Wednesday, September 02, 2026
Do D.E.I. Bike Paths Exist? The Trump Administration Says Yes.
Do D.E.I. Bike Paths Exist? The Trump Administration Says Yes.
“The Trump administration revoked grants for “D.E.I. bike lanes,” attempted removals near the White House and National Mall, and urged funding restrictions. A judge blocked demolition, while Nashville and Fairfield grants were frozen or canceled.
The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of “that dork on a bike.”
Four years ago, after Joe Biden fell from a bike, Donald Trump made a pledgeto the American people.
“I will never, ever ride a bicycle,” he declared.
The joke landed because Mr. Trump is known to be more of a limo-and-golf-cart sort of guy. But more recently, his administration has begun acting on its deep aversion to cycling, revoking federal grants for what it calls “D.E.I. bike lanes.”
In a high-profile move earlier this year, the administration even tried to remove a bike lane near the White House.
Sean Duffy, Mr. Trump’s transportation secretary, has argued that when bike lanes cut into space for cars and trucks, the result is more congestion, “longer travel times and wasted fuel.”
But Mr. Duffy and his colleagues have also deployed rhetoric that suggests the bicycle is hopelessly lefty, belonging in the same category as green-haired baristas, Rosie O’Donnell and yard signs professing that love is love.
Last month, the Transportation Department told National Public Radio that liberals believe “that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”
The attacks are depressing to longtime cycling advocates like Bill Nesper, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “There is something there that they’re playing on, which is ‘Look at that dork on a bike,’” Mr. Nesper said.
Whether this strategy pays off politically remains to be seen. A 2025 YouGov poll showed that 76 percent of Americans supported bike lanes in and around where they live, including 66 percent of Republicans. But it also showed that only a third of Americans are pining for more.
As it is, many American communities, regardless of politics, have embraced bike-friendly policies, on the grounds that bikes are good for the planet and for the body, and address congestion by taking cars off the road. Often inspired by bike-friendly European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, the moves are a major shift in the way American communities approach transportation planning.
There are now 4,400 directional miles of protected bike lanes today, up from 108 directional miles in 2000, according to PeopleForBikes, an industry trade association and advocacy group. (Directional miles are miles that can be traveled in one direction; with a two-way bike lane one mile long counting as two directional miles.)
The group notes that more than 25,000 miles of rail beds have been converted to bike-friendly trails, double what it was two decades ago.
But the Trump administration is trying to put the brakes on the trend.
In Nashville, the future of an ambitious series of bike lanes, called the East Nashville Spokes project, is up in the air after the Trump administration froze a $9.3 million grant, prompting a court battle that remains unresolved.
In Washington this year, the administration announced it was tearing out the 15th Street bike lane as “part of the president’s initiative to revitalize” the city. But in a 61-page ruling in April, Judge Amy Berman Jackson temporarily blocked the demolition plan citing an “absence of reasoned decision-making” in justifying the removal.
In Fairfield, Ala., a majority-Black city of 9,500 people southwest of Birmingham, the administration canceled an $11.7 million grant for a bike and walking path, originally awarded under the Biden administration as part of a “sustainability and equity” program. Advocates had said that 17 percent of the families in the area do not have access to a car.
In an interview, the city’s mayor Herman Carnes, Jr. said he did not know why the grant had been canceled. “It got ripped away from us,” he said.
Bike lanes have long enjoyed bipartisan support. In 1967, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican governor of California, signed a law that for the first time allowed city governments to create bicycle lanes.
Ray LaHood, a Republican who served as transportation secretary under President Barack Obama, avidly supported federal money for bike projects. He once wrote of “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of nonmotorized.”
But as the bike-lane revolution picked up steam — along with calls to make cities more walkable — some conservatives feared that it amounted to a series of intrusive social engineering schemes.
In a few conservative circles, city planning even became falsely linked to dark conspiracies about Agenda 21, a nonbinding United Nations resolution encouraging sustainable development, and the voguish concept of the “15-minute city,” which said that people should be able to walk or bike to amenities like grocery stores in 15 minutes or so.
It was not long before the bicycle itself was portrayed as a political cause supported by left-wing dingbats. In 2020, Matt Walsh, the right-wing pundit, painted cyclists as childish hobbyists.
“If you want to play with your bike, go to a park, or a bike trail in the woods, or maybe daddy can take you down to the tennis court near the playground so you can ride your Big Wheel,” he said.
Last year, President Trump poked fun of Pete Buttigieg, the Biden-era transportation secretary, for riding a bike, tossing in a gratuitous reminder that Mr. Buttigieg is gay.
“Buttigieg, who has no clue, you know, he drives to work on his bicycle, in all fairness, with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship,” he said.
At a conference last year, Mr. Duffy suggested that the idea of European bike-friendly cities was unsuitable for Americans. “We’re not Europe,” he said, citing vehicle sizes. “I don’t think we should necessarily buy into the European model.”
This summer, Mr. Duffy pushed for more change. On July 22, Mr. Duffy wrote a letter to a group of senators, urging them to restrict future funding for bike lanes and support removing ones “that contribute to congestion.”
To Mr. Nesper, the letter represented something “much worse” than canceling or stalling individual grants. Mr. Duffy, he said, was now calling for ripping out existing lanes and advocating for “a systematic change in transportation law to restrict the funding of bike lanes overall.”
Hostility to bike lanes, in fact, can be found in surprising places.
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu, a progressive Democrat, had put in miles of lanes, but eventually slowed down because of complaints.
Her administration is currently navigating opposition in some traditionally Black neighborhoods to a plan to redesign Blue Hill Avenue, a major thoroughfare. Much of the criticism has been directed at a proposal for a center-running bus lane, which some say will create new traffic problems.
But a plan to add bike lanes has also rankled critics like Reggie Stewart, a real estate agent and climate and environmental justice chair of the Boston NAACP.
“You’re taking away parking and adding to an already congested corridor,” he said.
Mr. Stewart and others are now asking the Trump administration to rescind an $80 million grant to fund the project.
“Ironically, in my climate and environmental justice work, we’re opposing a lot of what Trump is for,” Mr. Stewart said.
But in this case, he said, the president might be an ally.
“Mayor Wu,” Mr. Stewart said, “falls into that category of liberals who think they know best without having real conversations with the people affected.”
Marcela Dwork, a spokeswoman for the city of Boston, said officials would continue “to work with community members” on the design proposal, with a number of meetings scheduled for September.
Richard Fausset is a national correspondent for The Times who writes about the way Americans live in a polarized country.“
Tuesday, September 01, 2026
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Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims - The New York Times
Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims
"The social media giant settled with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, and agreed to make major changes to its products over claims its platforms endangered children.
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Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms.
In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues,striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.
The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. The states filed their agreement with Meta on Wednesday morning in that court, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to approve it.
Meta still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals, some of which are scheduled for trial in the coming months.
The settlement could signal an inflection point for a social media industry that has largely escaped regulatory scrutiny over the harms its products have caused children. The settlement amount is one of the highest ever paid by a tech company to states.
Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
“Meta wouldn’t settle unless it sees the writing on the wall and feels really exposed,” said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford University.
Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, said the company’s agreement to monetary relief and product changes “is very meaningful and well beyond what any court has ordered or is likely to order.”
“The focus of this case was to protect our kids: stopping notifications and alerts at night and when they are in school, encouraging them to take breaks from social media, protecting them against harmful features, implementing age-assurance technology and more,” Mr. Weiser said in a statement.
The agreement may also play into other legal claims against Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snap, the owner of Snapchat. States, schools and teenagers have filed thousands of lawsuits against the tech companies, accusing them of targeting young users with product features that are as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos, drawing inspiration in part from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.
The tech companies have argued that they have added safety features for children and are protected by a law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields companies from liability for what their users post.
Some of the lawsuits were grouped into a series of bellwether personal injury cases brought by individual teenagers in California state court; some are scheduled for trial in October.
A separate group of federal cases is being heard in Oakland, of which some states were a part. School districts have also brought cases accusing the companies of public nuisance for the costs that schools have shouldered from social media addiction.
Meta has faced an uphill battle with some of these lawsuits. In March, Meta and YouTube lost their first personal injury case, paying $6 million in damages. Separately, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta this month to pay penalties totaling nearly $1 billion in a case brought by the state attorney general for violations of consumer protection laws.
The company’s decision to settle acknowledges its vulnerability as the trials have shaped a negative narrative about its treatment of young users. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has had to defend himself against evidence that he knew of harms caused to children. He had been expected to testify again at the trial in Oakland.
Last month, Meta said that it had spent about $2 billion in the second quarter alone to handle its legal challenges.
The agreement also ends a trial brought by Tennessee’s state attorney general against Meta for consumer protection violations.
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the “like” button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls.
“This is a monumental public health victory for young people in D.C. and across the country, and the safety features Meta is required to install will fundamentally and immediately change how young people use Instagram and Facebook," Brian Schwalb, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, said in a statement.
Meta was the first social media company to settle with the states, he added. But it “will not be the last,” he said.
A settlement with dozens of states would indicate that for Meta, “the cost of maintaining infinite scroll, auto play, filters, etc., is just too big a risk for the company,” said Stuart Benjamin, a professor at Duke School of Law and the co-director of Duke’s Center for Innovation Policy. “And they have concluded that they’ve just got to end that risk one way or another.”
Countries around the world are limiting social media use by young people. Last year, Australia became the first nation to bar children under 16 from using social media. Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and others have implemented or are considering similar rules. The European Union last month took the first step toward its own ban, which would be the largest in the world.
In the United States, lawmakers have reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would strengthen privacy for minors and allow them to opt out of algorithmic features that have been linked to compulsive use of social media. Multiple states have also passed laws aimed at limiting harm to children from social media.
Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco."
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Monday, August 24, 2026
A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I.
A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I.
“A Russian drone with an Nvidia module autonomously targeted a gas station in Zaporizhzhia on July 6, killing Tetiana Bubynets and two others. Experts and commanders attribute the strike to experimental artificial intelligence selecting targets without human control.
An attack by what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian drone with an Nvidia chip presages a dystopian future of weaponry untethered to humans.
The young woman ran for her life, but it was too late.
A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others.
They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have died in Russian airstrikes, but the circumstances of their deaths came with an ominous twist. The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and the forensic team that examined wreckage from the deadly strike and others in the city.
The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said.
It is a development long watched for in the war in Ukraine, presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.
“This is a risk for the whole world,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of air defenses in Zaporizhzhia. “In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”
Analysis of debris from this attack and others in Zaporizhzhia found that the drones had onboard minicomputers, sold commercially by Nvidia, that made their targeting decisions, the experts and military officials said. Nvidia produces a majority of the chips powering the world’s most advanced A.I. systems.
The presence of Nvidia modules and a lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to surmise that the weapons were guided by an autonomous A.I. system, which was confirmed on further investigation.
Autonomous A.I. systems can be trained on thousands of images to recognize categories like “river,” “military truck” or “person.” Self-targeting drones use their cameras to hunt for these things with greater precision than a human pilot can provide. But opponents of such weapons argue that, without human intervention, drones may be more prone to mistakes or violations of the laws of war, such as by failing to distinguish innocent civilians from combatants.
The use of self-targeting A.I. in the gas station attack, on July 6, would be the first documented case in which civilian deaths were caused by a Russian drone outfitted with such a system, said Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She added that the Nvidia module “is the best proof” that Russia was experimenting with autonomous A.I.
While an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has written on social media that Russia was testing self-targeting A.I. systems, the fatalities have not been previously reported, nor have the details of the Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module that was used.
Both Russia and Ukraine were already using A.I. in multiple drone models before the fully autonomous drones emerged. In those earlier models, A.I. is used only for what is known as the “last mile” — the final stage of the attack, after a remote human pilot has selected the target. Fully autonomous A.I. removes humans from the final target selection.
The Nvidia chip in the Zaporizhzhia attack was not encrypted, Ukrainian officials said, so they could see the terrain images that had been uploaded to the module, enabling the drone to track visual landmarks and stay on course. They were also able to examine coding, they said, that revealed what types of targets the drone had been trained to recognize and attack, like propane tanks.
Earlier drone models are generally either piloted by human operators, through radio transmissions or fiber-optic cables, or they are preprogrammed with coordinates. As drones have taken over the battlefield in Ukraine, their pilots have become prime targets.
An autonomous A.I.-guided drone, by contrast, requires no human pilots and can be more accurate than a munition programmed to hit coordinates.
Local air defense officials say that Russia has been aiming for civilian objects like pumps or propane tanks at gas stations in trying out autonomous drones in Zaporizhzhia, along with military recruitment centers. It is not clear why these targets were chosen for the tests.
Vadym Kushnikov, a drone expert at the Kharkiv Aviation Institute in Ukraine, said the drone that killed the three civilians was “a preprogrammed tool trained in virtual reality to track specific objects.”
While traditional software follows step-by-step rules written by a person, an A.I. system derives its own rules by finding patterns across enormous amounts of data, a process called machine learning. That allows it to manage unanticipated situations. It also means no one can fully predict what it might do.
Rights groups and the International Red Cross vehemently oppose the use of A.I. weapons without humans in the loop. Such groups say that autonomous systems essentially leave robots to interpret international law in determining legitimate targets in war.
But some exports argue that, in the future, weapons should in fact be required to have A.I. systems. These weapons are safer, the argument goes, because they are able to make decisions before striking, even if not always perfectly, unlike unguided aerial bombs or ordinary artillery shells that just fall without seeing what they will hit.
The weapon in the fatal strike was flying in a group of about half a dozen drones, according to the regional military governor, the city’s air defense commander and an air defense team on duty that day. None were emitting radio signals, and they had other characteristics associated with Russia’s autonomous A.I. tests, including being launched in a wave, the officials said.
While some of the A.I.-guided drones tested by Russia have detonated on impact, others have not and remained intact, Ukrainian officials said. They showed debris from two such drones to reporters for The New York Times. The Times photographed the Nvidia computer module inside the drones and sent the images to the company.
Nvidia confirmed that the photos showed a Jetson Orin minicomputer. Such modules, which cost only a few hundred dollars, have been found on several types of Russian weapons.
In a statement, the company said that the minicomputer was a consumer-grade product “sold to students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” Nvidia sells the computer in many countries but not in Russia. It is, though, widely available through resellers, the statement said.
Ukraine, too, has tested self-targeting A.I. systems. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister who was recently ousted, said in an interview with The Timeslate last month that Ukraine tested an entirely autonomous A.I. system in Russian-occupied Crimea over the past several months. Mr. Fedorov said that the devices targeted fuel storage sites and military equipment and that no civilians had been killed.
While the drones in the Zaporizhzhia attack had no antennas to send back data on the tests, Russian forces often fly reconnaissance drones that can record strikes. The city is also believed to harbor Russian spies who report battlefield damage assessments.
The absence of an antenna would not by itself prove that a drone was self-targeting. It could be preprogrammed to fly a route, with computer algorithms like those used for decades in auto-piloting systems for aircraft. But that drone would not need an Nvidia chip.
Russia began test flights of A.I.-guided Molniya drones — a mass-produced fixed-wing model — in May, and started testing self-targeting systems in the V2U, another fixed-wing drone, several months before that, Ukrainian air defense experts said. Some of the V2U tests were only for “last mile” targeting.
In interviews, some residents of Zaporizhzhia, which lies just nine miles from the front, said that the thought of devices buzzing over the city, making their own decisions to kill, brought chills. But Ukrainian cities have been so heavily bombarded for years that life had already been reshaped by less sophisticated drones.
Interceptor drones, piloted (for now) by men and women who are local heroes, are one answer to the drone threat. Anti-drone nets are another, covering about 240 miles of roads in and around Zaporizhzhia.
Another defensive measure is camouflage. Plastic sheeting, for example, is propped at odd angles around propane tanks at gas stations, in an effort to fool A.I. image recognition systems.
Moments before the exploding drone barreled toward the gas station on July 6, a group of people huddled by the wall of a nearby apartment building for safety, having already heard blasts as the drones came in waves.
Oksana Ishenko, a station attendant, stood beside Ms. Bubynets. “She was crying from fear,” Ms. Ishenko recalled.
Then some in the group started to shout, “A plane! A plane!” Ms. Ishenko said. A drone was heading their way. Ms. Bubynets and several others bolted, fanning out in a parking lot. After the drone failed to make its way around the apartment building, it detonated before reaching its target.
Ms. Bubynets, who had been studying accounting at Zaporizhzhia National University, lay on the pavement, unmoving, with blood flowing from her nose. She was declared dead at a hospital, said Tetiana Melikhova, one of her professors. The two others killed, Oleksiy Svirin, 41, and Roman Karpiy, 48, died later of their wounds.
“They are training the technology,” Colonel Minaiev, the city’s air defense commander, said of the Russians. A.I. is good but not yet perfect, he added. “They are looking for mistakes and will fix them.”
Evelina Riabenko, Stanislav Kozliuk and Paul Mozur contributed reporting.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.“
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