In a move proponents say will save constituents up to $162.5 million annually, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other New York City officials on Friday unveiled a “click-to-cancel” rule aimed at ensuring people can end online subscriptions as easily as they start them. Days after entering office in January, Mamdani signed a pair of executive orders, “Combating Hidden Junk Fees” and “Fighting…
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On May 21, activists with the Philadelphia chapter of the youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement began a protracted hunger strike, vowing to starve themselves until Mayor Cherelle Parker committed to spending an extraordinary $1.19 billion municipal budget surplus on community programs. They were demanding investments in renewable energy alongside demands not traditionally…
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A new report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) shows that private equity firms now own almost 3 million apartment units in the U.S., which amounts to one in eight apartment units, some 13 percent of apartment units in the country. Approximately half of these units were bought since 2021, highlighting private equity’s turn to the housing market even as the U.S. suffers from a housing…
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Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect. The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption…
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The rise in gas prices happened so quickly, single mom Luna Rosado has barely had time to adjust. Rosado fills her tank twice a week to commute to her two health care jobs and shuttle her three kids to school, basketball and soccer practice. This month, as costs have risen 30 percent after the start of war in Iran, she’s been paying about $40 more a week on gas. That’s $160 less a…
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One online grocery shopper got charged $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins, while another — buying from the same store at the same time — got charged $4.89. A consumer watchdog detected this price discrepancy during an investigation last September in Seattle. The grocery app Instacart used an artificial intelligence-powered algorithm that charged customers differently for each item by as much as…
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