The bill would ban the use of facial recognition algorithms in real time, when the body cameras are rolling, and in subsequent forensic analysis of footage.

Separately, the Justice Department has opened an antitrust probe into the deal, in which four automakers reached a pact on compromise tailpipe emissions with California, defying federal regulators, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"It was promoted as this extravagant development, but in many ways it failed spectacularly," says Chicago-based photographer Noritaka Minami, who first learned about California City while attending graduate school at UC Irvine.

That deal represents the most clear-cut example of auto industry unease with the Trump administration’s August 2018 proposal to dramatically ease fuel economy and vehicle greenhouse gas emissions standards drafted by the Obama administration, which sought to boost average fuel efficiency to roughly 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.The Trump administration questions the science around climate change, and wants to ditch the Obama-era rules.

In a joint statement, the automakers said the pact with California “will provide our companies much-needed regulatory certainty by allowing us to meet both federal and state requirements with a single national fleet, avoiding a patchwork of regulations while continuing to ensure meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”.

White House spokesman Judd Deere, responding to the letter on Friday, said the California Air Resource Board “failed to put forward a productive alternative, and we are moving forward to finalize a rule with the goal of promoting safer, cleaner, and more affordable vehicles.”.

“The NY Privacy Act, in its current form, is unworkable for businesses that want to comply and fails to provide New York residents meaningful control over how their data is collected, used, and protected,” said John Olsen, a director for the Internet Association, which represents the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

The California Assembly passed legislation on Wednesday that could have a profound effect on hundreds of thousands of workers by requiring companies like Uber , Postmates, Amazon Flex, and others to recognize much of their workforce as employees entitled to labor protections and benefits.

Most of those multiday deluges are the product of atmospheric rivers, high-altitude streams of air that originate near the equator and are packed with water vapor.

“If you’re unlicensed, you’re probably not paying taxes, you’re certainly not paying licensing fees, and you’re not participating in all the regulations and oversight the state has in place.” The number of businesses listed on Weedmaps fluctuates as shops pop up and shut down, but by the beginning of August 2018, the site was listing about 2,000 total marijuana dispensaries and delivery services in Southern California.

Despite a flurry of stories in the media about people losing their insurance and leaving the area, Mark Sektnan, president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, told me, “We’re not seeing a trend.” Insurance prices are increasing in some places, but California doesn’t allow insurers to jack up premiums based on recent disasters, and nearly everyone can find home insurance if they want it, he said.

Meanwhile, search results within the European Union can differ from those elsewhere due to its right to be forgotten law, and web publishers around the world are still grappling with the effect of the sweeping EU privacy regulations that took effect this year.A series of laws passed in California this year raise a new possibility: that individual US states will splinter off into their own versions of the internet.

I was part of a small group of volunteers who came together to start a nonprofit organization, Safecast, to design, build, and deploy Geiger counters and a website that would eventually make more than 100 million measurements of radiation levels available to the public.We started in Japan, of course, but eventually people around the world joined the movement, creating an open global data set.

“Once it starts raining hard on a burn area, the things can get generated really fast, like five minutes,” says Kean.The debris flow can carry boulders and trees along with mud, making it more dangerous than a regular flood or a dry landslide.

The Camp Fire comes just a year after the second most destructive blaze, the Tubbs Fire, struck the city of Santa Rosa to the south of Paradise, leveling 5,500 structures and killing 22.LEARN MOREThe WIRED Guide to Climate Change“How could this happen?” says Stephen Pyne, a fire researcher at Arizona State University.

"If you use intensity as a proxy for pollution—that is, if you assume stronger fires will produce more emissions like smoke—then by stint of that, yes, there ought to be more smoke," says atmospheric composition scientist Mark Parrington.A senior researcher at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, Parrington tracks wildfires around the world to better understand their effect on pollution and public health.

That’s why all these fires popped up on either end of the state nearly simultaneously: They share a common origin in the jet stream.https://twitter.com/RobElvington/status/1061385865857949696When the air masses hit the Sierra Nevada Mountains in eastern California, they behave like water flowing over a rock in a stream.

“We have a weather event, in this case a downslope windstorm, where, as opposed to the normal westerly winds, we get easterly winds that are cascading off the crest of the Sierra Nevada,” says Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno.A windstorm barreling from the east just set the stage for this week's burning disaster.

“We need to be thinking about exponential changes.”Getting the U.S. back on boardThe American politicians at the conference, who typically came from liberal cities and blue states like New York and Washington, had a more immediate concern: Trying to persuade the rest of the world that the United States hasn’t completely abandoned the fight, despite the fact that President Trump has vowed to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

California is set to launch a satellite to track greenhouse gases, as former US Secretary of State John Kerry and island nation leaders warned that the world is far off course to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures.

The conference, which is hosting thousands of leaders, climate activists and business representatives, has already seen several other major commitments to cut carbon emissions. Mr Trump announced last year that he would be walking away from the Paris agreement, which commits nations to set ambitious plans to cut emissions.

Not only does California need to make up some of the climate slack created by the Trump administration, but the state is now ahead of its targets, with 29% of electricity last year generated from renewables and over 50% from zero-carbon sources (including nuclear and hydroelectric power).

At 1.9 degrees F higher than the 20th century average, these sizzling temperatures rendered the month the 11th hottest July on record for the U.S., NOAA scientists reported at a press briefing.

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite passed over California on July 27 and July 29, observing the Carr Fire on July 27 and the Ferguson Fire on July 29.

NASA's Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station(ECOSTRESS) has captured new imagery of three wildfires burning in California and Nevada -- the first image of its kind to be taken by the agency's newest Earth-observing mission.

New images made with data acquired by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite show the high concentrations of carbon monoxide emitted from the fires (in orange/red) between July 29 and August 8.

California’s summer of deadly wildfires and dangerous heatwaves will soon be the new normal if nothing is done to stop climate change, a report released on Monday warns.

The bill, which will need to be approved by the state senate and Governor Jerry Brown, will require a complete shift to clean energy such as solar and wind by 2045.

Oh, and as Nathanel Johnson points out at Grist, environmentalists and activists have long argued over the distinction between "renewable," which is primarily solar and wind, and "clean," which includes other carbon-neutral-but-still-environmentally-problematic sources of juice like dams and nuclear power.The deeper problem is that merely farming the electrons isn’t enough.