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At least 600 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are receiving permanent termination notices in the wake of a recent court decision that protected some CDC employees from layoffs but not others.The notices went out this week and many people have not yet received them, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 2,000 dues-paying members at CDC.The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday did not offer details on the layoffs and referred an AP reporter to a March statement that said restructuring and downsizing were intended to make health agencies more responsive and efficient.AFGE officials said they are aware of at least 600 CDC employees being cut.But “due to a staggering lack of transparency from HHS,” the union hasn’t received formal notices of who is being laid off,” the federation said in a statement on Wednesday.The permanent cuts include about 100 people who worked in violence prevention. Some employees noted those cuts come less than two weeks after a man fired at least 180 bullets into the CDC’s campus and killed a police officer.“The irony is devastating: The very experts trained to understand, interrupt and prevent this kind of violence were among those whose jobs were eliminated,” some of the affected employees wrote in a blog post last week.On April 1, the HHS officials sent layoff notices to thousands of employees at the CDC and other federal health agencies, part of a sweeping overhaul designed to vastly shrink the agencies responsible for protecting and promoting Americans’ health.Many have been on administrative leave since then paid but not allowed to work as lawsuits played out.A federal judge in Rhode Island last week issued a preliminary ruling that protected employees in several parts of the CDC, including groups dealing with smoking, reproductive health, environmental health, workplace safety, birth defects and sexually transmitted diseases.But the ruling did not protect other CDC employees, and layoffs are being finalized across other parts of the agency, including in the freedom of information office. The terminations were effective as of Monday, employees were told.Affected projects included work to prevent rape, child abuse and teen dating violence. The laid-off staff included people who have helped other countries to track violence against children an effort that helped give rise to an international conference in November at which countries talked about setting violence-reduction goals.“There are nationally and internationally recognized experts that will be impossible to replace,” said Tom Simon, the retired senior director for scientific programs at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Mike Stobbe, AP Medical Writer
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E-Commerce
A Ukrainian citizen man suspected to be one of the coordinators of the undersea explosions in 2022 that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany has been arrested, German prosecutors said Thursday.The suspect, identified only as Serhii K. in line with German privacy rules, was arrested overnight by officers from a police station in Misano Adriatrico, near the Italian city of Rimini, federal prosecutors said.Explosions on Sept. 26, 2022, damaged the pipelines, which were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The damage added to tensions over the war in Ukraine as European countries moved to wean themselves off Russian energy sources, following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Investigators have been largely tightlipped on their investigation, but said two years ago they found traces of undersea explosives in samples taken from a yacht that was searched as part of the probe.In a statement Thursday, prosecutors said Serhii K. was one of a group of people who placed explosives on the pipelines and is believed to have been one of the coordinators. They said he is suspected of causing explosions, anti-constitutional sabotage and the destruction of structures. He was arrested on a European arrest warrant that was issued on Monday.The suspect and others used a yacht that set off from the German port of Rostock, which had been hired from a German company using forged IDs and with the help of intermediaries, prosecutors said.They didn’t give any information on the other people aboard the yacht or say anything about who else might have been involved in coordinating the suspected sabotage, or about a possible motive.German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig praised what she called “a very impressive investigative success.” She said in a statement that the explosions must be cleared up, “so it is good that we are making progress.”The explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was Russia’s main natural gas supply route to Germany until Moscow cut off supplies at the end of August 2022.They also damaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which never entered service because Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February of that year.Russia has accused the U.S. of staging the explosions, a charge Washington has denied. The pipelines were long a target of criticism by the U.S. and some of its allies, who warned that they posed a risk to Europe’s energy security by increasing dependence on Russian gas.In 2023, German media reported that a pro-Ukraine group was involved in the sabotage. Ukraine rejected suggestions it might have ordered the attack and German officials voiced caution over the accusation.German prosecutors didn’t say when they expect Serhii K. to be handed over to German authorities.Swedish and Danish authorities closed their investigations in February 2024, leaving the German prosecutors’ case as the sole probe. Geir Moulson, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Fourteen years ago, Silicon Valley startup August rethought the front door with its internet-connected smart locks. Its growth led to an acquisition in 2017 by lock manufacturer Yaleand it’s still the top-selling smart lock brand in the U.S. But despite the relative ubiquity of connected-home products like August‘s locks, Ring doorbells, and Nest thermostats, the true ideal of the smart homea dwelling with built-in tech that seems to magically cater to your needsseems no closer than it was when August launched. Now, Augusts founding team is back for a second attempt at realizing the smart home with Doma. The new startup is led by August founders Jason Johnson and designer Yves Béhar, and its even raised an undisclosed sum from original August investors Moderne Ventures and Uncork Capital in a recent seed round. On paper, Doma doesnt need to exist. The smart home market is growing with or without it. But that hardly means there isnt opportunity for disruption in a category that doesnt seem to be making anyone all that happy. For most people, the home is their single greatest investment, but its no more resilient to floods or able to cater to our moods than it was a generation ago. Béhar and Johnson think they can address at least one of those. These single-entity products that have launched a part of an era that we think is going to go awayand we want to be the pioneers of of this new wave of solutions,” says Béhar, who notes that the Doma team prefers to work toward home intelligence” rather than a “smart home.” [Image: Muse Storytelling] The false promise of a smart home The smart home is one of those ideas thats seemed inevitable on the early-aughts stages of amped tech conferences, but simply didnt scale practically for most people. iPod guru Tony Fadell rethought thermostats with his Wi-Fi enabled Nest in 2011, while August arrived in 2012 to usher in keyless electric locks that opened via smartphone. In the decade-plus since, weve gotten internet-connected security cameras, doorbells, lighting, TVs, and music players. Altogether, the smart home industry is projected to bring in global revenue at $160 billion in 2025 and growing 12% a yearbut its premise is a lie. We have smart appliances that each live a discrete digital life. Even despite unifying smart home standards like Matter, and organizing app layers like Apples HomeKit and Googles Google Home, none of it sings as some future-home UX weve been promised. We still need to manage everythingoften in separate apps. Every time I change the music or the lights, I have to get on my phone, says Béhar. I would say [we want to create] very quiet experiences that really equate to something magical, something luxurious. In many ways, a real smart home feels as far away today as it did a decade ago. One recent survey of 1,000 people found that as many as 93% of U.S. households now had a smart home device of some sort, but less than a third intended to buy any more smart home devices over the next year. We always dreamed of going deeper into the home with August, Johnson says. Now, he wants Doma to be a super team of traditional home product manufacturers, unified by discreet sensors and design standards driven by Béhars firm Fuseproject, to create a more natural experience driven less by apps on your watch or phone than a smart AI system that tracks your familys behaviors in a home. We don’t want the technology to be what it is today. You go to somebody’s front door, there is a camera, there is a door lock, there is a keypad, says Béhar. Those things are parasites that have been kind of tacked, glued, or taped to the outside of your home, and then inside your home, the issue is exactly the same. [Image: Muse Storytelling] How Doma wants to buck the industry Exactly how Doma creates these experiences, and what theyll entail, is still very much up in the air. At the heart of Domas system is an AI that promises to choreograph experiences as simple as predicting the room youre entering next and turning the lights on for you. It will integrate with platforms like HomeKit, and use emerging sensor technologies, like sub-millimeter wave detection, to follow someones behaviorsin, out, and around the house. Used by Googles Project Soli, sub-millimeter wave technology is basically radar. But Johnson notes that in a home setting it can be tucked behind glass so it doesnt stick out from a surface like a security camera. And it can track movement data without more obtrusive video feeds that eliminate a sense of privacy. The first Doma products will be announced later this year, and the company is considering sensors around movement, air, water, and energywith a particular focus on home security at launch Alarms remain particularly annoying, and Johnson points out that opening a window for some fresh air in the middle of the night can bring the police to your door. But an AI that could tell it was you who’d opened the window could ignore the gesture. At minimum, it might try a more subtle tack, like turning on a light to get your attention, before calling the police. One of the things that we really want to do with August is to truly secure a home. And we couldn’t do that, right? saysJohnson. We could lock the door if it was closed. We couldn’t close the door. We couldn’t lock windows. So will Doma allow those new interactions? That may be the plan with the help of Domas product partnerswhich currently include half a dozen more traditional companies around the home who are building Doma-ready products. (The company makes money off of product sales.) While the team is still tight-lipped about whats actually in the works, they are promising a few unifying brand standards, to ensure premium integration. For one, Doma products wont have batteries. Everything will be hardwired (a decision that addresses an ongoing issue but seems rooted in the scar tissue of early August years, when dead batteries were a regular headache for users). Nothing can require a subscription. Another key tenet: Whenever Doma sunsets a product, it must still keep all of its basic function (even if some AI would be lost). Johnson says of the Google/Nest announcement that its older generation projects would lose their networking properties, the Doma team felt affirmed in their adherence to the idea that if we were to cease to exist as a company . . . you could still use all of our products without requiring access to the API or to the cloud.” All-in-all, much of Domas logic is sound. Assuming they can woo the right partners, and actually create a more meaningful home UX with artificial intelligence, the only real catch is that Doma, by design, wont be for everyone. The deep integration of its hardwired hardware comes with a cost: it will require either skilled handymen or patient homeowners to install it. This naturally limits a market of smart home buyers who might snag a Nest or tack-on doorbell. Doma is really meant for people doing a retrofit or new construction. But the result of all of this investment is that Doma wants to be the first company to really do the intelligent home the right way and demonstrate whats possible. Were architecting everything to beand we dont have the right term yetbut to be persistent, says Johnson.
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