gains

During the first few weeks of the new Trump administration, foreign inspections carried on as usual. But the sudden hemorrhaging of FDA workers through firings, retirements, and buyouts quickly foiled the agency’s plans to ramp up staff and inspections.

While the administration had vowed that food safety inspectors would be spared, it began to cut critical investigative support staff in March, a move that would eventually incapacitate foreign inspections, current and former FDA staffers told ProPublica.

As the agency lost support staff, their responsibilities shifted to investigators, who were quickly overwhelmed by the new burdens. Passports, visas, and travel were all delayed.

“Support staff are not just there to bide time—they have a meaningful role,” said Sandra Eskin, who served as a top USDA food safety official in the Biden administration and is now the CEO of advocacy group Stop Foodborne Illness. “It’s like a game of Jenga: If you pull out one from the middle or the bottom, the whole tower collapses.”

In recent years, the agency has typically been able to conduct about 110 foreign food inspections each month, but in March, the number of inspections dropped almost in half compared with the monthly average in the previous two years.

As specialists who handled reimbursements were also fired, some investigators waited months for repayment, which made them reluctant to take on other foreign assignments, former and current staffers said.

The cuts and growing work burden quickly collapsed morale across the investigative division, leading many senior investigative officials with decades of experience to retire.

“We already had a significant percentage of our workforce that was eligible for retirement,” said a current FDA employee in the investigations division, “so reading the writing on the wall, they decided to exit.” These departures also interrupted the development of new investigators, as some of the senior staff members who left had been tasked with training new hires, a process that can take up to two years.

“There’s been such a brain drain,” said food safety expert Jennifer McEntire, founder of consulting firm Food Safety Strategy, “when inspectors do go out and are observing things, there’s no phone-a-friend.”

Instead of addressing the shortfall, in May, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced that the agency would expand the number of unannounced foreign inspections, in which investigators show up at facilities without alerting them first. Given the limited staff and resources, several current and former staffers told ProPublica that the prospect of conducting unannounced visits was impractical and even “comical.”

“A foreign unannounced trip is like an accelerated coordination process,” said a current FDA investigations official. “If you’re going to increase the number and not increase the staff, we don’t know how to make some of that stuff work.”

By the end of July, the number of foreign food inspections conducted by the agency was nearly 30 percent lower compared with similar periods in the previous two years. The administration refused to provide ProPublica with up-to-date inspection numbers, so we relied on data from the FDA’s public inspection dashboard to conduct this analysis.

Foreign inspections are not the only tool for overseeing food from abroad. The agency has developed partnerships with counterparts in other countries to ensure comparable oversight and required importers to verify that their foreign suppliers are following American standards. However, former and current agency staffers said that these initiatives also have been impacted by the administration’s cuts and recent departures.

While the administration’s cuts were ostensibly ordered to maximize efficiency and productivity, they have had an opposite effect, several former and current FDA employees said, reversing years of progress.

“The goal is to accomplish as much and more with less resources,” said a former high-level FDA investigations official. “Less inspections translate to less regulatory oversight, and that, from a public health perspective, never benefits the public.”

Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, said the fallout is simple:

“When you take a wrecking ball to the federal government, you are going to wind up undermining important government functions that keep all of us safe, especially our food,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people die.”

How we calculated foreign food inspections

To understand how inspections of foreign food facilities have changed, we used a publicly available dashboard where the FDA publishes the results of those inspections. This database also includes inspections for manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, tobacco, biologics, and veterinary products.

Beginning in May, we downloaded the entire database weekly and tracked the number of newly added foreign food facility inspections.

The dashboard is continually updated, with data added after inspections are finalized. That typically occurs 45 to 90 days after the close of an inspection, though some reports may not be posted until the agency takes a final enforcement action. Through an analysis, we determined that few reports are added more than 90 days after an inspection date.

Our story therefore only includes inspections through July. In an accompanying chart, we show the more provisional data through September. We asked HHS for recent figures, but the department refused to share them.

We considered the possibility that the downtrend in foreign food inspections was solely due to a lag in inspections being added to the dashboard. To check this, we performed the same analysis on domestic inspections. This analysis showed that while the rate of foreign inspections had significantly decreased, domestic inspections have continued almost uninterrupted.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Why being too attractive can hurt fitness influencers

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This suggests that humility can be a powerful communication tool for influencers who might otherwise seem “out of reach.”

Why it matters

Fitfluencers depend on their appearance as a kind of credential. A sculpted physique signals expertise in health and wellness. But engagement isn’t just about how good someone looks on camera. It’s about whether followers feel they can connect with them.

This is where relatability comes in. Audiences connect with fitfluencers who feel like real, reachable versions of themselves. But extreme attractiveness does the opposite: It turns an attainable goal into an impossible ideal, and what should inspire instead alienates.

This effect aligns with classic social comparison theory. People judge themselves in relation to others. If the gap between self and fitfluencer seems too wide, comparisons become discouraging, not motivating. In other words, the more “perfect” the fitfluencer looks, the less followers believe they can realistically be like them—and the less likely they are to engage.

Social media platforms have been taking note. These days, TikTok, Snapchat, and other outlets build their appeal on candid, authentic content over polished, airbrushed imagery. In this new landscape, perfection can be a liability.

Our research shows that extreme attractiveness might grab attention but can undermine connection, the true currency of the influencer economy. For brands and creators, the takeaway is clear: Success may depend less on looking flawless and more on sounding real.

What’s next

Our findings raise new questions about how beauty shapes influence online.

For instance, gender appears to matter. In a follow-up study, highly attractive female fitness influencers faced stronger backlash than equally attractive men, perhaps reflecting a broader social tendency to judge women’s looks more harshly. Future research could explore whether similar biases apply to other visible traits, such as race or disability.

The effect may also extend beyond fitness. Industries built around appearance—fashion, beauty, or lifestyle content—could show the same pattern.

Finally, not all audiences respond alike. People new to fitness or younger users still forming their identities may be especially prone to negative comparisons with highly attractive fitfluencers. Understanding these differences could help creators and platforms foster healthier engagement online.

Justin Palmer contributed research for this article as an undergraduate.

Andrew Edelblum is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Dayton and Abby Frank is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Disruption to science will last longer than the US government shutdown

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President Donald Trump alongside Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump alongside Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

However, the full impact of the shutdown and the Trump administration’s broader assaults on science to US international competitiveness, economic security, and electoral politics could take years to materialize.

In parallel, the dramatic drop in international student enrollment, the financial squeeze facing research institutions, and research security measures to curb foreign interference spell an uncertain future for American higher education.

With neither the White House nor Congress showing signs of reaching a budget deal, Trump continues to test the limits of executive authority, reinterpreting the law—or simply ignoring it.

Earlier in October, Trump redirected unspent research funding to pay furloughed service members before they missed their Oct. 15 paycheck. Changing appropriated funds directly challenges the power vested in Congress—not the president—to control federal spending.

The White House’s promise to fire an additional 10,000 civil servants during the shutdown, its threat to withhold back pay from furloughed workers, and its push to end any programs with lapsed funding “not consistent with the President’s priorities” similarly move to broaden presidential power.

Here, the damage to science could snowball. If Trump and Vought chip enough authority away from Congress by making funding decisions or shuttering statutory agencies, the next three years will see an untold amount of impounded, rescinded, or repurposed research funds.

photo of empty science lab

The government shutdown has emptied many laboratories staffed by federal scientists. Combined with other actions by the Trump administration, more scientists could continue to lose funding.

Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The government shutdown has emptied many laboratories staffed by federal scientists. Combined with other actions by the Trump administration, more scientists could continue to lose funding. Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Science, democracy, and global competition

While technology has long served as a core pillar of national and economic security, science has only recently reemerged as a key driver of greater geopolitical and cultural change.

China’s extraordinary rise in science over the past three decades and its arrival as the United States’ chief technological competitor has upended conventional wisdom that innovation can thrive only in liberal democracies.

The White House’s efforts to centralize federal grantmaking, restrict free speech, erase public data, and expand surveillance mirror China’s successful playbook for building scientific capacity while suppressing dissent.

As the shape of the Trump administration’s vision for American science has come into focus, what remains unclear is whether, after the shutdown, it can outcompete China by following its lead.

Kenneth M. Evans is a Fellow in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Inside the marketplace for vaccine medical exemptions

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Not everything was quite as it seemed

Frontline Health Advocates provides medical exemption notes—for a fee. What exactly are they selling?

Maybe a client hears about them in the comment section of the Facebook group “Medical Exemption Accepted,” or on the r/unvaccinated forum on Reddit. Maybe it’s through an interview posted on the video-sharing platform Rumble. Or maybe it’s the targeted advertisements on Google: “We do medical exemptions.”

Cassandra Clerkin, a mother in upstate New York, first got in touch with Frontline Health Advocates near the start of the 2024–2025 school year, after hearing they had doctors who would write exemptions from school immunization requirements. One of Clerkin’s children, she said, had suffered seizures after receiving a vaccine. The family didn’t want more shots. But New York has some of the country’s strictest school immunization policies.

Perhaps Frontline could help.

Vaccine mandates have a long history in the United States, but they’ve been subject to fresh public attention—and partisan dispute—since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontline Health Advocates seemingly emerged from pandemic-era battles with a model that, experts say, appears to be unique: It bills itself as a standalone organization that supplies people across the US with medical exemptions from vaccination requirements—for a fee of $495.

On forms obtained by Undark, Frontline’s listed addresses are a storage facility in Denison, Texas, and a package store in Sedona, Arizona. The group publishes little information online about its leadership or finances, but it has quietly developed a following.

There’s little question that Frontline exemptions sometimes work, and some parents report positive experiences with the organization. But there are real questions about whether its legal strategy would hold up in court—and whether clients are confused about what, precisely, they are receiving.

In upstate New York, Clerkin said she spoke with a representative from Frontline by phone about the process. They made it sound, she said, like getting an exemption “would be pretty seamless.”

Soon after, she recalled, she received a call from a doctor named Andrew Zywiec. A week after the family issued a credit card payment of $495 to a chiropractic firm in California, the medical exemption arrived by email. “The duration of the restriction from receiving VACCINATIONS is PERMANENT,” the document stated, citing a range of health concerns, and warning that civil or criminal penalties could result if the school district ignored the request.

Clerkin submitted the document to the district.

Every state in the country has legal language on the books that seems to require certain immunizations before children can enroll in school—although in some places exemption policies are so lax that shots are effectively optional. The military also has vaccine requirements, as do some civilian workplaces, including many hospitals and nursing homes. Immigration proceedings, too, often require applicants to receive shots.

Some people may register personal objections to vaccination, or they may have medical conditions that could make receiving a shot dangerous. Workarounds exist. Most states, for example, allow parents to apply for religious or personal belief exemptions from school vaccine requirements by stating that they object to vaccination due to deeply held convictions. But those exemptions are sometimes denied, and in four states—California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York—they aren’t an option at all. (The policy in a fifth state, West Virginia, is currently in flux.)

In those states, the only way to attend school without a required shot is to receive a medical waiver. There are real reasons for some people to pursue them: They may be immunocompromised in a way that makes certain vaccines high-risk, or they may have had a bad reaction to a shot in the past. In some cases, families may earnestly believe their child cannot safely receive a vaccine, but have difficulty finding a physician who agrees, or who is willing to attest to that on an exemption.

Interest in medical exemptions tends to grow when laws tighten. In 2015, after a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened hundreds of people, California lawmakers ended the state’s personal belief exemption. Almost immediately, the medical exemption rate more than doubled, according to a 2019 paper by a team of public health researchers. The law “created a black market for medical exemptions,” one unnamed health officer told the researchers. Parents, the officer added, would go online and “get medical exemptions from physicians who were not their child’s treating physician.”

The state cracked down, prosecuting some health care providers for allegedly providing improper medical exemptions, and tightening the rules for receiving a waiver. New York, which eliminated religious exemptions in 2019, has taken similar steps; the Department of Health maintains a public list of health care providers who have been banned or suspended from using immunization registries in the state, on a webpage titled “School Vaccination Fraud Awareness.”

In New York, advocates say, state policies have made it prohibitively difficult for some families to obtain medical exemptions, regardless of the reason. “My understanding is that up until this year, again, a lot of doctors weren’t willing to write these medical exemptions,” said Chad Davenport, an attorney outside Buffalo, New York, who often represents families seeking medical exemptions. (One of his clients recently won a key ruling in a federal court case against a Long Island school district that had denied medical exemptions from at least six health care providers.)

Enter Frontline Health Advocates. The organization, Davenport said, “kind of stepped in and provided families at least an option, or a potential path.”

Two researchers who have studied vaccination exemptions in the United States said the organization appears to have a unique model: While individual doctors have sometimes gained a reputation for supplying medical exemptions, neither expert had seen a full-fledged national organization offering those services.

“They’re very blatant,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies vaccine law and policy.

The group’s founder and director is William Lionberger, a chiropractor who has been licensed to practice in California since 1981, and who once maintained a practice north of San Diego. According to public records, he has also served as a police officer in a town near Sedona. (Lionberger declined a request for an on-the-record interview, and the organization did not answer a list of questions from Undark.) Interviewers who have hosted Lionberger on their shows describe him as affiliated with America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that opposed Covid-19 vaccines and other public health measures while promoting unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

Frontline Health Advocates’ webpage was first registered in March 2022, with a name echoing that of America’s Frontline Doctors. By April of that year, the website was inviting visitors to “Get your exemption now.” In a 2023 interview, Lionberger described having a “team of medical experts” who “work with all kinds of situations,” evaluating clients both for “regular vax injuries and regular vax exemptive conditions.”

He added: “People now don’t even want their kids to get anywhere near a regular vaccine.”

The group employs a pair of distinctive legal strategies. One of these is to form itself as something called a Private Ministerial Association. Online, some groups that help set up such private associations describe them as offering special First Amendment protections. A membership application document hosted on Frontline’s website describes the group as “a private, unincorporated ministry that operates as much as possible, outside the jurisdiction of government entities, agencies, officers, agents, contractors, and other representatives, as protected by law.”

Another strategy is to invoke federal disability law. In the 2023 interview, Lionberger boasted that they drew on “the most powerful thing that you can bring against discrimination”—specifically, federal protections. A promotional video posted on the Frontline website makes a similar claim, advertising waivers “supported by the protections under US federal laws.” Undark obtained three near-identical exemptions sent to New York families in 2024. In them, Frontline argues that the client’s need for a medical exemption is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, which guarantees certain accommodations for people with disabilities and other medical needs.

In Frontline documents from 2024, the organization suggests that this federal protection supersedes state vaccination laws—offering a way around exemption policies across the country.

In New York, Clerkin had received a document combining medical language with legal details. The document bore the signatures of doctor Andrew Zywiec and an administrative law specialist and JD, Christine Pazzula, along with the seal of the United States Department of Justice.

Not everything was quite as it seemed. Frontline has no relationship with the Department of Justice. Pazzula, according to her LinkedIn profile, had received her legal degree from an unaccredited correspondence school in California, and her name does not appear in databases of attorneys admitted to the bar in New York, Texas, or Nevada, where her LinkedIn profile says she is based. (In a brief email to Undark, Pazzula said she no longer works for Frontline.)

Another parent who received a Frontline exemption in 2024 would later testify under oath that she believed Zywiec to be a physician licensed in the state of New York, but state records show that nobody named Zywiec has ever held a medical license in the state.

Multiple online testimonials about Frontline mention Zywiec. A review of public records suggests a turbulent history. Zywiec served in the Army and graduated from medical school in 2019, according to a CV. In 2020, he began a pediatrics residency at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, but the relationship soured: He ultimately sued the hospital, alleging an unsafe work environment, and filed an employment complaint that, among other concerns, said he had been “coerced into taking the so-called Covid-19 vaccine.” In court documents associated with the lawsuit, a hospital official described an employee who was “spotty and difficult.” In 2021, Zywiec’s co-residents had written a letter to their superiors alleging that he had made offensive remarks to colleagues and treated nurses poorly, also writing that he “would delay care to patients because he wanted to participate in procedures unrelated to his patients because they interested him.”

Zywiec maintains an online medical practice, where he describes himself as “an international medical doctor and board-certified indigenous medicine provider” and offers a range of services, including a $150, 30-minute, “Medical Excuse/Note” consultation that yields a “legitimate medical excuse tailored to your situation.” On X, where he has amassed a following in the tens of thousands, Zywiec regularly shares content about the dangers of vaccines.

The promotional video on Frontline’s website describes the exemptions as “signed by state-licensed physicians with full credentials.” Zywiec’s name does not appear in a national database of licensed physicians maintained by the Federation of State Medical Boards. (In a brief email, Zywiec referred interview requests to Frontline. He did not answer a list of questions from Undark, and Frontline did not respond to a question about Zywiec’s license status.)

The exemption that Zywiec had signed for Clerkin was denied. In a letter, the school district explained that New York law requires exemptions to be signed by a physician licensed in the state. Clerkin said that she was aware Zywiec was not licensed in New York, but Frontline seemed confident in their approach, and she thought it might work. That did not pan out, she said. “I feel like they talk this big thing,” Clerkin said. But, she added, “if you know that you can’t help these children, and you’re just preying on these mothers who will do anything for their children, that is evil.”

Some Frontline exemptions do get through, at least in New York. “I can certainly tell you that there have been some people, even this year, who have been able to get their Frontline Health waivers accepted,” Davenport told Undark. But, he said, courts have not tested the argument that an exemption invoking federal law will trump the state’s requirement that the exemption comes from a New York-licensed physician. He does not recommend Frontline to clients. “I basically tell them, although Frontline may technically be correct, it’s not a good legal position for you to be in,” Davenport said. “And so I always advise them to try to get a New York state waiver signed by a New York state doctor and then submit that, because that puts you in the best legal position.”

In a video on its website, Frontline warns potential clients that exemptions may be denied, noting that the group “cannot guarantee that an unknown person you are engaging with is going to abide by federal laws.” But Rita Palma, a health freedom activist on Long Island who has worked with many families seeking medical exemptions, told Undark that she thinks parents are still confused about the limitations of the waivers. “What I’m getting from parents is that Frontline Health Advocates say that federal law overrides state law,” she said. Whether or not that’s true in the case of vaccine exemptions remains unclear.

The $495 fee—extra for expedited service—is a steep price for some families. “They’ve made a nice killing in New York,” Palma said. “I hate to put it like that, but they’ve definitely gotten a lot of parents to pay them to get exemptions.”

It’s difficult to know how many waivers Frontline has sold. In online forums, people describe successes with schools. “I got lifetime medical exemptions for my children,” one parent wrote in a Facebook group in April, noting that she was not affiliated with Frontline. The group is “replete with lawyers to respond to any pushback from schools,” she added.

One mother in Connecticut told Undark that she had contacted Frontline in 2024, when her son needed a flu shot to stay in daycare. “I was looking around for a way to get an exemption,” she said. (The mother spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a professional need for privacy.) After a phone call with a licensed pediatrician in Texas, she received an exemption. The daycare, she said, accepted it. “It was a pretty smooth experience, overall,” she said.

“I was aware that it was a gamble,” the mother said; Frontline had told her the exemption might not be accepted. “But then they kind of were like, well, you know, technically, if they don’t accept it, it’s illegal because it’s protected by ADA and all that kind of thing,” she said.

The group has attracted attention from some public health officials. In Los Angeles County, a public health department website is topped by a large red banner warning that Frontline exemptions don’t work in California. In October 2024, in Connecticut, minutes from a meeting of the state’s School Nurse Advisory Council described Frontline as providing what the council believed to be “fraudulent” exemptions to families. A spokesperson for Connecticut Public Health, Brittany Schaefer, told Undark in late September that Frontline is the subject of “an active investigation.”

Undark asked three legal experts to review a copy of an exemption issued to a family in New York in September 2024 and obtained via court records. “It seems to be a fill-in-the-blank type of form,” said Barbara Hoffman, an expert in disability law at Rutgers Law School. The waiver, Hoffman believes, overstates the penalties generally levied for ADA infractions. School districts, employers, or others who received this form, she speculated, might feel like “it’s not worth the effort to reject this.”

“This looks like an official document,” she added, highlighting the seal of the Department of Justice and references to potential civil penalties. “It’s designed to intimidate somebody who doesn’t really know better, or just doesn’t want to risk any potential litigation.”

Could invoking the ADA really override state-level vaccine requirements? Reiss, the UC Law San Francisco expert, was skeptical, noting that state law has generally held in similar cases. “My expectation,” she wrote in an email, “is that that won’t hold.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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