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Good afternoon. Days after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a group of high school students is meeting with lawmakers and rallying outside the state capitol. Bump stock prices are on the rise, thanks to President Donald Trump's proposal to ban them. YouTube is also dealing with the aftermath of the shooting, after a conspiracy video about it began trending on the platform. —Josh Petri
How “Putin's Cook” fed America's appetite for destruction. In November 2013, three Russian political operatives flew from Moscow to New York. Over the next few days, the men toured Manhattan, took side trips to Washington and Detroit, drank vodka at a Brighton Beach restaurant, and had a guitar singalong with Russian emigres. It was a whirlwind, but they had no time to waste. Their boss was Yevgeny Prigozhin—a lieutenant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and one of the 13 Russians named in the indictment announced last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Prigozhin had ordered up a film depicting an impoverished and crime-ridden America, and his operatives' 2013 journey offers a glimpse into the propaganda machine he built.
Bump stocks are worth a lot more thanks to an announcement from Trump. The devices, which increase the rate of fire of a semi-automatic gun to mimic that of a fully automatic weapon, could become the subject of a ban proposed by Trump Tuesday afternoon. On Gun Broker, a firearms auction platform, bump stock prices quickly rose. One listing, with a $399.99 price tag, added “get them while you can guys.” The retail price for a comparable device is less than $200.
YouTube was criticized after promoting a video with a title that suggested a teen survivor of last week’s Florida school shooting was a paid actor—the latest sign of Google’s ongoing struggle to suppress conspiracy theories on its massive video site. The video shows David Hogg, a student who has spoken out for gun control after the attack killed 17, in a Los Angeles TV news clip from last summer. A description of the video read, "DAVID HOGG THE ACTOR...." Below the video, YouTube’s algorithm suggested viewers watch a clip with similar claims.
New Jersey Transit trains are bedeviled by bad brakes, bare wires and rotten parts. While federal regulators regularly inspect railroads, safety failures at NJ Transit led them to conduct a deeper audit in 2016. Though the agency appears to have mostly resolved its findings, the inspectors last year tested NJ Transit equipment with unprecedented frequency, uncovering persistent defects that speak to years of budget starvation and routine risks for more than 300,000 daily riders.
Nobody wants to let Google win the war for maps all over again. Autonomous cars need up-to-the-minute maps of every conceivable roadway to move, and whoever owns the most detailed and expansive versions of these maps will own an asset that could be worth billions. The result? An all-out mapping war, with dozens of contenders entering into a dizzying array of alliances and burning tens of millions of investment dollars in pursuit of a payoff that could be years away.
The rise of tech giants may be bad news for the economy. Companies like Facebook and Amazon are the tip of the iceberg of a trend toward market concentration. That's good for profits, but a new study says it also risks harming productivity and growth potential in the long run.
French Crémants should be your Champagne alternative. Made by the same method as Champagne, these wines are the latest buzz-grabbers in the expanding bubbly universe—and a wise choice if you’re looking to move on from boring prosecco. Think of them as the underdogs of the French wine world, offering sophisticated Gallic flair without the Champagne price tag.
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