Day: June 9, 2024

НЬЮ-ЙОРК – Один человек был арестован в результате инцидента, в результате которого в прошлом месяце был ранен офицер полиции Нью-Йорка в Центральном парке. 18-летнего Брента […]

ВОСТОЧНЫЙ НЬЮ-ЙОРК, Бруклин  – Полиция опубликовала изображение мужчины, обвиняемого в нанесении ножевого ранения водителю автобуса MTA, когда тот находился на дежурстве в Бруклине. Инцидент произошел […]

If you were on Twitter or TikTok over the weekend, you might have seen people talking about Project 2025.

Led by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a presidential transition operation—basically a government-in-waiting if former President Donald Trump returns to office on Jan. 20, 2025. The $22 million effort does not say it is specifically intended for Trump, but that it wants a conservative as the next commander-in-chief.

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The project, published in 2023, includes a nearly 1,000-page handbook that detailed a conservative agenda for the next president. Project 2025 said on its website that the handbook is “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” Project 2025 said on its website. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. That is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

“With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government,” the project continued.

Read More: How Far Trump Would Go

Dozens of conservative organizations are behind the effort. Part of the plan includes firing federal employees that conservatives believe are preventing right-wing policies from being implemented and replacing them with their own picks, the Associated Press reported.

The handbook detailed “a top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice and putting an end to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) efforts to curb the spread of misinformation. The handbook said that “the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech.”

The agenda also included a crackdown on abortion pills, which it called “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” The handbook urged the Food and Drug Administration to reverse the approval of the pills, claiming that the approval process was “politicized” and “illegal” (more than 100 scientific studies over decades have found that both mifepristone and misoprostol, the two abortion-inducing drugs, are safe).

The Associated Press previously called the handbook’s language “apocalyptic.” The handbook encouraged the next presidential administration to “reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises,” saying that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press corps to have permanent space on the premises.

Many critics have labeled Project 2025 as “authoritarian.” The project relies on what legal scholars call the unitary executive theory, which dismisses the idea that there are three separate branches of government for checks and balances, The New York Times reported. Rather, proponents of the theory argue that Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to have total authority over the executive branch.

“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers in the U.S., previously told the Associated Press.

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An aerial view of Fresno, California.

Shunyu Fan/Getty Images

• Fresno lost over $600,000 to a phishing scam in 2020.
• Officials failed to spot red flags on a contractor invoice, a jury found.
• Mayor Jerry Dyer said the city has since improved training and updated fraud prevention procedures.

The city of Fresno lost more than $600,000 to to a phishing scam in 2020. Now, a grand jury says that city officials should have noticed the scam before it cost taxpayer dollars.

City officials discovered the fraud after realizing an invoice from a contractor working on a section of the Fresno police station was fake, according to The Fresno Bee.

The contract included the real contractor’s letterhead but an incorrect account number, according to the Bee. City officials did not publicly comment on the scam until reporting by the paper uncovered it in 2022.

A civil grand jury found on Thursday that the city failed to notice “conspicuous red flags” that should have tipped them off to the fraud, the Bee reported.

The jury found that the city’s finance department followed policies that were “understood” through training but never written, according to the Bee. Employees were also supposed to get approval from another employee for large payments, but failed to do so when making the payments that resulted in the scam, the jury said.

“Phishing” attacks are carried out by criminals who usually send an email or some other message pretending to be a company or individual asking for credit card information, passwords, or other sensitive information. The goal of the scam is to trick users into sharing personal information so the scammer can gain access to their computer, company, or finances.

One study from Harvard Business School predicted that phishing scams could “increase drastically in quality and quantity over the coming years” with AI now able to automate the “entire phishing process.”

Earlier this month, scammers targeted a tiny Idaho town, stealing more than $1 million from the town government through a similar scam. Criminals there tricked an employee into thinking that the city’s payment information for a contractor needed to be updated.

Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer — who was not in office when the scam occurred — did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider on Sunday.

He told The Bee in a statement that the city has already met many of the jury’s recommendations following the case, including implementing new training.

“I am appreciative of the Civil Grand Jury’s time and attention on such a relevant issue in our city and our nation,” the statement said. “I am also pleased with the grand jury’s confidence that internally updated procedures appear appropriate for preventing this type of fraud from happening again.”

Auto insurers may be tracking your driving.

bernardbodo/Getty

• Auto insurers have asked hesitant customers to allow them to track their driving.
• The companies have found a way around that resistance by relying on driving data from other apps.
• Insurance rates, meanwhile, have hit a 50-year high.

Auto insurers have spent years appealing to customers to allow them to track their driving.

While many surveillance-wary customers have declined, insurers found a loophole: Monitor driving using quiet deals with other apps.

Auto insurance companies can then use that data to determine how risky a driver is to the company’s bottom line, and how much those drivers should pay for insurance.

In 2024, car insurance rates soared to a 50-year high, surpassing inflation and leading to higher premiums and deductibles, Business Insider previously reported.

In a world where everything from the age of a driver to local climate events can be used to assess insurance rates, it might sound nice to have one’s risk assessed on something you can actually control.

But most families don’t realize that the phone apps they use in the background — such as Life360, MyRadar, or GasBuddy — are handing their driving data over to insurers, The New York Times reported.

The apps all rely on driving analysis technology operated by Arity, an Allstate company that collects data to form a driving score that can be sold to insurers to “help create future transportation solutions that are smarter and safer,” according to Allstate’s website, which says Arity has collected “more than a trillion miles of driving data.”

The opt-in consent on the apps is small and vague about what information is shared, the Times reported, so many customers had no idea they were sharing driving data with insurers.

“People today are generating massive amounts of data, and we believe this data has significant potential value for businesses across transportation. Consumers stand to gain big too,” Arity’s website says, adding that customers can have “greater control to receive rates based on how safely they drive.”

A spokesperson for Arity did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.