In the last few years, rents across the United States have skyrocketed. According to a Congressional Research Service analysis of data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, more than 22.7 million renter households, or nearly half, were considered "cost burdened" in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

According to a March 2026 report by Zillow, "rents have increased by 36.2%" since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the typical asking rent was $1,910, according to Zillow, meaning that a household would have to earn at least $76,400 a year to be able to comfortably afford it.

Rising rents in the U.S. are a complex problem. But one factor contributing to higher costs for renters is the concentration in ownership. According to a new report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, private equity firms now own "at least 11,800 apartment buildings with almost 3 million units," or approximately 13% of apartment units in the U.S.

The number of apartments owned by private equity firms has increased dramatically in recent years. Over 1.3 million apartment units have been acquired by private equity firms since just 2021.

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The old "monkey see, monkey do" adage may rest on some neuroscientific evidence, finds a new Yale study. To examine how the primate brain facilitates cooperative behavior among individuals during social interaction, a team of researchers trained pairs of marmoset monkeys to cooperate in a task.

The challenge: If the monkeys pulled separate levers within one second of each other, they'd receive treat rewards. Success required astute mutual observation between both monkeys and the ability to read body language cues so they could gauge each other's readiness to act.

The result: They pulled it off.

How? By employing what the researchers have dubbed "the social gaze." Specifically, the monkeys cooperated by continuously gathering and interpreting social information. The animals especially focused on eye gaze and body movements to predict what each other was about to do.

The findings are published in the journal Neuron.

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Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey recently proposed expanding the use of automated enforcement technologies (AET), which use cameras and sensors to identify traffic violations. State lawmakers are working on legislation that would authorize cities and towns to use AET to ticket people for speeding and running red lights and stop signs.

Given the ACLU's years-long campaign to warn about the dangers of unregulated license plate readers (LPR), we're often asked about the potential risks of AET.

Our take: When properly regulated, AET does not pose the same threats to privacy as license-plate-reader surveillance. We're also encouraged by the smart guardrails state lawmakers are considering in legislation that would authorize Massachusetts cities and towns to expand AET.

Read on to learn more about how AET works, how it differs from the LPRs already in widespread use throughout Massachusetts, and how lawmakers ought to regulate both technologies to ensure they support community safety without violating privacy.

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Vermont is the first US state to ban the weedkilling pesticide paraquat, backed by lawmakers who cited concerns about research showing the chemical substantially increases the risk of the incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson's disease.

Phil Scott, the governor, signed the legislation on Tuesday. The new law takes effect 1 November, though it contains a provision allowing state regulators to issue special permits for paraquat use on fruit-producing tree orchards, berries and other "small fruit" crops up until 31 December 2030.

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"There are so many factors that are pointing to the correlation ... between paraquat use and Parkinson's," Michelle Bos-Lun, a state representative, said in a 13 May House committee hearing about the bill. "We have to do something to phase this out. Our job is to support farmers and to support all Vermonters. My belief is that paraquat is causing harm to both."

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Paraquat has been used in the United States since 1964 as a tool to kill broadleaf weeds and grasses. Though banned in several countries, it is one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States. Paraquat is used in growing soybeans, cotton, and corn as well as in growing grapes, pistachios, peanuts and many other crops.

The chemical is known to be extremely dangerous to anyone who ingests even a small amount, and regulators have issued warnings and placed restrictions on its use because of poisoning risks. But whether or not it causes Parkinson's disease has been a matter of fierce debate.

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On Wednesday, the White House invited leaders of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and Microsoft to the Oval Office for a signing ceremony the following afternoon. President Trump was to sign an executive order on AI and cybersecurity--the administration's most formal effort yet to establish a voluntary process for reviewing frontier models before their release. But roughly three hours before the ceremony, when some company executives were already in the air to Washington, the White House called it off.

Trump told reporters he had "postponed" the order because he "didn't like certain aspects of it," adding: "I think it gets in the way of--you know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead." Former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks called the president that morning--"unbeknownst to anybody," one official said, and "derailed it." Sacks purportedly raised concerns held by some in the AI industry that a "voluntary" review system could harden into a de facto licensing regime, slow the pace of American AI development, and hand China the lead. One source offered a blunter explanation for the president's decision: Trump "just hates regulation," and the order was "just something doomers wanted."

There's a line among public policy watchers that policy is personnel. This latest episode adds support to the idea that policy is also personal. However, it would be wrong to treat all of this as just another episode of disorganized personalism in the White House. Two additional elements of this story are worth emphasizing. The first is the substance of what was killed--about as mild an intervention as a serious government response to frontier-model risk could be. The second is the absence of any reliable process for working through frontier-AI disagreements, which matters more right now than it would in most periods: The next three years are likely the inflection point for the technology, and the United States cannot afford to govern them by impulse.

What the Order Would Have Done

Thanks to a leaked draft, we know roughly what was on the table. The order--titled "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security"--opened with the administration's now-standard line about leading the world in AI by refusing "to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation." What followed was, for the most part, not regulation of industry at all.

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In February 2026, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a war against Iran. Three months on, Americans are being crushed at the pump, paying around 50% more than before the war. In response, Trump and Gov. Phil Scott have floated suspensions of the federal and state gas taxes.

At first glance, the proposals sound logical. Why not help average working Americans who are suffering from Trump and Netanyahu's war? Take a closer look, however, and three flaws emerge.

A gas tax suspension would be too small to help Vermont workers. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. Vermont's excise tax is 12.1 cents. Take 30.5 cents off what you just paid at the pump. Are you better off than you were a year ago? Or three months ago? No, not even close.

But it would be big enough to devastate our roads and bridges. Gas tax rates have been kept below inflation for years. The federal gas tax has been held at 18.4 cents since 1993. If it had been pegged to inflation, it would be at least 33 cents by now. Our underfunded roads and bridges rely on those stagnant gas taxes. They can't afford a complete suspension without a new source of revenue.

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BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned. The plan will essentially transform school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles, taking a technology that was originally designed to issue tickets to people illegally passing stopped buses and using it for much wider and general law enforcement, likely without a warrant.

BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans. Internally, BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children.

"Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?," Michael Soyfer, an attorney from the Institute for Justice, which has various ongoing ALPR-related lawsuits, told 404 Media in a phone call.

BusPatrol says it has cameras in more than 40,000 buses across 24 states. Ordinarily, those cameras track whether a vehicle illegally passes the school bus while it has its stop signs, or stop arms, extended. BusPatrol then reviews the footage and passes it to the police, who decide if the driver violated the law. BusPatrol then sends the ticket to the driver. For cities and counties, the attraction of BusPatrol is as a revenue generator while also theoretically making cars drive more safely near children. (In April, Bloomberg Businessweek published an investigation showing in one case there was no evidence of a decline in collisions near stopped school buses, and the respective county paid BusPatrol tens of millions of dollars.)

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