For the ongoing federal layoffs and reversals, a tracker from CNN:

CNN is tracking the evolving situation at federal offices in Washington and across the United States. Earlier this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs walked back its plans to conduct mass layoffs, so it is no longer included in the tracker below. This page will be updated as new reporting becomes available.

Sourced from a wide collection of outlets and reporting, the tracker only includes firings and not administrative leave or those who took buyouts at the fork in the road.

In soccer, a free kick can be awarded after an opponent commits a foul. The ball is still and a wall of defenders stand in between the goal and the kicker to make scoring a greater challenge. The Washington Post breaks down the differing strategies of star players Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Often, all attention fixates on a lone player standing over the ball. Few have mastered this moment — of striking a free kick with perfect execution — like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

But while the outcome is often the same — a goal of spectacular dimension — the approach, technique and execution differ substantially.

My soccer knowledge is sparse, so I learned something new. I like the flow from overview, to player, to kick, followed by video footage. It lets you appreciate each player’s intention and years of practice behind a quick action.

For ProPublica, William Turton, Christopher Bing, and Avi Asher-Schapiro report on a blueprint for a system that provides home addresses to the Department of Homeland Security.

Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.

This of course is just the beginning.

I think that most people assume that the single-entity government already has access to all of our data, like how certain social media companies know a little too much about us.

But there are barriers in between the multiple entities of government to protect individual privacy and freedoms. This is on purpose. This IRS system takes away a barrier and sets precedent for future systems of a single-entity government to surveil citizens.

Read enough children’s books with anthropomorphic animals and you might notice that some animals tend towards a gender like a male frog or a female cat. For the Pudding, Melanie Walsh, with Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee, and Jan Diehm, found out how often and why with an analysis of 300 books and a reader experiment.

To find picture books that specifically feature anthropomorphic animals, we selected any book that had “animals” as one of its top Goodreads tags; any book that was tagged as “animals” in the Children’s Book Database; or any book that GPT-4o identified as featuring animals (after being prompted with its title, author, and description). We then manually evaluated every book and every representation of animal characters (for more on how we determined “anthropomorphic” animals, see below). We excluded anthologies and collections, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The story is framed into acts and an interactive to see all the books in the dataset, which is available on GitHub.

In Jacksonville, Florida, police arrested a man because AI facial recognition classified his face as a close match to a suspect’s. The police had the wrong person.

Even though charges were dropped, it’s easy to see how a flawed probabilistic tool used by those who don’t fully understand uncertainty leads to poor results. What happens when law enforcement’s mistake is less obvious and the consequences grow more serious?
Read More

Vaccination rates are still relatively high, but they need to be for herd immunity. For ProPublica, Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, with graphics by Lucas Waldron, highlight states that fell below the recommended threshold for measles over the past decade.

At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.

“There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates,” said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah.”

A state grid map with difference charts show decreasing rates. There is a thin margin for error.

The Washington Post reconstructed the flooding at Camp Mystic, from the perspectives of geography, rain downpour, counselors and campers trying to reach safety, and parents looking for information. This was tough to read through.

Risk estimates change by statistical model and what that model accounts for. The above map, by Connie Hanzhang Jin for NPR, shows FEMA estimates (orange and yellow lines) against estimates from risk modeling company First Street (blue gradient fill) for the flooded area at Camp Mystic. More buildings fall into range for the latter.

Unfortunately, the discrepancy between FEMA estimates and more updated models that consider rainfall and flash flooding is not new.