Washington Post

President Trump blasted reporting from Puerto Rico as ‘fake news.’ Heeding it might have saved lives.

[Commentary] When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico last fall, President Donald Trump playfully lobbed rolls of paper towels to those taking shelter. What if the reporting on the ground had been taken seriously — as something to be heeded, and reacted to, instead of summarily dismissed? What if the president had pushed for help from wherever it could be found, including from outside the overstressed federal agency? 

Justice Department to appeal its loss in the AT&T-Time Warner trial

The Justice Department filed an appeal challenging its loss in the AT&T-Time Warner antitrust trial. AT&T completed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner a few weeks ago after a federal judge rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the deal would be anti-competitive. “My guess is that the government is going to try to show that a lot of important evidence was rejected by the judge, and the judge put too much weight on the testimony of the merging parties," said Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust official who now leads Public Knowledge. 

Robocalls are getting worse. And some big businesses soon could start calling you even more.

Robocalls ravaged Americans’ smartphones in record numbers in June. But some of the nation’s top businesses – from credit card companies and student lenders to retailers and car dealers – are still urging the Trump administration to make it easier for them to dial and text mobile devices en masse. For many smartphone owners, there’s rarely a day that they don’t receive an unanticipated call from an unrecognized number, some sporting an area code that’s suspiciously similar to their own. In June, robocalls rang an estimated 4 billion times.

In America’s tech capital, tens of thousands go without home Internet. Here’s how San Francisco wants to fix it.

Despite being awash in tech start-ups and the latest innovations, San Francisco has a surprising lack of connectivity. As many as 1 in 8 people  — more than 100,000 residents — don’t subscribe to home Internet, city officials say. To close that digital divide, the local government has come up with an entrepreneurial solution: Build a high-speed network of its own that could compete with the likes of AT&T and Comcast. If the estimated $1.9 billion proposal is approved, San Francisco would become the biggest U.S.