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Meta sunsetted Facebook News in early April for users in the U.S. and Australia as the platform further deemphasizes news and politics. The feature was shut down in the U.K., France, and Germany last year.

Launched in 2019, the News tab curated headlines from national and international news organizations, as well as smaller, local publications.

Meta says users can still be able to view links to news articles, and news organizations can still be able to post and promote their stories and websites, as any other individual or organization can on Facebook.

The change came as Meta tries to scale back news and political content on its platforms following years of criticism about how it handles misinformation and whether it contributes to political polarization.

“This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more,” said Dani Lever, a Meta spokesperson. “This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted.”

Meta said the change to the News tab does not affect its fact-checking network and review of misinformation. But misinformation remains a challenge for the company, especially as the U.S. presidential election and other races get underway.

“Facebook didn’t envision itself as a political platform. It was run by tech people. And then suddenly it started scaling and they found themselves immersed in politics, and they themselves became the headline,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy who studies tech policy and how new technologies evolve over time.

News makes up less than 3% of what users worldwide see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said, adding that the number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. dropped by over 80% last year.

However, according to a 2023 Pew Research study, half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media. And one platform outpaces the rest: Facebook.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A Southern California police department has been handcuffed by Lego after the toy company asked the agency to stop adding Lego heads to cover the faces of suspects in images it shares on social media.

The Murrieta Police Department has been using Lego heads and emojis to cover people’s faces in posts on social sites since at least early 2023. But the altered photos went viral after the department posted a statement about its policy, prompting several news articles and, later, the request from Lego.

“Why the covered faces?” the department wrote on March 18 in an Instagram post that featured five people in a lineup, their faces covered by Lego heads with varying expressions. The post went on to reference a California law that took effect January 1, limiting departments from sharing mugshots on social media.

“The Murrieta Police Department prides itself in its transparency with the community, but also honors everyone’s rights and protections as afforded by law; even suspects,” the department wrote.

Across the U.S., law enforcement agencies have often posted galleries of photos for “Mugshot Mondays” and “Wanted Wednesdays” to social media in efforts to bolster community engagement. But experts increasingly point to the harmful effects of putting such images online. For people awaiting trial, mugshots can carry a presumption of guilt. And for anyone seeking to move past a criminal conviction, the images can make it hard to get a job and haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Murrieta police had an internal discussion about posting photos of arrestees in general and announced a new department policy on Instagram in January 2023. The community had requested more of their “Weekly Roundup” posts, so the department said it started using the Lego heads and emojis to comply with the law while still engaging with Murrieta residents.

But on March 19, the toy company reached out and “respectfully asked us to refrain from using their intellectual property in our social media content, which, of course, we understand and will comply with,” Lt. Jeremy Durrant said in a statement. “We are currently exploring other methods to continue publishing our content in a way that is engaging and interesting to our followers.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Garden centers enjoyed a pandemic boom, particularly with millennials, as people looked for outdoor activities during lockdowns. Now, garden centers are hoping to keep that interest up, even as they deal with higher costs, a tough hiring environment, and ever more volatile weather.

The Garden Center Group, which tracks sales of about 125 centers, said sales are up by about 25% compared with 2019, but stayed flat between 2022 and 2023. Spending on lawn and gardening activities continued to rise, with an average household spend of $616 in 2022, an increase of $74 from 2021.

Younger households in the 18- to 44-year-old age group saw larger increases in spending than older households. The spring season is crucial since garden centers can make about 60% of sales during the 12 weeks of spring.

At Flowercraft in San Francisco, houseplants, vegetable starts, and citrus trees are selling well as the spring season, the biggest season by far for garden centers, gets underway.

Although spring hasn’t quite kicked into high gear yet in San Francisco, smaller items such as four-inch plants or six plants in a pack are selling better than bigger one-gallon to 15-gallon plants.

At the East Coast Garden Center in Millsboro, Delaware, higher costs are another issue.

To offset higher costs, the center had to raise prices. For example, a one-gallon flower was around five dollars, now it's more than six dollars. Unpredictable weather has also been a challenge that has affected sales, including droughts in some parts of the country while record-setting rain flooded other areas.

And like many industries, garden centers have been hit hard by worker shortages, with many now having to offer higher pay and benefits to attract new employees, further stressing their bottom lines.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

An artificial intelligence robot called Theo is a new high-tech weapon in the battle to root out disease from Dutch tulip fields. The robot, which checks each plant and kills diseased plants, is replacing a dwindling number of human “sickness spotters” who patrol bulb fields on the lookout for diseased flowers.

On a spring morning, the robot trundles along rows of yellow and red “goudstuk” tulips, checking each plant and, when necessary, killing diseased bulbs to prevent the spread of the tulip-breaking virus.

The dead bulbs are removed from healthy ones in a sorting warehouse after they have been harvested. The virus stunts the growth and development of plants leading to smaller and weaker flowers. It also weakens the bulb itself, eventually leaving it unable to flower.

“In every tulip field, there's a certain percentage of sick tulips. And every year, they need to be taken out in order to prevent the sick tulips from infecting other healthy tulips. And, we used to do it always by hand and we could never do everything in one year because it was too much. And now, we have the robot here with us. And, the robot is really amazing. It can work through the day, through the night, through the weekends. It never takes a break. And it does it also better than humans,” says Allan Visser, a third-generation tulip farmer who is using the robot for the second growing season.

The robot rolls on caterpillar tracks through fields at one kilometer per hour (0.6 mph) hunting out the telltale red stripes that form on the leaves of infected flowers.

Erik de Jong of H2L Robotics, the company that makes the robots, says artificial intelligence helps them identify sick flowers, and very precise GPS coordinates allow them to pinpoint the flowers that need to be destroyed.

However, Theo's skills and efficiency come with a hefty price tag. The robot costs 185,000 euros ($200,000).

As part of efforts to tackle tulip-breaking virus, there are 45 robots patrolling tulip fields across the Netherlands as the weather warms up and farmers approach peak season. 

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

McDonald’s apologized for a global technology outage that shuttered some restaurants for hours on March 15.

The company said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. It started around 12 a.m. CDT during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicago-based company said.

“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers,” Brian Rice, the company’s global chief information officer, said in a statement.

“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused,” the statement added.

The company said the outage also wasn’t related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider. In December, McDonald’s announced a multi-year partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.

Earlier, McDonald’s in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide,” calling it “a system failure.” In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a “computer system failure” knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app over several hours.

Some McDonald’s restaurants began operating normally again after the outage at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London. A worker at a restaurant in Bangkok said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments but allowing it to still accept cash for orders. A worker at a Milan restaurant noted that the system was offline for a couple of hours and a technician walked them through getting it back up and running. Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the U.K. had complained of issues with ordering.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

As rural hospitals continue to struggle financially, a new type of hospital is slowly taking root, especially in the Southeast.

Rural emergency hospitals receive more than $3 million in federal funding a year and higher Medicare reimbursements in exchange for closing all inpatient beds and providing 24/7 emergency care. While that makes it easier for a hospital to keep its doors open, experts say it doesn’t solve all of the challenges facing rural health care.

People might have to travel further for treatments for illnesses that require inpatient stays, like pneumonia or COVID-19. In some of the communities where hospitals have converted to the new designation, residents are confused about what kind of care they can receive. Plus, rural hospitals are hesitant to make the switch, because there’s no margin of error.

“It’s ironic” that the facilities that might need the most help can’t afford to take the risk, said Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer at the National Rural Health Association. She pointed to having to give up certain services and benefits, such as a federal discount program for prescription drugs.

Nebraska’s first rural emergency hospital opened in February in a city called Friend. Though residents expressed concerns at a September town hall about closing inpatient services, the importance of having emergency care outweighed other worries.

“We have farmers and ranchers and people who don’t have the time to drive an hour to get care, so they’ll just go without,” said Ron Te Brink, co-CEO and chief information officer. “Rural health care is so extremely important to a lot of Nebraska communities like ours.”

“If my intuition is correct, it will probably work well for some communities and it may not work well for others,” said Hospital CEO Dr. Kenneth Williams.

Cochran-McClain said her organization is trying to work with Congress to change regulations that have been a barrier for rural facilities, like closing inpatient behavioral health beds that are already scarce.

As Quinten Whitwell, the CEO of Irwin County Hospital, sees it: “As this program evolves, there will be more people that I think will understand the value.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.