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A young woman and her mother are nervously driving through the night when theyre pulled over by law enforcement. Flashlights in their faces, the women are questioned about whether theyre heading for the border and whether the young woman might be pregnant, before being pulled out of the car.

This political ad, released ahead of the 2020 election, speculated about what a post-Roe v. Wade future might look like as Republican states sought to crack down on abortion ban violators.

In the weeks since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional protection for abortion, the ad went viral, contributing to growing fears of state border checkpoints and widespread data mining to track menstruation and pregnancy outcomes.

But I think the reality is, the vast majority of these criminal cases are going to begin in kind of more mundane and common ways, said Emma Roth, staff attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Despite fears of unconstitutional legal gambits and Big Brother-style tracking, lawyers and experts predict that much of what is expected to unfold over the coming months and years will look very familiar.

More than 1,700 people have faced criminal charges over pregnancy outcomes since 1973, according to NAPW. Like a woman charged with murder for a self-induced abortion in Starr County earlier this year, many pregnant people who get caught up in the criminal justice system are reported to law enforcement by health care workers. Like a woman in Mississippi who was charged with murder after a stillbirth, many people willingly turn over digital records that are used to incriminate them.

Reproductive justice lawyers say they are focused not on preparing for a potential dystopian future like the one presented in the commercial, but on educating health care providers, lawyers and pregnant people about what they can do to protect themselves right now with the rights they still have available to them.

In January, a 26-year-old woman in rural South Texas went to Starr County Memorial Hospital for complications related to a self-managed abortion.

A nurse at the hospital reported her to law enforcement, and in April, the woman was charged with murder and imprisoned on a $500,000 bond. The district attorney later dismissed the charges, acknowledging that Texas law specifically exempts someone who has an abortion from being prosecuted for murder.

Despite the legal missteps, this case tread a very familiar path for pregnancy criminalization.

The most common way that a criminal case begins is that they are reported by a medical provider, Roth said.

Getting an illegal abortion looks very different in 2022 than it did in 1972: Many people who would have turned to surgical abortions can now have pills discreetly mailed to their homes. There are international nonprofits that have publicly flouted state and federal regulations for years to provide these medications to people in states that restrict abortion access.

The two-drug regimen is generally safe and effective, when taken as recommended, but there is always a risk of medical complications.

Advocates worry that people who self-manage an abortion or experience a miscarriage that resembles an abortion may not seek out necessary medical assistance if they fear being prosecuted.

Although Texas abortion law specifically exempts pregnant patients, the Starr County case exemplifies the ways they can still get caught up in the system.

We know that prosecutors are going to try to criminally punish people, irrespective of what the law says, said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel at If/When/How, a reproductive justice legal nonprofit, in an interview last month. For us to be able to resist this criminalization, it is important to note that it is unlawful criminalization. Merely being an act of a prosecutor doesnt mean that its the law.

Pregnant people may also worry about anyone who, in the language of the law, aided and abetted or helped furnish the means for an abortion friends who drove them over state lines, someone who mailed them pills, a doctor who provided an ultrasound to ensure they completed the abortion.

People are living in constant fear [because] they wouldnt want to do anything that would jeopardize the liberty of their loved ones or their medical providers, and as a result, may avoid necessary health care, Roth said.

Prosecutors in five Texas counties have vowed that they will not pursue abortion-related charges, but legislators are already discussing ways they may empower other district attorneys to bring charges outside their jurisdiction.

And Texas abortion laws do not bring only criminal penalties. The trigger law, which goes into effect later this summer to coincide with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, also has civil penalties of at least $100,000 per abortion, and under a law commonly referred to as Senate Bill 8, anyone who aids or abets in a prohibited abortion can be sued for up to $10,000 by any private citizen.

Anti-abortion lawyers have already begun filing pre-lawsuit petitions to depose abortion providers and abortion funders to gain information about potential prohibited abortions, in hopes of bringing lawsuits.

Already, advocacy groups have mobilized resources for people who face prosecution or fear it. If/When/How operates a legal help line that answers questions and helps connect people to legal resources around abortion access. NAPW provides pro bono legal representation to people who are facing criminalization over a pregnancy outcome with the slogan, If you are locked up because you are knocked up call NAPW!

Advocates and lawyers are working to arm health care providers and pregnant patients with information about their rights.

Since Texas current abortion laws do not require providers to report someone they suspect may have undergone an illegal abortion, providers who do proactively report to law enforcement may be in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance clarifying providers obligation under HIPAA, stressing the importance of giving individuals confidence that their protected health information including information relating to abortion and other sexual and reproductive health care, will be kept private.

The guidance makes clear that providers cannot disclose to law enforcement that a patient is considering seeking an illegal or out-of-state abortion, or provide data on all abortions performed at a facility without a court order.

Roth said this is an important message right now, as many health care providers may be inclined to over-report for fear of being criminalized themselves.

They are very concerned about the liability of not reporting, Roth said. I hope that this guidance clarifies that they should also be concerned about being found in violation of federal law if they report when they should not have done so.

But HIPAA does not offer blanket protection to people navigating the health care system.

Law enforcement could also use a court order, a court-ordered warrant, subpoenas and administrative requests to compel a health care provider to release a patients medical records in the case of a suspected illegal abortion, said Rebecca Reingold, associate director of the ONeill Institute for National and Global Health Law. A health care provider could refuse to comply but would likely face fines or penalties for doing so.

HIPAA also applies only to covered entities, like health care providers and insurers. Other health care services, including health tracking apps, are not protected by HIPAA and can potentially leave a trail of breadcrumbs that could help law enforcement identify illegal abortions.

Theres a lot of different ways that we are leaving recorded footprints, both where we go online, but then the real kicker is, where we go in the real world with your location tracking, said Jen King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

This digital footprint trails behind each of us, documenting where we go, what we search, who we text and call, and with services like period tracking apps, when we menstruate or dont menstruate.

Law enforcement can access all of that through warrants or even, depending on who theyre asking, sometimes providers will just hand that information over, King said.

This has led many people to delete their period tracking apps, and Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have introduced a pair of bills that would limit the sale of health and location data collected from smartphones.

But many digital security advocates are pushing back against the idea that the average person using an app to track their period is going to get caught up in a digital dragnet, at least at this point.

Period trackers are not the primary form of digital evidence likely to be used in abortion prosecutions today, said Kendra Albert, a lawyer with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, in a Medium post. If tracking your period is useful to you, you dont need to stop tracking your period, although you may choose to switch to an app that collects less data and stores it locally.

Most often, the trail of information becomes relevant once law enforcement is already investigating a suspected illegal abortion that was reported by friends, family or medical professionals.

In 2017, Latice Fisher delivered a stillborn baby at her home in Mississippi; she was 35 weeks pregnant. Fisher originally told health care professionals that she didnt know she was pregnant.

But when Fisher voluntarily handed her phone over to the police, they found she had googled how to buy abortion-inducing medication 10 days before she gave birth. She was charged with second-degree murder, though there was no concrete evidence that she took the medication.

After Fisher spent several weeks in jail, the district attorney put the case to a second grand jury, which declined to indict her.

Whats really important about that case is that the police didnt need to seek a warrant because she actually willingly handed over her phone, Roth said. Never, ever hand your phone over to law enforcement if they dont have a warrant, and also dont talk to law enforcement without your attorney present.

If someone is actively seeking out an abortion, lawyers and digital security experts recommend taking precautions using a secure browser and relying on encrypted texting services or burner phones for communication, as a starting point.

But for people fearful of potentially needing an abortion in the future, King said, its difficult to fully cover your tracks all the time.

Those are all fingers in the leaking dam, King said. You can try to plug them all, but then youll basically be living like somebody who practices operational security for a living. Thats hard. I dont even do all that.

When you join us at The Texas Tribune Festival Sept. 22-24 in downtown Austin, youll hear from changemakers who are driving innovation, lawmakers who are taking charge with new policies, industry leaders who are pushing Texas forward and so many others. See the growing speaker list and buy tickets.

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Academic Claims Sanctions Have Decimated the Russian Economy According to a paper written by Yale Universitys Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and 18 co-authors, Western sanctions placed on Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine are working as intended and severely damaging the Russian economy.

The paper, titled Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy, is the product of research performed by Yale University academics who used private Russian language and unconventional data sources which included high-frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, and releases from Russias trade partners.

The authors also claim to have used data mining of complex shipping data to create one of the first comprehensive economic analyses measuring Russian current economic activity some five months after the invasion began.

The authors state that, as a result of Western economic sanctions on Russian financial institutions and businesses, the countrys strategic positioning as a commodities exporter has irrevocably deteriorated. Russia now deals from a position of weakness and still faces challenges as it adopts a pivot to Asia approach designed to rely less on trade with the West.

Despite some workarounds and leakiness in international sanctions, the papers authors say that Russian imports have mostly collapsed and Russia now faces major challenges in obtaining technological parts, with widespread supply shortages already hurting its domestic economy.

Self-Sufficiency Delusion

The authors also describe Putins promise of becoming more self-sufficient as a nation as delusional, showing how Russian domestic manufacturing has come to a total standstill with no ability to replace lost businesses, talent, and products. To top it off, the analysis reveals that Russias economy is now struggling with soaring prices and consumer angst.

Russias claims that oil and gas revenues are being used to withstand the effect of the economic sanctions were also shown as lies by the papers authors, and the paper also painted a negative picture of Russias future unless something changes.

Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia, and The Kyiv School of Economics and McFaul-Yermak Working Group have led the way in proposing additional sanctions measures, the paper states, adding that defeatist headlines in the Western press about Russias economy bouncing back are not factual.

The Kremlin, however, has repeatedly painted a very different picture. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that his nations economy would overcome the reckless and insane sanctions levied by Western states. Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that efforts to hurt the Russian economy didnt work and that Russian government authorities and businesses have worked in a composed and professional manner to normalize the economic situation.

We stabilized the financial markets, the banking system, the trade system, he claimed.

Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.

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Putin's Nightmare Has Arrived: Sanctions Creating Economic Oblivion For Russia - 19FortyFive

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Over the past two weeks Ethereums popular ETH coin jumped by nearly half as confidence builds over its hotly anticipated switch, or Merge, to a leaner, more efficient blockchain technology called proof of stake.

Yet its gains pale in comparison to the sudden surge of interest in another, long-forgotten alternative from the very beginning of Ethereums history.

The value of ETC, a kind of illegitimate offspring birthed in 2016, has tripled during the same period and nearly taken out highs last visited in March, according to data from CoinGecko.

Its price surge really began to take off after Vitalik Buterin, Ethereums founder, encouraged users and developerslast weekto migrate back to his original creation if they were not convinced by theupcoming Merge.

Its a very welcoming community, Buterin told the Paris conference. If you like proof of work, you should go use Ethereum Classic, its a totally fine chain.

ETC resulted from the so-called DAO Hack of the Ethereum network in which $60 million was successfully stolen from a decentralized autonomous organization just a year after Buterins creation had first gone live in July 2015at the time a fortune for a fledgling crypto industry.

A vote was held by DAO users responsible for governance decisions, with a majority supporting a hard fork in the chain that would restore investors their stolen money.

Since the decision was highly controversial, another part of the community refused to play along and instead continued with the original chain, known as Ethereum Classic, and its native currency, ETC.

Buterins comments have helped rekindle interest in the ETC cryptocurrency from miners, most of whom have not had it easy with the recent collapse in ETH and now face effectively losing their income entirely.

The reason is that Ethereum, the second most popular blockchain after Bitcoin, will no longer require mining services once it switches to a faster, more efficient technology as part of the Mergetentatively scheduled for Sept. 19.

Replacing them will instead be stakers, who will assume their job maintaining the security of its trustless payment network.

Confronted with the imminent loss of business, mining pool AntPool pledged to invest $10 million on Tuesday to support further development of Ethereum Classic, which is now run independently.

To understand the difference between miners and stakers, its important to first understand the underlying technology.

Normally financial transactions require a trusted counterparty like a bank to ensure both sides of an exchange can fulfill their end of the deal before it clears the trade and credits or debits an account.

Cryptocurrency changes hands on an entirely permissionless basis, however. Complete strangers can buy and sell coins using anonymous wallets without fear of being shortchanged.

Thats because an asset like Bitcoin operates using a shared ledger of transactions distributed to everyone interested in maintaining the network.Business is recorded in the form of blocks on a chain with miners paid newly minted Bitcoin as an incentive to validate each of these immutable entries.

This majority consensus mechanism is known as proof of work (PoW), and it requires an enormous amount of computing power for each miner to keep his or her copy of the ledger always up to date and current.

Because Bitcoins network prioritized security and decentralization above all, it requires enough electricity to power a small country and can only process transactions at a snails pace by todays standards.

Thats why new types of blockchain technology have emerged such as Solana that take a completely opposite approach, using what is known as proof of stake (PoS) to improve energy efficiency and scalability to achieve speeds similar to credit card giant Visa.

Instead of transactions being validated by whoever is willing to set aside their computing power as a mining rig, people stake a certain amount of their own holdings much as they would a security deposit.

The downside to this solution is that more influence is centralized in the hands of a smaller, select number of people who stand to benefit from being the only ones that can reap blockchain rewards by maintaining the network.

There are penalties to ensure the system is not abused, however. In the event of an attack, either staged with intent or permitted through negligence, their staked crypto can be forfeited in part or whole.

Ethereum is now in the process of switching from PoW to its so-called Beacon chain currently running in parallel that uses PoS. Validators that want to earn crypto must agree to first lock up 32 ETH, roughly $55,000 at present value.

For those miners either not willing or able to do so, they can switch to Ethereum Classic.

Theyll definitely welcome proof-of-work fans, Buterin said.

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It was early one morning in 1996 when Andrew Hopkins, then a PhD biophysics student at Oxford University, had a brainwave as he walked home from a late-night lab meeting.

He was trying to find molecules to fight HIV and to better understand drug resistance.

I remember this idea struck me that there must be a better way to do drug discovery other than the complex and expensive way everyone was following, he says. Why couldnt we design an automated approach to drug design that would use all the information in parallel so that even a humble PhD student could create a medicine? That idea really stuck with me. I remember almost the exact moment to this day. And that was the genesis of the idea that eventually became Exscientia.

It was to prove a lucrative brainwave. Hopkins set up the company in 2012 as a spinout from the University of Dundee, where he was by then working as a professor. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are being trained to mimic human creativity, to develop new medicines. This involves the use of automated computer algorithms to sift through large datasets to design novel compounds that can treat diseases, and to help select the right patients for each treatment.

Age 50

Family Married with a 10-year-old daughter. He met his wife, Iva Hopkins Navratilova, at Pfizer. Her business, Kinetic Discovery, merged with his to create the experimental biology labs at Exscientia.

Education Dwr-y-Felin comprehensive and Neath College in south Wales; degree in chemistry at Manchester; doctorate in molecular biophysics at Oxford.

Pay 415,000

Last holiday Czech Republic to visit his wifes family at Easter.

Best advice he has been given My dad worked in a factory. He said to me: Get a good education and get a job you enjoy doing. Its worth an extra six grand a year. And I definitely got a job I enjoy doing.

Biggest career mistake Its too early to tell. He quotes Miles Davis: Its not the note you play thats the wrong note its the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

Words he overuses Fundamentally; the heart of the matter.

How he relaxes Reading and dog walking. I am a bibliophile. I immerse myself in books to relax.

This approach drastically cuts the time of drug development. Hopkins says that for Exscientias pipeline it has typically taken 12 to 15 months from starting a project to identifying a drug candidate, compared with four and a half years in the traditional pharmaceutical industry.

The average cost of developing a medicine is $2bn, according to Deloittes latest pharma report, and many drugs fail the failure rate is 90% for medicines that are in early clinical studies (where they are tested on humans).

Typically, pharma companies make 2,500 compounds to test them against a specific disease, while AI enables Oxford-based Exscientia to whittle down that number to about 250, Hopkins says. Its a much more methodical approach.

Last autumn, the Welsh scientist became one of Britains richest entrepreneurs, with a paper fortune of 400m after the company achieved a $2.9bn stock market debut on Nasdaq in New York, making it one of Britains biggest biotech firms. Hopkinss stake of nearly 16% is now worth 170m, as the share price has lost 60% of its value in a bloodbath for Wall Street stocks.

Exscientia was part of a transatlantic trend that is defying government attempts to build a biotech powerhouse in the UK. Abcam, a pioneering Cambridge antibody company, recently announced it was moving its stock market listing from the UK to the US. We are a British company; we choose to be in Oxford because we can attract global talent, Hopkins says. But to be seen as a global company, we listed on what is the global technology index, which is Nasdaq. What we have now is an incredibly international shareholder base from across the world.

The business came up with the first AI-designed drug to enter clinical trials a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder in partnership with Japans Sumitomo, although Sumitomo later decided not to proceed with it. The Japanese firm is currently studying another drug developed by Exscientia, for the treatment of Alzheimers disease psychosis, in early human trials.

Hopkins, now 50, fell in love with science thanks to an inspirational chemistry teacher. He has worked as a scientist since the age of 16, when he did a stint in industrial chemistry at the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales, which he says taught him about the benefits of automation in boosting productivity.

He spent nearly a decade at the US drug giant Pfizer, where he was on a data warehouse project that led to some of the first machine-learning applications in the pharmaceutical industry, with the findings published in Nature in 2006.

During the subsequent five years at Dundee University, he further researched applying data mining and machine learning to drug discovery. He says being a professor is actually one of the best jobs in the world and gave him the freedom to research AI methods at length. He maintains his links with the university, where he is honorary chair of medicinal informatics at the School of Life Sciences.

Exscientia (which means from knowledge in Latin) soon moved to the Schrdinger Building at the Oxford science park, and now employs 450 people worldwide, from Vienna to Boston, Miami and Osaka, equally split between AI engineering, chemistry and biology.

It is building a new robotics laboratory at Milton Park near Oxford, focused on the automation of chemistry and biology to accelerate drug development and its declared goal is drugs designed by AI, made by robot. Other pharma companies have also introduced some automation into their processes, but generally lab technology is similar to how it was when he was a student in the 1990s, Hopkins says.

The firm is involved in 30 projects, some in partnership with big pharmaceutical companies including Frances Sanofi and the US firm Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). It is also working with Oxford University on developing medicines that target neuroinflammation for the treatment of Alzheimers disease. Among the firms solo projects, a cancer drug for solid tumours is about to go into early clinical trials.

Exscientia is also working on a broader coronavirus pill to rival Paxlovid, the Covid-19 treatment made by Hopkinss former employer Pfizer. This work is funded by a $1.5m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which took a stake in Exscientia. The companys other investors include BMS, Celgene (now a BMS subsidiary) and Germanys Evotec, as well as Japans Softbank, the US fund manager BlackRock and the life science investor Novo Holdings.

Hopkins says the team has identified a set of molecules that could work as a broader treatment for Covid-19, new mutations and other coronaviruses, and that there will be more news later this year. The firm is aiming for a low-cost pill that could be distributed globally and given quickly to people who fall ill to prevent serious illness and hospitalisation. Covid-19 infections are rising again in 110 countries and the World Health Organizations director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned that the pandemic is far from over.

Firms across the pharmaceutical industry have started using AI in recent years. AstraZeneca is investing heavily in it for its entire research and development infrastructure, and GSK has built an AI team of 120 engineers, with plans to reach 160 next year, making it the largest such in-house team in the industry.

AI systems require a lot of computing power and enormous datasets. Their use should boost the number of new drugs being approved every year typically 40 to 50 in the US to many more. Hopkins confidently predicts: This is the way all drugs will be designed in the future. In the next decade, this technology will become ubiquitous.

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