Avi Asher-Schapiro

As summer heat hits record highs, U.S. workers have staged protests over dangerous working conditions caused by extreme heat

Lawmakers in Latin America are carving out new rights for the human brain in response to advances in neurotechnology that make scanning, analyzing and selling mental data ever more possible.

Last month, the Chilean Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision ordering Emotiv, a U.S. producer of a commercial brain scanning tool, to erase the data it had collected on a former Chilean senator, Guido Girardi.

U.S. abortion rights campaigner Alison Dreith has moved house four times in the last five years - partly an attempt to dodge the threatening letters that kept arriving in her mailbox.

"The first time I got a letter I thought to myself 'how the hell did they get my address?'" said Dreith, head of strategic partnerships at the Midwest Access Coalition, a nonprofit that helps women access legal abortions.

Dozens of crypto enthusiasts streamed into co-working spaces in Mexico City this week for the global launch of Worldcoin, hoping to have their irises scanned with a biometric verification device in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Mexico City is one of 35 cities in 20 countries where Worldcoin is pushing its ambitious project to create a unique "digital passport" called World ID, which would help distinguish humans from bots online.

Facing a wave of strikes as the summer season kicked off, California hotels found a new way to fight back - apps that hire temporary workers and automatically penalize them if they join the strikers, union leaders say.

Replacements hired through the apps have seen their employee ratings cut and shifts canceled for taking to the picket lines, said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, which called July's walkouts over pay, conditions and housing costs.

California lawmaker Mialisa Bonta made her abortion public to help other women keep theirs private.

It was in 2022 that Bonta went public about terminating her own unplanned pregnancy at the age of 21, joining a growing number of influential women opting to open up in the face of increasing U.S. restrictions on abortion.

RightsCon - the annual digital rights conference hosted by advocacy group Access Now - is a rare place where officials at big tech companies mix with some of their biggest critics.

Executives and government officials share the spotlight with whistleblowers and civil society organizations that lobby for tech policies that protect the world's most vulnerable users.

Privacy laws and labor organizing offer the best chance to curb the growing power of big tech and tackle artificial intelligence's main threats, said a leading AI researcher and executive.

Current efforts to regulate AI risk being overly influenced by the tech industry itself, said Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, ahead of RightsCon, a major digital rights conference in Costa Rica this week.

Dozens of Amazon.com Inc delivery drivers in California have signed a first-of-its-kind union contract in the U.S. as fears grow over low wages, tough conditions, and workers' safety put at risk from worsening heatwaves fueled by climate change.

The 84 workers in the city of Palmdale, who organized with the Teamsters union, secured pay rises, paid holidays and safety protections in April after gaining recognition from their employer Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS), a delivery firm contracted by Amazon.

A few days after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, a year ago, taser maker Axon Enterprise floated the idea of a "non-lethal" drone for schools that could be activated by AI-powered surveillance.

It caused a stir - prompting the company's own AI ethics advisory board to quit in protest and highlighting growing unease about the ethics and effectiveness of security tools being marketed aggressively by tech firms to U.S. schools.