Day: February 27, 2020

Your mobile phone company might be on the hook for fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for selling your real-time location data.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC wants AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon to pay hundreds of millions in fines. (The report did not specify an exact amount.) The agency has already told the companies it will issue notices of liability asking for the fines. The notices are not final settlements, and the companies they’re issued to can (and likely will) fight them.

The notices appear to be the result of an FCC probe into …

Military drills delayed. Schools closed. Religious pilgrims banned. Professional soccer games played in empty stadiums.

That’s how much of the world, from Saudi Arabia to Japan to the United States, is dealing with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. As infections and deaths tick upward, governments have taken a range of measures, from mild to drastic, to try to stop the virus’s spread.

Governments are struggling to contend with what increasingly looks like a pandemic. Some of the decisions seem prudent — keeping people away from each other to minimize contagion is smart, after all — but they …

On a cool November night in the West Bank, Murad Shteiwi walked me through the streets where he had been shot.

Shteiwi is an activist leader in the town of Kufr Qaddum, a quiet village near the northern city of Nablus. Israel closed the road between Kufr Qaddum and Nablus during the second intifada in the 2000s to prevent Palestinians from getting too close to the nearby Israeli settlement Qadumim. A drive to Nablus that should take 15 minutes takes closer to 40.

On Fridays, the residents of Kufr Qaddum stage demonstrations — which they say are peaceful, though …

At 6:30 pm on Wednesday, President Donald Trump and a team of senior officials involved in coronavirus preparedness held a press conference to reassure the public that, well, everything is going fine.

Trump talked about how there’d been only 15 cases in the US so far, adding, “The threat to America is low.”

“Our containment strategy has been working,” Alex Azar, Health and Human Services secretary and chairman of the coronavirus task force, said.

But as they spoke, the Washington Post reported a new milestone in the novel coronavirus outbreak: A new person has been diagnosed with the virus …