The scale of the Western crisis is demonstrated by a time-lapse photo of dust from a storm in Colorado and smoke from wildfires in New Mexico.

The video is captivating. A sheet of brown spills down from the north like a swash on a beach as three whitish-gray geysers erupt from the New Mexico highlands in the direction of the east.

What it represents is far more destructive.

Two deadly occurrences are depicted in the time-lapse photo, which was taken by a satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The first is a wildfire outbreak that began in northern New Mexico last month and has grown in size over the last two weeks as a result of an extremely dry climate and strong winds. The second is a dust storm in Colorado brought on by strong winds.

Both serve as illustrations of the kinds of natural disasters that, as a result of climate change, are growing more severe and frequent.

The NASA Earth Observatory reported that as of Tuesday, there were seven sizable fires active in New Mexico. Four of them are visible in the satellite view. The Cerro Pelado fire, which has burned about 27,000 acres close to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the most western. The Cooks Peak fire, which has burned around 59,000 acres close to Taos, is the most northern. The Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires, which combined into a single massive, 160,000-acre conflagration around April 22; are located immediately south of that.

An area greater than Indianapolis is covered by the 380 square miles of burning land visible in the satellite image. Numerous people have had to leave their homes due to the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire, including those in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a community of 13,000 people located approximately an hour east of Santa Fe.

Although wildfires naturally occur in Western ecosystems, human activity has made them more worse. A significant factor is drought. The American Southwest has seen the driest two decades in 12 centuries, partly as a result of climate change, and there are currently no signs that the situation will soon get better.

The wind is another significant aspect that is currently stoking all of the flames in northern New Mexico. In actuality, the Hermits Peak Fire began as a planned burn, which is a fire purposefully started under controlled circumstances to remove dry vegetation and lower the risk of larger, uncontrolled fires, but blustery, uncontrollable winds caused it to spread quickly.

The Colorado dust storm, the second event visible in the NOAA image, was likewise brought on by strong winds.

The National Weather Service in Pueblo, Colorado, warned of highly hazardous driving conditions on Friday: “Visibility is lowering to near nil and winds are gusting to 50-60 m.p.h. within this blowing dust.”

The effects of these catastrophes can be extremely extensive, as shown by the satellite images. Even though the “brownout” conditions during the dust storm were largely confined, winds carried the dust particles hundreds of miles through southeast Colorado, western Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles.

Air quality is lowered by fine particulate matter, which also poses health risks, especially for those who already have heart or lung conditions. That holds true for all wildfire by products, including smoke, soot, and dust.

The sun turned red as far east as New York City last summer due to wildfires, which caused air quality alerts to be issued over practically the entire nation. Additionally, scientists discovered in January that harmful ozone and smoke levels were rising over most of the Western United States.

TikTok will no longer be allowed on government-owned smartphones under the bipartisan funding measure that was approved by both chambers of Congress on Friday, reflecting the growing worry about the well-known video-sharing app owned by China’s Byte Dance.
The plan, which still needs to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, also requires businesses considering significant mergers to pay more to file with federal antitrust regulators and requires e-commerce platforms to conduct more due diligence to help prevent the sale of counterfeit goods online.

Many of the most aggressive tech-related proposals that Congress tried to enact fell short, including antitrust legislation that would have required Apple and Google’s app stores to offer developers more payment options and a bill requiring extra safety measures for children online. Additionally, despite the fact that Congress made progress toward a compromise measure on national privacy rules this year compared to previous years, a patchwork of state laws still governs how consumer data is secured.
The absence of many antitrust laws that would have targeted its backers, who include Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta, was applauded by the center-left IT industry lobby Chamber of Progress.

Following the publication of the package’s contents earlier this week, Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich issued a statement saying, “What you don’t see in this year’s omnibus are the more contentious elements that have raised red flags on problems like content regulation.” The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, a well-known antitrust proposal, was formerly a source of concern for the group.
Net Choice, a different business organization, praised Congress for “refusing to include radical and unchecked leftist ideas to reform American antitrust law in this omnibus.”
But the legislation that the legislature passed as part of the spending package will still have an impact on technology in other ways.

TikTok Ban on Government Devices:

TikTok’s removal from government-owned devices may help competing apps like Snap’s Facebook and Instagram and Meta’s Facebook, which compete for the attention of young users. The measure makes an exception for uses related to national security, law enforcement, and research.

Since businesses domiciled in China may be forced by law to hand over user information, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern that TikTok’s ownership structure could leave U.S. user data susceptible. Although TikTok has frequently insisted that the data it collects from American users is not stored in China, this guarantee hasn’t done much to allay worries.

Through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the business has been negotiating a deal with the administration to allay concerns about national security.

“We’re sorry that Congress has tried to prohibit TikTok on government devices – a political gesture that will do nothing to enhance national security interests,” a TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement after the text of the legislation was made public. “Any security issues that have been brought up at the federal and state levels will be adequately addressed by the agreement that is currently being reviewed by CFIUS. We will continue to advise Congress on these initiatives, which were developed to further safeguard our platform in the United States and are currently being implemented under the supervision of our nation’s top national security authorities.

Deterring Online Counterfeit Sales:

The INFORM Consumers Act, which aims to prevent the online sale of fake, stolen, or hazardous goods, is also part of the expenditure package. The bill mandates that online marketplaces like Amazon quickly gather and verify data from “any high-volume third-party seller,” including bank and contact information.
Amazon initially opposed the bill last year, writing that it was “pushed by some big-box retailers” and asserting that it would penalise small companies that sell online. However, the company ultimately supported a version of the bill, arguing that it was crucial to have a federal standard rather than a patchwork of state laws. eBay and Etsy had previously backed the legislation.

In a statement, Kovacevich stated that passing the bipartisan INFORM Act would be a big triumph for customers who “deserve to know whom they’re buying from when they visit an online marketplace.” Both parties, as well as traditional retailers and online marketplaces, have backed this legislation after years of hearings and markups.
The bill “will achieve our shared goal of protecting consumers from bad actors while avoiding overly broad disclosure requirements that would harm our sellers’ privacy and restrict their ability to run their creative businesses,” according to Jeffrey Zubricki, head of Etsy’s Americas advocacy and public policy.

Higher Fees for Big Mergers:

One provision to boost money for the antitrust authorities that examine mergers was included in the end-of-year legislation, despite more comprehensive antitrust measures targeting digital platforms not being included. The Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act will increase the fee that businesses seeking major mergers must pay in order to register with the antitrust authorities as required by law. Additionally, the bill decreases the price for smaller transactions and permits the fees to be changed annually in accordance with the consumer price index.

The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division, who have experienced a significant increase in merger filings over the previous few years without commensurate budget increases, are the intended beneficiaries of the bill.
Even though it didn’t live up to antitrust supporters’ expectations, the merger filing fee bill’s inclusion was praised.
According to Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, which is supported in part by the Omidyar Network, “this is a significant turning point for the anti-monopoly campaign.” For the first time since 1976, antitrust law will be dramatically strengthened, according to Miller.

Miller continued, “Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Pharma spent huge amounts in an unprecedented campaign to prevent Congress from passing antitrust reform and damage the authority of state and federal enforcers to uphold the law — and they lost.
The inclusion of merger fees “is an essential step to reform merger costs after decades of the status quo so we can provide our antitrust enforcers with the resources they need to perform their jobs,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., the bill’s sponsor, in a statement earlier this week. It is obvious that this is only the beginning of the battle. I’ll keep working across party lines to defend consumers and improve competition.

Empowering State Ags in Antitrust Cases:

A variation of the State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act was one of the antitrust laws in the package. The law gives state attorneys general the ability to choose the district in which they file their charges and prevent them from being consolidated in another district, giving them the same authority as federal enforcers in antitrust prosecutions. According to the law, businesses defending themselves against accusations of antitrust infractions won’t be able to choose where they think the case would be heard more favorably.

This is what transpired in a case against Google for antitrust violations brought by a number of state attorneys general who claimed the corporation had an unjustified monopoly on the digital advertising market. In order to be heard alongside private antitrust accusations against the corporation in the pretrial processes, the company moved the case from Texas to New York.
Attorneys general from 52 states and territories wrote to Congress last year to support the proposal.

Openness Regarding Ransomware Attacks:

The bipartisan RANSOMWARE Act, which obliges the FTC to inform Congress about the quantity and variety of foreign ransomware or other malware complaints it receives, was also incorporated into the funding package. The FTC is also required to report to Congress any trends it notices in the amount of complaints it receives, including those from citizens, businesses, or governments of countries like China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia. Additionally, it must divulge details about the outcomes of any lawsuit it has taken in connection with these cases. The FTC can offer suggestions for new regulations to make it easier to withstand these attacks as well as for best practises that companies can use to safeguard themselves.

A study on how technology affects children:

The package also contains a version of the Children and Media Research Advancement (CAMRA) Act, which instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to perform or support studies on how media and technology affect young children, adolescents, and babies.
According to the law, these effects could include how technology like social networking, artificial intelligence, video games, or virtual reality affect people’s cognitive, mental, and physical health. Within two years of the law’s passage, the head of the National Institutes of Health is required to provide a report to Congress on its activities.

As 2021 came to a close, crypto enthusiasts were brimming with optimism. After all, it had been a banner year: Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, had crossed into the mainstream. Casual investors were talking to their friends about the relative merits of Bitcoin versus Ether. Some people even pretended to understand algorithmic stablecoins.

Fast forward a year, and the primary topics of conversation among even the most devout of the crypto faithful were more likely to be about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto co-founder of the fallen FTX empire, or whether they’d ever retrieve the coins trapped on bankrupt exchanges and lending platforms after a series of big digital-asset collapses.

“Crypto winter” is the industry term for the chill that descended on the market in 2022, and contagion was the name of the game. After the collapse of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin, major crypto players fell like dominos: Three Arrows Capital. Voyager Digital, Celsius Network, FTX, BlockFi.

The hits kept coming, but it wasn’t all downside – at least at first. The Super Bowl, one of the largest sporting events in the US, featured splashy, celebrity-filled commercials for crypto companies including Coinbase, Crypto.com and the aforementioned FTX, which was still riding high. There were crypto conferences in the Bahamas and Miami, with sessions about the future of Bitcoin by day and glitzy parties by night. And the industry’s prominence grew in Washington, as lavish political giving and an army of lobbyists signaled its increasing influence there.

Still, crypto prices kept falling. Bitcoin – the largest token by market value – plunged more than 60%, leading a rout in digital assets that erased some $2 trillion in total market value from the highs reached in November 2021. Bankman-Fried went from being described as a modern John Pierpont Morgan to being arrested and accused of multiple crimes including fraud. And NFT prices fell back to earth.

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