By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

Amazon’s Zoox on Wednesday launched its robotaxi service in Las Vegas, offering free rides through parts of the entertainment mecca for anyone willing to gamble on the safety of a driverless vehicle that operates without a steering wheel.

The Las Vegas debut of Zoox’s long-planned ride-hailing service reflects Amazon-owned robotaxi maker’s confidence in the safety of its boxy vehicles after two years of testing them in the city.

The robotaxis initially were only available to employees in Las Vegas before gradually expanding to friends and family members. Now, anyone with the Zoox app will be able to request a ride to five designated locations, including Resorts World, the Luxor hotel and the New York-New York hotel. The longest distance the Zoox robotaxis will travel is about three miles (4.8 kilometers) while carrying up to four passengers.

All rides will be provided for free for at least the first few months to help promote the existence of the service in the perennially popular travel destination. Once it begins charging for rides in Las Vegas, Zoox says its prices will be comparable to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

Zoox can afford to give free rides largely because of Amazon’s deep pockets. The e-commerce powerhouse, currently worth $2.5 trillion, bought Zoox for $1.2 billion five years ago as part of its efforts to establish a foothold in other fields of technology.

Amazon-Zoox robotaxis is beginning to give free rides through parts of Las Vegas as part of its driverless service’s launch. (Zoox Inc. via AP)

The Las Vegas market marks Zoox’s first step in its attempt to catch up with robotaxi leader Waymo, a Google spin-off that offers that already provides driverless rides in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin, Texas (where Tesla is still in the testing phase of a robotaxi service that its CEO, Elon Musk, has been hyping for the past decade).

While Waymo implants its driverless technology in vehicles built by traditional automakers, Zoox is manufacturing its distinctively designed robotaxis in a former bus factory located in Hayward, California — about 25 miles southeast of San Francisco.

In a sign of its ambitions, Zoox hopes to manufacture as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually as it expands into other markets. While the company is currently testing its vehicles in San Francisco, it hopes to open up its service to all passengers next year. Some San Francisco passengers who signed up for Zoox’s testing program are expected to be able to start getting driverless rides before the end of this year.

Zoox is currently operating about 50 vehicles in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with most of them in Nevada for now. After it starts charging for rides in San Francisco, Zoox hopes to expand to Austin and Miami next.

By JAMIE STENGLE

DALLAS (AP) — One of the nation’s first doctors accused of illegally providing care to transgender youth under GOP-led bans was found to have not violated the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office says, nearly a year after the state sued the physician.

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Dr. Hector Granados, a pediatric endocrinologist in El Paso, was called a “scofflaw” last year by Paxton’s office in a lawsuit that accused him of falsifying medical records and violating a Texas ban that took effect in 2023. More than two dozen states have prohibitions on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, but Texas was the first to bring cases against doctors, filing lawsuits against Granados and two other providers.

The cases against the other doctors, both in Dallas, remain ongoing. But Paxton’s office quietly withdrew its lawsuit last week against Granados, saying in a statement that “no legal violations were found” following a “review of the evidence and Granados’ complete medical records.”

Granados, who says Paxton’s office never reached out before suing him last October, said he wished the state had first let him show he had stopped providing gender-affirming care for youth before the law took effect.

“It was just out and then we had to do everything afterwards,” Granados said in an interview.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that states can ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and at least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the care. Although those accused of violating bans face criminal charges in some states, they do not in Texas, where the punishments instead expose providers to steep fines and revocation of their medical licenses.

Paxton’s office said in a statement that Dr. May Lau and Dr. M. Brett Cooper, the other accused physicians, will “face justice for hurting Texas kids both physically and mentally.” Their attorneys didn’t offer comment Wednesday.

“Attorney General Paxton will continue to bring the full force of the law against the delusional, left-wing medical professionals guilty of forcing ‘gender’ insanity on our children,” Paxton’s office said.

Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has sought to position himself as a national leader among the GOP’s ascendant hard right and is running for the U.S. Senate.

Trump, in his second term, has launched a broad charge against transgender rights, moving to reverse years of legal and policy gains for transgender Americans. Even in states where the care is allowed under state law, major hospitals and hospital systems have said they were stopping or restricting the care.

Harper Seldin, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said that even when a lawsuit is dropped, it still takes “an enormous toll” on those who have to defend themselves.

“I think this continues to be best understood as part of the Texas AG’s campaign to intimidate medical providers,” he said.

FILE – Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Hector Granados poses for a photo outside his private practice in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton, File)

Granados said he was meticulous in halting gender-affirming care for youth before Texas’ ban took effect. He said that before the ban, treating transgender youth was just an extension of his practice that treats youth with diabetes, growth problems and early puberty.

He said that after the ban, he did continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, but that those treatments were not for gender transition. Granados said they were for youth with endocrine disorders, which occur when hormone levels are too high or too low.

Texas’ lawsuit against Granados called him a “scofflaw who is harming the health and safety of Texas children.” It referenced a 2015 news article about transgender care that quoted Granados and medical articles he had written on the topic. Also listed in the lawsuit were details on unnamed patients, including their ages and what they had been prescribed, including testosterone.

In a court document filed in Cooper’s case, an attorney in Paxton’s office said they had subpoenaed provider reports for the doctor’s testosterone prescriptions from the Texas Prescription Monitoring Program.

FILE – Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Hector Granados speaks during an interview at his private practice in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton, File)

Granados’ attorney, Mark Bracken, said that after entering into an agreed protective order with the state, they were able to confidentially produce patient records to show Granados had complied with the law.

Peter Salib, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said that it’s “unusual” for a state to drop a case due to lack of violations after filing a lawsuit.

“They have a lot of opportunity to find out what is going on before they decide to bring a lawsuit,” he said.

Granados said he’s grateful to no longer have the lawsuit on the back of his mind.

“It always puts a toll on you and how you feel,” he said.

The Big 10 is a powerhouse. As fall arrives, our student athletes will be returning to campuses, and we will have the pageantry of Saturday afternoon football. But the Big 10 is also the educational engine of our nation.

Our 18 member institutions are spread across the country, from Rutgers, New Jersey, to Seattle and Los Angeles. Each fall, in large cities and Midwest college towns, we welcome more than a half-million undergraduate students to our doors. Our collective library (the Big Collection) holds more than a quarter of all the books in all the libraries of North America. We do higher education at a scope and scale unmatched in this country and the world.

Public support for higher education is essential for the collective health of our future society. To be sure, there are many routes our young people can choose in life, including entering the workforce right out of high school, trade schools and higher education. And while some may say academics exist in an ivory tower, the experience of welcoming generations of young people into our institutions each year provides a constant reminder of what is gained by educating young adults to ask why and why not rather than to rely on rote certainty.

As a professor at the University of Illinois, I wear multiple hats. I teach classes that range in size from 60 to nearly 200 students, run a research laboratory that pursues cutting-edge biomedical research and do the service work that help our universities run.

In the classroom, I help students learn how, not what, to think. We live in an age where literal mountains of information are just … available. The trick is knowing what to do with that information. How to navigate what is known, but most importantly how to deal with what is uncertain.

I also run a tissue engineering research lab. Undergraduate students, graduate students seeking a doctorate, and postdoctoral associates (those who have already received a doctorate) work together in teams to develop new biomedical technologies. It is essential young researchers learn how to identify a problem, develop strategies to address it, build teams and assess how well they meet their goals, and overcome failures along the way.

Instead of learning to pattern match, young researchers must learn how to illuminate new spaces and create entirely new connections. And because we work at the edge of what is known, our studies often take us in directions both surprising and entirely different from how we set off.

This fall not only marks a return to classes but also a deadline. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., the person tasked to oversee not only our nation’s health care systems but also our health research infrastructure including the National Institutes of Health, pledged this spring“a massive testing and research effort” that would determine the cause of autism by September.

This statement fundamentally misrepresents how research is done. It offers fast certainty rather than acknowledging and embracing the reality of an unknown horizon. It offers false hope to patients and families. And it mocks the efforts of those who have committed their lives and careers to understanding disease and developing cures.

One of the most important skills I teach young researchers is how to navigate uncertainty. Biology and our bodies are complex. Progress requires understanding what your research does, and often more importantly does not, contribute. Publishing our findings as scientific manuscripts is the currency of academic researchers. Yet a single research project does not, and cannot, solve all things.

So in the discussion section of these manuscripts we identify the new things we have found, describe connections between our findings and the prior work of others, and where we acknowledge what we don’t yet know or what our studies do not allow us to know. The best researchers have the most nuanced discussions that contextualize this uncertainty. This is the truth we offer. Show me a discussion that only offers certainty, and I see a scientist who ether does not understand what they are working on or is too arrogant to admit the things they don’t yet know.

We must all learn to more confidently embrace uncertainty. The world is only getting more complicated and the challenges we face harder. Our young people especially deserve the opportunity to learn how to work on hard problems, to fail, to persist and eventually to make progress.

The health of our society depends on generations of young students equipped to embrace, and succeed in the face of, uncertainty. The Big 10 and our nation’s higher education community provides the tools they need to be able to confront the largest of challenges we all face. To embrace uncertainty and difficult conversations, and come out prepared to co-create a healthier future.

Brendan Harley, Sc.D, is a Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained bioengineer and decorated professor at the University of Illinois who works at the intersection of health, society and our imagination.

 

I have no problem with renaming the Department of Defense into the Department of War, as Donald Trump is trying to do. (It’s technically not up to the president but to Congress, but the Republicans there will oblige him.) After all, that martial label was good enough from George Washington to Harry Truman. And “war” is more honest and descriptive than the somewhat euphemistic “defense.” As Trump put it, “we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” Even that holds water.

But that’s the end of my concurrence with this cosmetic and ridiculous stunt of showmanship. Trump likes to rename things — the Gulf of Mexico/America and such — because doing so looks bold while skirting the complexities and nuances of real policy. Naming is part of turning his presidency into reality TV, and it works to the extent that it grabs our attention. But a new shingle (and URL) outside the Pentagon does not solve the fiendish challenges of running the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard and Space Force. Nor does it signal anything, positive or negative, about strategy.

Strategy — the word comes from the Greek strategos, meaning “general” or “commander” — is the domain that Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, should be concerned with but aren’t. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the continuation by other means of policy — or of politics, the German word Politik could mean either. That has often been misinterpreted as a cynical endorsement of warfare. In fact, Clausewitz meant something closer to the opposite: the need to limit war and subordinate it to achieving clearly defined political objectives. This is what Trump and Hegseth don’t get.

When Trump announced the name change, Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is all-in on Trump’s reality-TV shtick, bloviated again that the new label expresses the “warrior ethos” that he and the president are trying to revive after its alleged near-death under “woke” leaders and elites. The Department of War, Hegseth said, is henceforth about “maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”

To people who think deeply about war, and know that it is hell, this vacuous bellicosity is hard to bear. Christopher Preble, who runs a “grand strategy” program at the Stimson Center in Washington, thinks that the Trump-Hegseth obsession with lethality “risks a focus on killing for killing’s sake, and comes at the expense of strategic clarity.”

Even and especially when a nation has the most powerful military in world history, its leaders need humility and wisdom in deploying that force. America didn’t lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was insufficiently lethal — “because it didn’t kill enough Iraqis and Afghans,” as Preble puts it — but because it lacked a strategy that was well considered, realistic and attainable.

What is observable during the second Trump administration so far is not the alignment of military and other means to clearly defined ends, but random displays of violence intended to shock and awe audiences foreign and domestic and to keep up the ratings on the reality-TV presidency.

Thus, Trump just ordered a military strike on a skiff in the Caribbean, killing the 11 men on board, who may or may not have been drug smugglers and whom Trump called “terrorists.” Normally, the Coast Guard would have picked up and dealt with such people. The strike was almost certainly unlawful (notice Hegseth’s disdain for “tepid legality”). But it made for a suspenseful video clip, which Trump of course shared, hinting of more strikes to come.

He and Hegseth seem equally ready to use war — the word and the threat — at home. The president has already deployed the National Guard in some American cities he considers disloyal, forcing Hegseth’s warriors to take a break from lethality to pick up trash and blow leaves. Chicago could be next and, as Trump posted, is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” He illustrated his threat with an AI image of himself à la Apocalypse Now, with Chicago in the background in place of a burning Vietnam.

This is the same president who habitually confuses aggressor and victim in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who keeps alienating America’s brothers-in-arms, most recently by ending training programs in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, NATO’s front line facing Russia. Who drives a potential ally, India, into the arms of America’s likeliest adversary, China. Who lacks any observable notion of grand strategy — that is, of a plausible plan to Keep America Great and achieve peace through strength.

So go ahead and rename that department. And do prepare for war. But do so with the goal of preventing war, as Harry Truman did when he chose the label “defense” just after witnessing the full genocidal and even nuclear horror of World War II. He and other American leaders of his time had glimpsed hell and wanted to save humanity from it. They hated war far too much to play with the word.

With or without bone spurs, Trump can’t keep impersonating a warrior while calling himself the President of PEACE. And America can’t keep letting him disdain strategy for the sake of show.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.