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An exterior view of the Supreme Court on June 20th, 2024, in Washington, DC.  | Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

The Supreme Court decided to press pause on the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to prevent smog-forming pollutants from drifting across state borders.
Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and various trade organizations including fossil fuel industry groups asked the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the plan while they contest the EPA’s actions in lower courts. SCOTUS agreed to put the plan on hold today in its opinion on Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency. Five justices voted in favor of halting implementation for now, while the remaining justices dissented.
“If anything, we see one reason for caution after another,” Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in his opinion.
“If anything, we see one reason for caution after another.”
While the stay is temporary, the decision signals that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court is likely to rule in favor of states opposing the EPA’s plan if the issue makes it to the nation’s highest court again for a final decision on the plan’s legal merit. That could make it harder to improve air quality across the nation since air pollutants typically don’t stay in one place.
The EPA’s Good Neighbor Plan compels 23 “upwind” states to curb certain pollutants from power plants and other industrial facilities before it drifts to other states downwind of them. It applies to nitrogen oxides, a key ingredient for smog (also called ground-level ozone), and replaces state plans that the EPA found to fall short of updated national air quality standards. The EPA expects its plan to prevent 1,300 premature deaths and more than 2,300 hospital and emergency room visits in 2026. It’s also supposed to ensure that those downwind states aren’t burdened by pollution they didn’t create and are able to meet national air quality standards despite their geographic disadvantage.
The rules wouldn’t be fully enforced until 2026, but many states were quick to object. Lower courts have already stayed the plan in 12 states challenging the EPA. The remaining 11 states, Ohio and its fellow plaintiffs say, would face “irreparable, economic injuries” if forced to comply. They also argue that the EPA’s measures would put undue pressure on the power grid and wouldn’t make sense to start to implement since they believe the plan will ultimately get struck down in court.
The legal battle is still playing out in lower courts, which is why some justices opposed weighing in on the matter preemptively.
But the decision issued today by SCOTUS doesn’t bode well for the Good Neighbor Plan as the EPA fights to keep it alive. The Biden administration could also lose this battle outside of court if voters reelect Donald Trump. The Trump administration attempted to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations during his term in office.

Developing…

An exterior view of the Supreme Court on June 20th, 2024, in Washington, DC.  | Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

The Supreme Court decided to press pause on the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to prevent smog-forming pollutants from drifting across state borders.

Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and various trade organizations including fossil fuel industry groups asked the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the plan while they contest the EPA’s actions in lower courts. SCOTUS agreed to put the plan on hold today in its opinion on Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency. Five justices voted in favor of halting implementation for now, while the remaining justices dissented.

“If anything, we see one reason for caution after another,” Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in his opinion.

While the stay is temporary, the decision signals that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court is likely to rule in favor of states opposing the EPA’s plan if the issue makes it to the nation’s highest court again for a final decision on the plan’s legal merit. That could make it harder to improve air quality across the nation since air pollutants typically don’t stay in one place.

The EPA’s Good Neighbor Plan compels 23 “upwind” states to curb certain pollutants from power plants and other industrial facilities before it drifts to other states downwind of them. It applies to nitrogen oxides, a key ingredient for smog (also called ground-level ozone), and replaces state plans that the EPA found to fall short of updated national air quality standards. The EPA expects its plan to prevent 1,300 premature deaths and more than 2,300 hospital and emergency room visits in 2026. It’s also supposed to ensure that those downwind states aren’t burdened by pollution they didn’t create and are able to meet national air quality standards despite their geographic disadvantage.

The rules wouldn’t be fully enforced until 2026, but many states were quick to object. Lower courts have already stayed the plan in 12 states challenging the EPA. The remaining 11 states, Ohio and its fellow plaintiffs say, would face “irreparable, economic injuries” if forced to comply. They also argue that the EPA’s measures would put undue pressure on the power grid and wouldn’t make sense to start to implement since they believe the plan will ultimately get struck down in court.

The legal battle is still playing out in lower courts, which is why some justices opposed weighing in on the matter preemptively.

But the decision issued today by SCOTUS doesn’t bode well for the Good Neighbor Plan as the EPA fights to keep it alive. The Biden administration could also lose this battle outside of court if voters reelect Donald Trump. The Trump administration attempted to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations during his term in office.

Developing…

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Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is launching its Xbox TV app on Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks in July. The Xbox app will provide access to Xbox Cloud Gaming so subscribers to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate can stream a variety of games directly to Fire TV devices.
Microsoft will support the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Stick 4K models for its Xbox app, which will be available in more than 25 countries. All you’ll need is a compatible Fire TV Stick, a Bluetooth-enabled wireless controller, and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to stream Xbox games.

Image: Microsoft
The Xbox TV app running on a Fire TV Stick.

This marks the first time the Xbox TV app has launched on a device other than Samsung’s recent TVs and monitors. Microsoft first partnered with Samsung in 2022 to launch an Xbox TV app on Samsung’s 2022 smart TVs. An Xbox app also appeared on Meta’s Quest VR headsets last year, providing access to Xbox Cloud Gaming.
“Over the past several years, we have been on a journey to deliver cloud gaming to more devices and to more people around the globe,” says Ashley McKissick, head of Xbox experiences and platforms engineering. “We are excited to add Fire TV to our growing family of cloud gaming devices and eager to welcome new players into this experience.”

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is launching its Xbox TV app on Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks in July. The Xbox app will provide access to Xbox Cloud Gaming so subscribers to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate can stream a variety of games directly to Fire TV devices.

Microsoft will support the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Stick 4K models for its Xbox app, which will be available in more than 25 countries. All you’ll need is a compatible Fire TV Stick, a Bluetooth-enabled wireless controller, and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to stream Xbox games.

Image: Microsoft
The Xbox TV app running on a Fire TV Stick.

This marks the first time the Xbox TV app has launched on a device other than Samsung’s recent TVs and monitors. Microsoft first partnered with Samsung in 2022 to launch an Xbox TV app on Samsung’s 2022 smart TVs. An Xbox app also appeared on Meta’s Quest VR headsets last year, providing access to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

“Over the past several years, we have been on a journey to deliver cloud gaming to more devices and to more people around the globe,” says Ashley McKissick, head of Xbox experiences and platforms engineering. “We are excited to add Fire TV to our growing family of cloud gaming devices and eager to welcome new players into this experience.”

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I met Vitus “V” Spehar — the face behind Under the Desk News — a year ago in Washington, DC. I was on location with The Verge filming the TikTok senate hearing along with interviews with senators and content creators for a Verge video about the looming ban. And when we interviewed V outside of the Capitol, V said that TikTok was useful for channels like their own — a news channel that was started because they didn’t believe traditional news sources were accessible enough to younger audiences. V’s TikTok channel now has 3.1 million subscribers.
Every weekday, V sifts through news websites in search of six to eight stories they deem important enough to share with their audience. V then condenses each story into a bite-size snippet, crawls under a desk, and creates a 90-second video that highlights the happenings of the day. It’s this ritual, which started on January 6th, 2021, that has propelled V into TikTok political fame.
But that fame comes with some unique challenges. Under The Desk occupies a tricky space that positions V somewhere between news anchor and internet personality. So while V reports information to millions of people, they view their followers as a community — one that they care about and sometimes give advice to. And when you couple that with the huge divide in US politics, it is a recipe for a whole lot of backlash that V increasingly has to deal with.
In the latest episode of my new creator-focused video series, I spend a day with V to figure out why the hell they continue to do it and, more importantly, how they feel about the looming ban that threatens their main subscriber base.

I met Vitus “V” Spehar — the face behind Under the Desk News — a year ago in Washington, DC. I was on location with The Verge filming the TikTok senate hearing along with interviews with senators and content creators for a Verge video about the looming ban. And when we interviewed V outside of the Capitol, V said that TikTok was useful for channels like their own — a news channel that was started because they didn’t believe traditional news sources were accessible enough to younger audiences. V’s TikTok channel now has 3.1 million subscribers.

Every weekday, V sifts through news websites in search of six to eight stories they deem important enough to share with their audience. V then condenses each story into a bite-size snippet, crawls under a desk, and creates a 90-second video that highlights the happenings of the day. It’s this ritual, which started on January 6th, 2021, that has propelled V into TikTok political fame.

But that fame comes with some unique challenges. Under The Desk occupies a tricky space that positions V somewhere between news anchor and internet personality. So while V reports information to millions of people, they view their followers as a community — one that they care about and sometimes give advice to. And when you couple that with the huge divide in US politics, it is a recipe for a whole lot of backlash that V increasingly has to deal with.

In the latest episode of my new creator-focused video series, I spend a day with V to figure out why the hell they continue to do it and, more importantly, how they feel about the looming ban that threatens their main subscriber base.

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Illustration: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about money and politics — always a good time — and how they come together in the form of lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and mouthy billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s.
That’s when big corporations started reacting to a cratering economy and did what they do best: throw money around. Now, of course, our political debates about everything from energy and finance to healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech have started spending tons of political money of their own.

To understand the structure of today’s political lobbying and how we got here, I asked Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins on the show. Brody has a new book he co-wrote with his brother Luke Mullins called The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, which came out last month. It’s a definitive history of modern lobbying in America, told through the lens of some of the industry’s most unsavory characters and the influence they’ve exerted on DC politics across decades.
Brody and I talked a lot about how lobbying has shifted over the years — from the regulated version on K Street, a real place in DC in proximity of Capitol Hill, to a much more diffuse and hard-to-track form of influence you might call shadow lobbying, in which companies spend tons of money on groups with innocent-sounding names that buy ads and coverage around the country to influence local elections. That avoids disclosure requirements and, in some cases, provides cover for criminal acts.
Over the last nearly five decades, the power of corporate America on the political landscape has been immeasurable, Brody says. There have been some checks on this growing power, like post-Waterform reforms and campaign finance laws, but this melding of money and politics has been a runaway train well into the 21st century, when big tech started to become a major player in the political lobbying scene.
Now, tech companies have more money and more direct influence over their customers than virtually any bank, pharmaceutical company, or oil and gas company you can think of, and they’ve started deploying new lobbying tactics, like in-app prompts, to pressure politicians and thwart regulation. Sometimes it works; you’ll hear Brody and I talk about the famous internet “Blackout” protest of 2012 that brought down laws called SOPA and PIPA. But in some cases, as we saw with TikTok recently, it can backfire.
As you’ll hear Brody explain, this isn’t entirely set in stone. The rise of Donald Trump and his decidedly untraditional approach to influence peddling tactics really turned lobbying on its head in 2016. With another election coming up, the shape of lobbying in America could change yet again and produce the single most effective and powerful lobbyist in American history.

Illustration: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about money and politics — always a good time — and how they come together in the form of lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and mouthy billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s.

That’s when big corporations started reacting to a cratering economy and did what they do best: throw money around. Now, of course, our political debates about everything from energy and finance to healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech have started spending tons of political money of their own.

To understand the structure of today’s political lobbying and how we got here, I asked Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins on the show. Brody has a new book he co-wrote with his brother Luke Mullins called The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, which came out last month. It’s a definitive history of modern lobbying in America, told through the lens of some of the industry’s most unsavory characters and the influence they’ve exerted on DC politics across decades.

Brody and I talked a lot about how lobbying has shifted over the years — from the regulated version on K Street, a real place in DC in proximity of Capitol Hill, to a much more diffuse and hard-to-track form of influence you might call shadow lobbying, in which companies spend tons of money on groups with innocent-sounding names that buy ads and coverage around the country to influence local elections. That avoids disclosure requirements and, in some cases, provides cover for criminal acts.

Over the last nearly five decades, the power of corporate America on the political landscape has been immeasurable, Brody says. There have been some checks on this growing power, like post-Waterform reforms and campaign finance laws, but this melding of money and politics has been a runaway train well into the 21st century, when big tech started to become a major player in the political lobbying scene.

Now, tech companies have more money and more direct influence over their customers than virtually any bank, pharmaceutical company, or oil and gas company you can think of, and they’ve started deploying new lobbying tactics, like in-app prompts, to pressure politicians and thwart regulation. Sometimes it works; you’ll hear Brody and I talk about the famous internet “Blackout” protest of 2012 that brought down laws called SOPA and PIPA. But in some cases, as we saw with TikTok recently, it can backfire.

As you’ll hear Brody explain, this isn’t entirely set in stone. The rise of Donald Trump and his decidedly untraditional approach to influence peddling tactics really turned lobbying on its head in 2016. With another election coming up, the shape of lobbying in America could change yet again and produce the single most effective and powerful lobbyist in American history.

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Trump and Biden debating in 2020. | Image: Getty

The first debate of the 2024 presidential race will see sitting President Joe Biden and his challenger, former President Donald Trump, face off in CNN’s Atlanta studio. They come into the debate with Trump tracking slightly ahead in most polling averages, with the gap narrowing in recent weeks after Trump’s felony convictions.
It will be an unusual debate. There won’t be an audience, and the network says it will mute candidates’ mics when it’s not their turn to speak. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) instituted a similar policy for the final 2020 Trump and Biden debate, which ended up being far calmer than the chaotic, interruption-filled first one that year. This time, the call was made by CNN, which organized this debate, rather than the nonprofit CPD, which has taken on that duty since 1988.
What time is the presidential debate?
Biden and Trump will debate for 90 minutes at 9PM ET on Thursday, June 27th.
How can I watch the presidential debate?
CNN, which is hosting the event, will broadcast the debate on live TV as well as in streams on its website, on YouTube, and for subscribers on Max. Other outlets will livestream the debate, too, including PBS, The Washington Post, C-SPAN, and Fox News on broadcast TV.
Who are the moderators?
Journalists Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, hosts of the political talk show State of the Union for CNN, will handle moderation.

Trump and Biden debating in 2020. | Image: Getty

The first debate of the 2024 presidential race will see sitting President Joe Biden and his challenger, former President Donald Trump, face off in CNN’s Atlanta studio. They come into the debate with Trump tracking slightly ahead in most polling averages, with the gap narrowing in recent weeks after Trump’s felony convictions.

It will be an unusual debate. There won’t be an audience, and the network says it will mute candidates’ mics when it’s not their turn to speak. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) instituted a similar policy for the final 2020 Trump and Biden debate, which ended up being far calmer than the chaotic, interruption-filled first one that year. This time, the call was made by CNN, which organized this debate, rather than the nonprofit CPD, which has taken on that duty since 1988.

What time is the presidential debate?

Biden and Trump will debate for 90 minutes at 9PM ET on Thursday, June 27th.

How can I watch the presidential debate?

CNN, which is hosting the event, will broadcast the debate on live TV as well as in streams on its website, on YouTube, and for subscribers on Max. Other outlets will livestream the debate, too, including PBS, The Washington Post, C-SPAN, and Fox News on broadcast TV.

Who are the moderators?

Journalists Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, hosts of the political talk show State of the Union for CNN, will handle moderation.

Read More 

GE Cync’s new undercabinet smart lights bring task lighting, dimming, and full color to your kitchen countertops. | Image: GE Cync

If you’ve been looking for a simple way to add smart, color-changing undercabinet lighting to your kitchen, I have good news. First announced at CES earlier this year, GE Lighting’s new Cync Reveal HD Plus Smart Undercabinet Fixtures are now available at Amazon, Lowe’s, and Best Buy, starting at $59.99.
These full-color and tunable white light fixtures fit under your cabinets and can be hardwired or plugged in to illuminate your countertops. The Cync lights are Matter-enabled and work with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings for smart home integration. I first saw a sneak peek of them at CES 2023 and was excited that this might finally provide a good solution to the problem of smart kitchen lighting.

Image: GE Lighting
GE Lighting’s new undercabinet light fixtures are installed under cabinets to provide task and ambient lighting.

If you’ve ever remodeled a kitchen, you, too, may have been stymied by the lack of a way to hardwire smart lighting under your cabinets. This was my experience a couple of years ago when I wanted to light up my kitchen countertops by putting smart, tunable white light that I could also dim under my cabinets.

This promo video shows how the lights can be connected and installed, as well as the color-changing, tunable light, and dimming options.

There were no hardwired options for smart LED lights that would work under cabinets. The only options I found were to wire a standard LED light strip to a smart switch — meaning no color changing or dimming, but I could control them remotely and on a schedule — or use a plug-in smart light strip to get the effects I wanted but at the expense of taking up several outlets in my kitchen and having chunky cables running everywhere.

Then, earlier this year at CES, I saw the Cync undercabinet lights set up and working in a mock kitchen, and they looked impressive. They have a wide but slim profile, appearing almost invisible under the cabinet from most angles but giving off more light than a standard light strip. They also have a diffuse effect, which means no harsh pinprick light from the LEDs reflecting off your countertops. I have some samples that I plan to test and will have a full review soon.
Color and tunable white light makes a lot of sense in a kitchen setting. It provides task lighting when cooking or cleaning and can change to dimmable color-changing light when you want a more ambient colorful glow during dinner time or when it’s time to relax.

Image: GE Lighting
The GE Lighting Cync puck.

Image: GE Lighting
The GE Lighting Cync bar.

Cync’s new lights offer all these functions and work with the Cync app, powered by the Savant smart home system. This lets you set the lights on a schedule and add them to scenes. They’re also compatible with smart home platforms for voice control and other features and have physical buttons for direct control.
You can pair the lights with a Cync wire-free smart dimmer switch for another physical control option. However, it’s unclear if they will work with Cync’s wired dimmer switches. Traditionally, smart LED lighting doesn’t play well with smart dimmer switches. If you wire these light panels to a standard switch, that switch would have to stay permanently on to access the smart features.
The Cync Smart Undercabinet Fixtures require 120V AC power and work over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. They come in 12-inch ($59.99), 18-inch ($64.99), and 24-inch ($69.99) edge-lit bars and three-inch diameter puck lights ($84.99). For larger spaces, you can connect up to 10 lights and power them all from one source.

GE Cync’s new undercabinet smart lights bring task lighting, dimming, and full color to your kitchen countertops. | Image: GE Cync

If you’ve been looking for a simple way to add smart, color-changing undercabinet lighting to your kitchen, I have good news. First announced at CES earlier this year, GE Lighting’s new Cync Reveal HD Plus Smart Undercabinet Fixtures are now available at Amazon, Lowe’s, and Best Buy, starting at $59.99.

These full-color and tunable white light fixtures fit under your cabinets and can be hardwired or plugged in to illuminate your countertops. The Cync lights are Matter-enabled and work with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings for smart home integration. I first saw a sneak peek of them at CES 2023 and was excited that this might finally provide a good solution to the problem of smart kitchen lighting.

Image: GE Lighting
GE Lighting’s new undercabinet light fixtures are installed under cabinets to provide task and ambient lighting.

If you’ve ever remodeled a kitchen, you, too, may have been stymied by the lack of a way to hardwire smart lighting under your cabinets. This was my experience a couple of years ago when I wanted to light up my kitchen countertops by putting smart, tunable white light that I could also dim under my cabinets.

There were no hardwired options for smart LED lights that would work under cabinets. The only options I found were to wire a standard LED light strip to a smart switch — meaning no color changing or dimming, but I could control them remotely and on a schedule — or use a plug-in smart light strip to get the effects I wanted but at the expense of taking up several outlets in my kitchen and having chunky cables running everywhere.

Then, earlier this year at CES, I saw the Cync undercabinet lights set up and working in a mock kitchen, and they looked impressive. They have a wide but slim profile, appearing almost invisible under the cabinet from most angles but giving off more light than a standard light strip. They also have a diffuse effect, which means no harsh pinprick light from the LEDs reflecting off your countertops. I have some samples that I plan to test and will have a full review soon.

Color and tunable white light makes a lot of sense in a kitchen setting. It provides task lighting when cooking or cleaning and can change to dimmable color-changing light when you want a more ambient colorful glow during dinner time or when it’s time to relax.

Cync’s new lights offer all these functions and work with the Cync app, powered by the Savant smart home system. This lets you set the lights on a schedule and add them to scenes. They’re also compatible with smart home platforms for voice control and other features and have physical buttons for direct control.

You can pair the lights with a Cync wire-free smart dimmer switch for another physical control option. However, it’s unclear if they will work with Cync’s wired dimmer switches. Traditionally, smart LED lighting doesn’t play well with smart dimmer switches. If you wire these light panels to a standard switch, that switch would have to stay permanently on to access the smart features.

The Cync Smart Undercabinet Fixtures require 120V AC power and work over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. They come in 12-inch ($59.99), 18-inch ($64.99), and 24-inch ($69.99) edge-lit bars and three-inch diameter puck lights ($84.99). For larger spaces, you can connect up to 10 lights and power them all from one source.

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YouTube is expecting to launch new AI tools later this year that are trained off the back of these deals. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records “lump sums of cash” in exchange for licensing their songs to legally train its AI music tools.
YouTube told the Financial Times that it’s not looking to expand Dream Track — which was supported by just ten artists during its test phase — but confirmed it was “in conversations with labels about other experiments.” The platform is aiming to license music from “dozens” of artists according to the report, which will instead be used to train new AI tools that YouTube is planning to launch later this year. The fee that YouTube is willing to pay for these licenses hasn’t been disclosed, but the report says these will likely be one-off payments rather than royalty-based arrangements.

Regardless, both artists and the labels that represent them will likely take some convincing. Sony Music has extensively warned AI companies against “unauthorized use” of its content, and UMG was willing to temporarily pull its entire music catalog from TikTok after inadequate protections against AI-generated music caused licensing negotiations to fall apart. Back in January, over 200 artists — including Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, and Katy Perry — also called for tech companies to cease using AI to “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
News of these discussions comes just days after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing record labels like Sony, Warner, and Universal, filed separate copyright infringement lawsuits against two of the top companies in generative AI music. The labels allege that outputs from Suno and Udio were produced using “unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” with the RIAA seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

YouTube is expecting to launch new AI tools later this year that are trained off the back of these deals. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records “lump sums of cash” in exchange for licensing their songs to legally train its AI music tools.

YouTube told the Financial Times that it’s not looking to expand Dream Track — which was supported by just ten artists during its test phase — but confirmed it was “in conversations with labels about other experiments.” The platform is aiming to license music from “dozens” of artists according to the report, which will instead be used to train new AI tools that YouTube is planning to launch later this year. The fee that YouTube is willing to pay for these licenses hasn’t been disclosed, but the report says these will likely be one-off payments rather than royalty-based arrangements.

Regardless, both artists and the labels that represent them will likely take some convincing. Sony Music has extensively warned AI companies against “unauthorized use” of its content, and UMG was willing to temporarily pull its entire music catalog from TikTok after inadequate protections against AI-generated music caused licensing negotiations to fall apart. Back in January, over 200 artists — including Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, and Katy Perry — also called for tech companies to cease using AI to “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”

News of these discussions comes just days after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing record labels like Sony, Warner, and Universal, filed separate copyright infringement lawsuits against two of the top companies in generative AI music. The labels allege that outputs from Suno and Udio were produced using “unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” with the RIAA seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Traffic got you down? If the idea of locking your car keys in a drawer and using alternate means of transportation sounds intriguing, Uber has the challenge for you. Today, the ridehailing company announced the One Less Car trial, in which 175 people in the US and Canada will be selected to ditch their cars for five weeks in exchange for cash and credits to be put toward other travel modes.
Call it a gimmick or a PR stunt, Uber says the aim is to highlight the high costs of personal car ownership, as well as all the external effects on our health and the cities where we live. Uber has long advocated for fewer cars on the road — even as studies have shown that the app-based ridehailing industry has intensified traffic congestion in cities.
The trial is modeled on a similar experiment conducted by Uber and the Behavioral Insights Team in Australia in 2023, in which dozens of residents were challenged to give up their cars for four weeks.
Uber says the aim is to highlight the high costs of personal car ownership
Now, Uber is bringing its experiment to North America. Car owners in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Miami, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver interested in participating can sign up online for the five-week trial, which will take place July 22nd–August 25th. Uber will then select 30 people from each city to give up their cars during those five weeks.
Each participant will receive $1,000 — based on the average monthly cost for vehicle ownership in the US — to use on (what else) Uber rides, bike- and scooter-share, car rental and carshare, and public transportation. Here’s how the stipend actually breaks down:

$500 in “Uber Cash” redeemable in the Uber app for car trips, or Lime bike and scooter share.
$200 voucher redeemable for car rental or carshare.
$300 across other transportation modes, such as public transit.

Uber will also throw in a one-month free Uber One membership, in which subscribers can earn 6 percent Uber Cash on eligible rides and $0 delivery fees on eligible food, groceries, and more.
There are a few requirements before signing up. You must be 18 or older, have a driver’s license, a vehicle that you use more than three times per week, a bank card, and be comfortable documenting your experience. The first week will be considered the “control period,” where each participant will be expected to document their mobility habits.
Each participant will receive $1,000
“Many Uber riders tell us they want to live a more car-light lifestyle with a variety of ways to ride, including public transit, shared bikes and scooters, walking, and rideshare,” Adam Gromis, global head of sustainability policy at Uber, said in a statement. “This research is critical to help us figure out how to make car-light living possible for more people who want to save money, emissions and time in traffic.”
Uber isn’t the first company to come up with this idea for a car-free trial. It’s not even the first ridehail company to try it. In 2018, Lyft launched its “Ditch with Lyft” trial, in which hundreds of participants in dozens of cities were given $550 in Lyft credits, bikeshare, and other tender to give up their cars for a month. The challenge then morphed into an offer of free Lyft trips to people who sold their cars on Carvana.
Uber says it was inspired to tackle its own trial after seeing encouraging results in Australia, in which participants reported increased walking, biking, and public transit usage during the challenge. Uber concluded that people need access to at least four other modes of transportation in order to successfully ditch their cars. Still, few of the participants said they’d be willing to go so far as to sell their cars and rely only on alternative modes — only three of the 58 said they planned to do this “in the near future.”
It will be interesting to track the response to the challenge in these various cities, with various levels of transit, bike infrastructure, and density, to see how well Uber’s theory about personal car ownership plays out. And it will be equally interesting to see if Uber takes any lessons away about its own contributions to car traffic.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Traffic got you down? If the idea of locking your car keys in a drawer and using alternate means of transportation sounds intriguing, Uber has the challenge for you. Today, the ridehailing company announced the One Less Car trial, in which 175 people in the US and Canada will be selected to ditch their cars for five weeks in exchange for cash and credits to be put toward other travel modes.

Call it a gimmick or a PR stunt, Uber says the aim is to highlight the high costs of personal car ownership, as well as all the external effects on our health and the cities where we live. Uber has long advocated for fewer cars on the road — even as studies have shown that the app-based ridehailing industry has intensified traffic congestion in cities.

The trial is modeled on a similar experiment conducted by Uber and the Behavioral Insights Team in Australia in 2023, in which dozens of residents were challenged to give up their cars for four weeks.

Now, Uber is bringing its experiment to North America. Car owners in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Miami, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver interested in participating can sign up online for the five-week trial, which will take place July 22nd–August 25th. Uber will then select 30 people from each city to give up their cars during those five weeks.

Each participant will receive $1,000 — based on the average monthly cost for vehicle ownership in the US — to use on (what else) Uber rides, bike- and scooter-share, car rental and carshare, and public transportation. Here’s how the stipend actually breaks down:

$500 in “Uber Cash” redeemable in the Uber app for car trips, or Lime bike and scooter share.
$200 voucher redeemable for car rental or carshare.
$300 across other transportation modes, such as public transit.

Uber will also throw in a one-month free Uber One membership, in which subscribers can earn 6 percent Uber Cash on eligible rides and $0 delivery fees on eligible food, groceries, and more.

There are a few requirements before signing up. You must be 18 or older, have a driver’s license, a vehicle that you use more than three times per week, a bank card, and be comfortable documenting your experience. The first week will be considered the “control period,” where each participant will be expected to document their mobility habits.

“Many Uber riders tell us they want to live a more car-light lifestyle with a variety of ways to ride, including public transit, shared bikes and scooters, walking, and rideshare,” Adam Gromis, global head of sustainability policy at Uber, said in a statement. “This research is critical to help us figure out how to make car-light living possible for more people who want to save money, emissions and time in traffic.”

Uber isn’t the first company to come up with this idea for a car-free trial. It’s not even the first ridehail company to try it. In 2018, Lyft launched its “Ditch with Lyft” trial, in which hundreds of participants in dozens of cities were given $550 in Lyft credits, bikeshare, and other tender to give up their cars for a month. The challenge then morphed into an offer of free Lyft trips to people who sold their cars on Carvana.

Uber says it was inspired to tackle its own trial after seeing encouraging results in Australia, in which participants reported increased walking, biking, and public transit usage during the challenge. Uber concluded that people need access to at least four other modes of transportation in order to successfully ditch their cars. Still, few of the participants said they’d be willing to go so far as to sell their cars and rely only on alternative modes — only three of the 58 said they planned to do this “in the near future.”

It will be interesting to track the response to the challenge in these various cities, with various levels of transit, bike infrastructure, and density, to see how well Uber’s theory about personal car ownership plays out. And it will be equally interesting to see if Uber takes any lessons away about its own contributions to car traffic.

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Illustration: The Verge

Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday. Before now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion — which the company says is its biggest ever — marks a significant jump.
Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good at learning ones that were related to one another, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Google’s Isaac Caswell says in a blog post.
The list of newly-supported languages in Translate includes Cantonese, which “has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate,” Caswell says. “Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it is tricky to find data and train models.” Caswell also says that “about a quarter of the new languages come from Africa.”
Most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people, Caswell tells The Verge in an interview, while “several” are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.

Illustration: The Verge

Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday. Before now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion — which the company says is its biggest ever — marks a significant jump.

Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good at learning ones that were related to one another, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Google’s Isaac Caswell says in a blog post.

The list of newly-supported languages in Translate includes Cantonese, which “has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate,” Caswell says. “Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it is tricky to find data and train models.” Caswell also says that “about a quarter of the new languages come from Africa.”

Most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people, Caswell tells The Verge in an interview, while “several” are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.

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BMW’s 2025 BMW M5, which is coming as a plug-in electric hybrid (PHEV) for the first time, will be a husky vehicle. With an electric motor to go along with its 4.4-liter V8 engine, the sedan will weigh in at a hefty 5,390 pounds when it launches during the fourth quarter of 2024.
That makes the new M5 about 1,000 pounds heavier than the 2023 model that preceded it. It also weighs more than trucks like the 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe (5,356 pounds), the 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire (5,336 pounds), and the 2024 Range Rover Sport (5,090 pounds), Motor1 noted today. Unlike Lucid’s EV, though, the M5 can’t blame as much of its heft on the battery, which is only big enough to go 25 miles without using gas.
The M5 isn’t the heaviest electrified BMW — the all-electric 2024 i7 M70, for instance, sits at a beefy 6,191 pounds. Meanwhile, the 2024 750e xDrive Sedan PHEV has a 5,635-pound gross curb weight.

The new M5 PHEV can go from 0–60mph in 3.4 seconds and tops out at 190mph under gas power if you get BMW’s M Driver’s Package. Using just the electric motor, it can go as fast as about 87mph. By default, the car runs in hybrid mode, using both internal combustion and electric power, with the output ratio of each determined by how the driver configures the car in the M Setup menu. And when the battery gets low, BMW says the engine will start outputting more power to charge it.

The company makes other pure EVs, including the i4 M50, the i5 M60, and the i7 M70. But BMW has grander plans to produce a properly electrified M model (that is, not an i-series M Performance car) a couple of years after its Neue Klasse EV architecture launches in 2025.

Image: BMW
BMW Vision Neue Klasse X on the road

Future BMW M model EVs will use the company’s own internally developed batteries and EV motors, M program boss Franciscus Van Meel recently told Road & Track.
That platform includes new systems to detect and relay sensor data to the car’s central computer, which the M division has been involved in developing. Van Meel said BMW’s EVs equipped with this system, dubbed Heart of Joy, would “react ten times faster than before” to things like wheelspin or locked-up brakes, along with enhancements to stability control, traction control, and overall performance.

BMW’s 2025 BMW M5, which is coming as a plug-in electric hybrid (PHEV) for the first time, will be a husky vehicle. With an electric motor to go along with its 4.4-liter V8 engine, the sedan will weigh in at a hefty 5,390 pounds when it launches during the fourth quarter of 2024.

That makes the new M5 about 1,000 pounds heavier than the 2023 model that preceded it. It also weighs more than trucks like the 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe (5,356 pounds), the 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire (5,336 pounds), and the 2024 Range Rover Sport (5,090 pounds), Motor1 noted today. Unlike Lucid’s EV, though, the M5 can’t blame as much of its heft on the battery, which is only big enough to go 25 miles without using gas.

The M5 isn’t the heaviest electrified BMW — the all-electric 2024 i7 M70, for instance, sits at a beefy 6,191 pounds. Meanwhile, the 2024 750e xDrive Sedan PHEV has a 5,635-pound gross curb weight.

The new M5 PHEV can go from 0–60mph in 3.4 seconds and tops out at 190mph under gas power if you get BMW’s M Driver’s Package. Using just the electric motor, it can go as fast as about 87mph. By default, the car runs in hybrid mode, using both internal combustion and electric power, with the output ratio of each determined by how the driver configures the car in the M Setup menu. And when the battery gets low, BMW says the engine will start outputting more power to charge it.

The company makes other pure EVs, including the i4 M50, the i5 M60, and the i7 M70. But BMW has grander plans to produce a properly electrified M model (that is, not an i-series M Performance car) a couple of years after its Neue Klasse EV architecture launches in 2025.

Image: BMW
BMW Vision Neue Klasse X on the road

Future BMW M model EVs will use the company’s own internally developed batteries and EV motors, M program boss Franciscus Van Meel recently told Road & Track.

That platform includes new systems to detect and relay sensor data to the car’s central computer, which the M division has been involved in developing. Van Meel said BMW’s EVs equipped with this system, dubbed Heart of Joy, would “react ten times faster than before” to things like wheelspin or locked-up brakes, along with enhancements to stability control, traction control, and overall performance.

Read More