On Our Radar

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

The present, however, can be brutal. To my mind, the week’s most important tech story was the slaying of an 18-year-old woman at a BART station in San Francisco’s East Bay, just a few miles from Silicon Valley, as she was getting off a train. Nia Wilson was traveling with her older sisters Lahtifa and Nishiya when, in a shocking act of terror, a man slashed her neck. She died at the scene. Lahtifa Wilson was wounded. A transient with a history of violence has been arrested.

How does this relate to tech?

Portland officials are weighing an ambitious plan to pump more cash into programs intended to benefit residents displaced from the city’s historically black neighborhoods.

What can we learn from footage that captures the hazards of shopping (or barbecuing, or swimming, or sleeping) while black?

This season, a string of recordings documenting quotidian social aggressions has been accumulating in our social-media feeds, clip by clip, like some portentous summer garland. The videos are shakily produced—shot by the rightfully indignant, who, in a matter of minutes, have realized that they must take up the role of gonzo filmmaker in order to protect reputations, freedoms, and, potentially, lives. They have a sick synchronicity, revealing an irrefutable pattern of behavior in their protagonists. Let’s call them the cop-calling tapes.

Amazon.com’s facial recognition tools incorrectly identified Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and 27 other members of Congress as people arrested for a crime during a test commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the watchdog said Thursday.

Here’s how one socialist sums up his beliefs:

“I think we just need to realize that the end goal is, ultimately, like social control of the means of production,” said Joe Cernelli, a founding member of that West Virginia DSA chapter. “You know we don’t just want to improve capitalism, we will ultimately want to get rid of it.”

In the past decade, nearly 26,000 murders have gone without an arrest in major American cities. Of those, more than 18,600 of the victims — almost three?quarters — were black.

Bias in land use decisions is difficult to measure, but new research in Durham reveals that race has been a significant factor.

Alissa Quart’s new book chronicles the pain of a disgruntled class that could change the country’s political landscape.

Opportunity Zones, created by Trump’s tax law, are meant to help the heartland thrive and make the country more equal—but can they pull it off?

Women of color, particularly black and Hispanic women, are less likely to obtain U.S. patent rights than white women and men, even as they are leading in the growth of new female-owned businesses over the last two decades, according to a new study.

A new report by the Pew Research Center looks at who gained the most ground since the Great Recession.

Massachusetts’ antiquated zoning laws have fueled a housing crisis, write Rachel Heller and Marc Draisen, that the Legislature has an opportunity to remedy.

Sometimes, it pays off to sweat the small stuff.