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Car ownership has long been integral to the American dream. But as automakers slash the production of inexpensive models to cater to customers who can afford oversized pickups and sport utility vehicles, buyers find themselves facing sticker shock at the same time they are already frustrated by the lingering effects of high inflation.

Consumer prices rose 3.3% in March, the biggest yearly increase since May 2024, while new car prices were up 12.6% from a year ago, the Labor Department reported Friday.

New vehicles now sell for an average of nearly $50,000, up 30% in six years, and average monthly payments — based on 10% down and a 6-year note — recently hit $775. Looking for something on the cheap end? The share of vehicles listing for less than $30,000 is about 13% — down from 40% five years ago, per the car review site CarGurus.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday declared unconstitutional a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for ​Congress to exercise its power to tax.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of ‌Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.

They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as ​a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create ​an apple-pie-vodka recipe.

The ban was part of a law passed during ⁠Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators ​to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

New rules approved by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could blunt the impact of a federal judge’s order freezing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee and putting many of its decisions on hold, experts say.

The changes were posted online Thursday in a new charter for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — the document that lays out how the panel is supposed to operate. The CDC is required to review and renew the charter every two years, although it rarely makes significant changes.

The charter was posted nearly a month after a Massachusetts federal judge, in a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and several other medical organizations, halted Kennedy’s remade ACIP and reversed many of the vaccine policy changes the panel had made over the last year — a move that adds further confusion over vaccine policy in the U.S. The judge said the committee’s members, many of whom are critical of vaccines, appeared to be “distinctly unqualified” to serve on the panel. The Department of Health and Human Services hasn’t yet appealed the ruling, but it has 60 days to do so.

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use, with various customized distributions that are tailored and designed for specific use cases or operations.

In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to “regain control of our digital destiny” by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn’t have control over its data and digital infrastructure.

The sign proudly announces that the roundabout near Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary was built with 500 million forints (about $1.5 million) of funds from the European Union.

The roundabout was built to service a container terminal on a new railway line that would help provide this landlocked part of central Europe with better access to the sea. Rather than having to pass through Budapest, Hungary’s capital, goods arriving from the Adriatic coast would transit quickly through the west of the country into Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and beyond.

But there’s a problem. Years after the roundabout was built, there’s still no railway. Instead, the roundabout lies unused in a field, waiting for the Hungarian government to build the railway that would make it useful.

Critics of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán say EU-funded construction projects like these are a monument to the economic system his government has built over its 16 years in office. Orbán’s electoral success, they say, has combined relentlessly demonizing the EU – painting it as a decadent, liberal, corrupting force in Hungary – while happily accepting vast amounts of money from it.

The Texas court of criminal appeals has overturned the death sentence of Clarence Curtis Jordan, a 70-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, who spent nearly 50 years on death row – much of that time without a lawyer.

Jordan was convicted in 1978 for the murder of Joe L Williams, a 40-year-old grocer in Houston, and was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, courts determined that Jordan, who has intellectual disabilities, was “incompetent”, making him ineligible for execution under constitutional standards.

In 2024, attorney Ben Wolff, director of the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs in Austin, took up Jordan’s case. In 2025, he filed a petition to the court requesting Jordan’s death sentence be overturned, arguing that the case was “a troubling, yet remediable failure of Texas criminal justice”, according to the Houston Press.

“Mr Jordan is an incompetent, brain-damaged person with an IQ that has been assessed at scores of 56 and 60. Mr Jordan has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, mental retardation and organic brain dysfunction – and was known during his trial as Father Nature. He has largely been unable to advocate or care for himself,” the filing continued.

After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, the crew's Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just after 8 p.m. ET on Friday.

The four Artemis II astronauts are back safely on Earth after flying around the moon on NASA’s first lunar mission in more than 50 years.

After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in their Orion capsule at 8:07 p.m. ET.

It was a picture-perfect splashdown under three huge parachutes, with the capsule landing upright and bobbing in the water as recovery teams raced to the scene.

An HHS spokesperson said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had concerns about the paper’s methodology. Some current or former CDC employees worry about political interference

The CDC was expected last month to publish a study showing that Covid vaccines reduced the likelihood of severe illness, but the agency’s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, delayed its release due to concerns about the methodology.

The study was scheduled to come out in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s flagship scientific publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). But Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email that Bhattacharya “expressed concerns about the observational method used in this study to calculate vaccine effectiveness.”

“It’s routine for CDC leadership to review and flag concerns about MMWR papers, especially relating to their methodology, leading up to planned publication,” Nixon said. “Dr. Bhattacharya wants to make sure that the paper uses the most appropriate methodology for such a study.”

Triumphal arch would be 250ft tall, featuring a 60ft golden Lady Liberty, at the foot of Arlington Memorial Bridge

The Trump administration on Friday released new renderings of the triumphal arch the president wants to install in Memorial Circle at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

As part of Donald Trump’s legacy-building quest during his second term in office, the so-called “Arc de Trump” would stand 250ft tall, feature a 60ft golden Lady Liberty, and include a viewing deck. The phrase “One Nation Under God” would stretch across the top of the structure, according to the latest plans from Harrison Design.

The mock-up was submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), who are next due to meet on 16 April to consider the proposal.

NBC News - The company said the suspect also made threats outside its corporate headquarters in San Francisco. San Francisco police early Friday arrested a person who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman's home and made threats outside the AI giant's San Francisco …

The annual rate of inflation hit 3.3%, led by a 21.2% increase for gasoline — the largest one-month increase at the pump since 1967.

Surging gas prices pushed inflation to its highest level in two years last month as the war with Iran sent gas prices spiraling.

The annual rate of inflation hit 3.3%, led by a 21.2% increase for gasoline — the largest one-month increase at the pump since 1967. Between February and March, overall inflation climbed 0.9%.

Gasoline prices surged to their highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic last month, while diesel and jet-fuel prices set records. Despite a two-week ceasefire announced Tuesday, those prices have yet to meaningfully decline. On Friday, AAA reported gas prices averaged $4.15 a gallon, $0.02 less than the $4.17 seen a day earlier.

Friday’s report comes amid broader concerns about the longer-term impact of the U.S. conflict with Iran.

Negotiators of 2015 deal say Tehran has seen how cutting off Hormuz strait can help it counter asymmetry of power

Former US envoys who dealt with Iran have said that the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent closure of the strait of Hormuz have given Iran new tools and resolve to resist pressure to shutter its nuclear programme.

Two senior negotiators for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama-era agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief, said the Trump administration’s war had handed Iran a coveted weapon by demonstrating its ability to cut off the strait of Hormuz, an economic chokehold that one negotiator said would help Iran “balance the asymmetry of power” with the US.

“This administration, to say it more politely, cannot unsoil the bed,” said Alan Eyre, a former diplomat who helped negotiate the JCPOA. “There’s no way to get back to the status quo ante before this war started.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45435884

"the company admitted it likely won’t be able to keep up with competing models."

"As such, the announcement is a bit of an enigma: if it can’t keep up with the competition, why release it at all? There’s a good change Meta is just trying to get its foot in the door — or a “seat at the big kid’s table,” as Wired put it. The company has struggled to stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape" "Meta’s preceding Llama open source models largely failed to catch on, with a major controversy last year finding that Meta may have faked benchmark results to make its Llama 4 model seem more capable than it actually was."

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/economy/p/1972277/bloomberg-pawn-shop-loans-spike-as-high-gas-prices-weigh-on-americans

[Bloomberg] Pawn Shop Loans Spike as High Gas Prices Weigh on Americans

Pawn shop owners across the US say they’ve seen an increase in demand for loans in the past month or so, a sign of just how punishing higher gas prices are for some Americans.

“We’re making a lot more loans,” said Tim Cassidy, the fourth generation in his family to run Cassidy’s Jewelry & Loan in Stockton, California. “They have to have that gas, they have to get to work.”

[…]

Pawn shops can offer timely signals about consumer strain that may not be clear in official statistics, which often mask the experiences of different socioeconomic groups and are typically released with a lag.

Emphasis mine.

California Assemblymember Nick Schultz is leading an effort to phase out the use of pesticides containing toxic “forever chemicals” to safeguard the nation’s produce.

Schultz (D-Burbank), introduced AB 1603 earlier this year to ban the use, sale, and manufacture of PFAS pesticides in California starting in 2035. The state is the nation’s top agricultural producer, its fruits, nuts ,and vegetables landing on plates across the US.

California has passed so many laws to get these highly persistent, harmful synthetic chemicals out of homes and the environment, Schultz said at a briefing Wednesday, he was shocked to learn that pesticides with intentionally added PFAS are regularly sprayed on the state’s crops. “I was even more startled to find out that these PFAS pesticides are present on the fruit and vegetables that we purchase at the grocery store, on the fruits and vegetables that we feed our families,” he said.

More than 2.5 million pounds of pesticides containing PFAS were sprayed on California crops between 2018 and 2023, according to an analysis of state pesticide use data by the Environmental Working Group, which is co-sponsoring Schultz’s bill with other public interest and health groups.

Social media giant Reddit has been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of a federal effort to unmask anonymous online critics of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court. The subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in the capital after ICE’s effort to identify the same user failed in a Northern California federal court. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment on the case.)

President Donald Trump's overhaul of US refugee policies has created a major shift in the number and nationalities of people admitted to the country, US government data shows.

Since October 2025, 4,499 refugees were resettled in the US, according to the Refugee Processing Center. All, except three from Afghanistan, were South African.

In the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration, which started in October 2023, 125,000 people were accepted from 85 countries.

Last year, Trump halted all refugee admissions, including for applicants from warzones, but allowed Afrikaners, a white minority group he said was persecuted, to seek resettlement. South Africa objected to his characterisation.

White House staff were warned last month not to use insider information to place bets on predictions markets.

The email was sent to staff on 24 March, a day after US President Donald Trump announced a five-day pause on his threat to attack Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure.

It referred to press reports that raised concerns over government officials using non-public information to place bets on platforms like Kalshi or Polymarket.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the BBC that "any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Ingle also said that all federal employees are subject to government ethics guidelines that prohibit the use of insider information for financial gain.

Amazon has told owners it will soon stop supporting older Kindle models - a move which has left some users outraged.

In emails from the tech giant, affected users were thanked for being a "longtime Kindle customer" but told devices released during or before 2012 would no longer receive updates from 20 May.

The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books.

Amazon said it has supported affected models for years and their active users have been offered discounts to help "transition to newer devices", but some have criticised it for making up to two million devices "obsolete".

"I have a Kindle Touch that I've had since 2013, it works great, I bought a book on it a few months ago, and suddenly it's obsolete," one X user wrote in a post tagging Amazon.