Avi Asher-Schapiro profile background image
Avi Asher-Schapiro profile image

Avi Asher-Schapiro

U.S. Tech Correspondent

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Avi Asher-Schapiro is the Tech Correspondent for Thomson Reuters Foundation based in New York City.

March 21, 2024

U.S. neurologist Sean Pauzauskie used to rely exclusively on expensive and cumbersome hospital kit to capture his patients' brainwaves and analyse problems in their electronic pathways.

But in recent years, the Colorado doctor turned to consumer headbands, commonly sold online to monitor sleep patterns or boost brain function, to capture the brain activity of some patients suffering seizures.

December 13, 2023

Last spring, after six years working as a nurse in care homes around Ohio and making between 500 to 600 dollars a week, Sadie decided she needed to try something new.

On the advice of a colleague, she downloaded Clipboard Health, an Uber-style app that allowed her to book short-term stints in elderly care facilities, for as much as twice the pay of some of the previous jobs she worked.

December 06, 2023

It should have been the smoothest of rides: rolling out robotaxis in San Francisco, America's tech capital. But there were bumps in the road and today driverless cars face mounting criticism across California even as firms plan for expansion.

In August, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow General Motors' Cruise and Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, to run round-the-clock robotaxis in San Francisco for the first time.

November 23, 2023

If the internet was once Gaza's window to the world, that window has now slammed shut and the strip's nascent tech industry has gone from incubator to grave in six weeks of all-out war.

Some of Gaza's brightest brains have died in the punishing Israeli bombardment, much of the strip's fledgling digital infrastructure has been destroyed, and hope for a better future obliterated. Many now fear that local, tech-savvy talent will also rush for the door.

October 20, 2023

After applying in vain for nearly 100 jobs through the human resources platform Workday, Derek Mobley noticed a suspicious pattern.

"I would get all these rejection emails at 2 or 3 in the morning," he told Context. "I knew it had to be automated."

October 12, 2023

False and misleading information has surged online since the militant Islamist group Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel, manipulating world opinion, fomenting local confusion and bolstering calls for retribution, experts say.

Israel has since rained down retaliatory strikes on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, leaving 180,000 homeless and 2.3 million without electricity or water.

October 04, 2023

Asma Ibrahim, an unemployed woman who lives in a cramped shack in northern Lebanon, has no idea why she was refused a welfare benefit for the country's poorest people - money that would prevent her five children from going to bed hungry.

"People in need are not receiving anything," she said by phone from the deprived Akkar region, adding that she had been calling a government hotline twice a week to ask why she was turned down after applying more than a year ago.

September 13, 2023

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

September 12, 2023

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.

August 01, 2023

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.