By Matt Day | Bloomberg

Amazon.com is pausing all commercial drone deliveries after two of its latest models crashed in rainy weather at a testing facility.

The company said Friday it was immediately suspending drone deliveries in Texas and Arizona to fix the aircraft’s software. It’s the latest setback for a program inching toward widespread commercial service more than 11 years after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced an initiative to build drones capable of delivering products to customers in less than half an hour.

In a previously unreported December incident, two MK30 drones crashed during flights at the Pendleton, Oregon, airport Amazon uses for testing, with one catching fire on the ground. The company later discovered a software issue was to blame, related to the light rain the aircraft were flying through at the time.

The MK30 drones, cleared to commence operations by the Federal Aviation Administration in October, have been delivering packages to customers’ homes in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, a suburb near Phoenix. The six-propeller machine is designed to be lighter and quieter than its predecessor, the MK27-2, and fly in light rain.

“We’re currently in the process of making software changes to the drone and will be voluntarily pausing our commercial operations,” Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said in a statement after Bloomberg inquired about the recent crashes. Deliveries will resume once the updates are completed and approved by the FAA, Stephenson said. Employees at the drone sites, who were told of the action Friday, will continue to be paid during the pause.

“Safety underscores everything we do in Prime Air and our MK30 drone is safe and compliant,” Stephenson added. “It’s designed to safely respond to unknown events in a known way, and the overall architecture of the drone has performed as expected.”

Amazon’s drone operation, called Prime Air, aims to deliver some 500 million packages a year by the end…

By Kevin Hardy, Stateline.org

The minimum wage will increase in nearly half the states this year even as the federal wage floor remains stuck at $7.25 per hour.

In many states, the minimum wage is automatically adjusted upward as inflation rises. But voters in several states, including deeply red ones such as Alaska and Missouri, chose in November to significantly increase their minimum wages this year.

Michigan will see its minimum wage jump from $10.33 to $12.48 on Feb. 21 after the state Supreme Court concluded the legislature subverted residents when it adopted but then significantly amended voter-initiated ballot measures in 2018 to raise the minimum wage and mandate paid sick time.

Michigan’s wage floor is set to rise to $14.97 by 2028 — more than double the federal minimum wage, which has not increased since 2009. That’s the longest period without a federal increase since Congress first set a minimum wage in 1938.

A total of 30 states and the District of Columbia have set their own minimum wage higher than the federal rate. And 67 localities — including Denver; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Los Angeles — have raised their minimum wage above the state minimum, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

Currently, 10 states have a minimum wage of $15 or higher: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Washington.

Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Missouri and Nebraska are on track to reach the $15 benchmark in the coming years. Such movement in red states should prompt Republicans who control Congress and the White House to move the national wage floor, argued Richard von Glahn, the political director at the labor advocacy group Missouri Jobs with Justice.

“We should have Republican legislators looking and seeing what their own voters are telling them and say, ‘You know, maybe they’re on to something here and maybe I should follow their lead,” he said.

Von Glahn led a…

By MATT O’BRIEN

Google says its artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini will deliver up-to-date news from The Associated Press in the tech giant’s first such deal with a news publisher.

Google announced the deal in a blog post Wednesday, saying that AP “will now deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app.”

AP’s chief revenue officer, Kristin Heitmann, said it is part of a longstanding relationship with the search giant “based on working together to provide timely, accurate news and information to global audiences.”

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“We are pleased Google recognizes the value of AP’s journalism as well as our commitment to nonpartisan reporting, in the development of its generative AI products,” Heitmann said in a written statement.

Neither company has disclosed how much Google will pay AP for the content. Google declined further comment on how it would present information from AP’s journalism and whether it would credit the news organization or link back to the original articles.

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, has been Google’s answer to the demand for generative AI tools that can compose documents, generate images, help program code or perform other work.

AP has sought to diversify its revenue stream in recent years and in 2023 signed a deal with OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, enabling the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories to train future versions of its AI systems. The financial terms of that deal were also not disclosed, but it sparked an increasing number of similar partnerships between OpenAI and news organizations around the world.

At the same time, news organizations have expressed concerns about AI companies using their material without permission — or payment — and then unfairly competing with them for advertising revenue that comes when people use a search…

By Jeanne Kuang | CalMatters

California businesses are suing to halt a new state law that bars them from requiring employees to attend anti-union meetings at work.

The state’s Chamber of Commerce and California Restaurant Association filed the suit in federal court on New Year’s Eve, a day before the new law was to go into effect, seeking to block it from being enforced.

The law prohibits employers from disciplining workers who refuse to attend workplace meetings to hear about their bosses’ “opinion about religious or political matters” — including whether or not employees should unionize. Businesses could be fined $500 a day for violations.

Labor groups said these so-called captive audience meetings intimidate workers out of exercising their right to unionize; business groups argued it interferes with employers’ right to free speech, including discussing how or political developments affect their workplaces.

The law, authored by Hayward Democratic Sen. Aisha Wahab, was one of organized labor’s few victories in the 2024 legislative session. California joined about 10 other mostly Democratic states in enacting similar laws amid a surge of labor organizing in recent years. Expecting the Trump administration to be less favorable to them, unions have been counted on the state law to help preserve the more organizing-friendly environment of the past four years.

For example: the National Labor Relations Board, which has for decades generally allowed employers to hold so-called captive audience meetings, in November issued a ruling calling them illegal . But Amazon, the employer in that case, is contesting the ruling and labor experts expect the board to reverse its position under Trump. In that case, the California ban on the meetings would still apply.

But the suit challenging the law is no surprise. Businesses have already sued over similar laws in other states. Wisconsin in 2009 was one of the first states to ban such meetings; When employers filed suit the…

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices.

The proposed settlement filed Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade.

The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn’t seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, “Hey, Siri.” Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted.

The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple’s long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers — a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve “a fundamental human right.”

Apple isn’t acknowledging any wrongdoing in the settlement, which still must be approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. Lawyers in the case have proposed scheduling a Feb. 14 court hearing in Oakland to review the terms.

If the settlement is approved, tens of millions of consumers who owned iPhones and other Apple devices from Sept. 17, 2014, through the end of last year could file claims. Each consumer could receive up to $20 per Siri-equipped device covered by the settlement, although the payment could be reduced or increased, depending on the volume of claims. Only 3% to 5% of eligible consumers are expected to file claims, according to estimates in court documents.

Eligible consumers will be limited to seeking compensation on a maximum of five devices.

The settlement represents a sliver of the $705 billion in profits that Apple has pocketed since September 2014. It’s also a fraction of the…

California consumer confidence fell 1% in December after a 10% dive in November following Republican Trump’s victory.

Originally Published: December 25, 2024 at 8:08 AM PST