Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. "If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse," reports the Washington Post.

But then Mississippi's warehouse-managing contractor implemented a new computer system that wasn't compatible with the state's delivery system (like they'd promised it would be back in 2023). And then things got even worse... "The problem, business owners allege, is that the company tore out the conveyor belts but didn't hire humans to replace them."

In February a state Revenue Department commissioner told lawmakers the state was hiring temporary replacement workers, but in the five weeks through March 29th they'd only managed to reduce "pending" orders by 21.7%, from 218,851 down to 171,190, according to stats from Mississippi Today. At least four Mississippi businesses are now suing the warehouse operator "claiming breach of contract and harm to their business."

So what's it like in a state suddenly running dry? The Washington Post reports: Willie the one-eyed skeleton is dressed for Cinco de Mayo, but the liquor store where Willie sits ran out of Jose Cuervo months ago. Arrow Wine and Spirits is also out of Tito's and Burnett's vodka, Franzia boxed wine, Jack Daniels, and every kind of premixed margarita... Restaurants in Jackson had no wine on Valentine's Day, and bars on the Gulf Coast ran dry before Mardi Gras. At least five liquor shops have closed, and if cheap pints don't hit the corner stores soon, many of them will, too...

[A]s both the state and its businesses lose millions in revenue, many say they see no real end to the crisis. Nearly 174,000 cases of alcohol are sitting in a warehouse north of Jackson, but no one seems to know how to get them out the door... Even the shops that have received deliveries say they often get the wrong thing — Jell-O shots, for instance, that should have been small-batch Norwegian gin...
At Willie the one-eyed skeleton's liquor store they'd previously made 300 to 400 sales a day, according to the article, but last week had 34 customers. And Mississippi is one of 17 U.S. states requiring liquor stores to buy their liquor from distribution centers controlled by the state's Department of Revenue...

Mississippi Today points out that while some want the state to finally privatize liquor distribution, "The state collects around $120 million a year in taxes on alcohol." Plus the state has already authorized "borrowing $95 million to construct a new warehouse, set to begin operations in 2027..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jrnvk for sharing the news.

Forbes estimates he's worth roughly $110 billion, "placing him ahead of Bill Gates."

And now Changpeng Zhao, the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, "has written a memoir..." It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese.... Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump...

In Zhao's telling, the case brought by multiple U.S. agencies was less about what Binance had done than about what it had become... "It didn't make sense to me, or any of my lawyers. Other than the fact that we were the biggest in the industry." The U.S. government alleged something more specific: that Binance failed to implement programs to prevent or report suspicious transactions — including those tied to Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades, Al Qaeda, and ISIS — while also processing trades between U.S. users and those in sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran, North Korea, and Syria. In total, regulators alleged the exchange willfully failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions, including those involving terrorist organizations, ransomware attackers, child sexual exploitation material, frauds and scams... The final settlement amount — $4.3 billion, split across the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission — was the largest corporate penalty in the history of nearly each agency involved. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time of the announcement: "Binance became the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed."

The prison passages are among the most vivid in the book. Zhao says he was worried about extortion because the media had reported he was the richest person in U.S. prison history, but then realized no one read the WSJ or Bloomberg or recognized him. Zhao also writes about the food, the routines and the specific indignity of confinement, including sharing a cell with a man serving 30 years for killing two people... Writes Zhao of his cellmate, "Soon, I discovered that the most lethal thing about him wasn't his murder conviction, it was his snoring. He snored more loudly than thunder strikes, the sound of which rose even above the constant toilet flushings."
Binance at one point held a roughly 20% stake in Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX and about $580 million in FTT tokens, the article points out. "As FTX neared collapse in late 2022, Zhao writes, Sam Bankman-Fried called to ask for a couple of billion dollars 'nonchalantly, as if he was asking for a bologna sandwich.'

"Some believe that Binance's brief show of interest in acquiring FTX, followed by its abrupt withdrawal from the deal, hastened FTX's spiral into bankruptcy..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system "Pix", developed by the country's central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments. Latin America has been able to build up sleek and effective payment systems in record time because it is not held back by legacy payment technology that isn't built for instant money movement. In the likes of the U.K., U.S. and Europe, payment systems are built on infrastructure that is often decades old. The process of building new systems is therefore incredibly operationally complex. Money must continue moving, so these systems can't just be "switched off."

Emerging markets, such as those in Latin America, did not have to contend with legacy technology on the same scale. Many of these communities were cash dominant until recently, due to the high fees associated with card usage and the lack of banking infrastructure in rural regions. However, while many people didn't have a local bank on their corner, they did have mobile phones... Through these digital channels, money moves instantly, via account-to-account transfers, QR codes and mobile wallets... Beyond this, real-time and traceable digital payments generate valuable cash-flow data that can transform credit underwriting for small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs. Historically, many SMEs in emerging and cash-reliant markets have struggled to access credit due to a lack of documented transaction histories, audited accounts or formal credit records...

Mexico is now poised to be the next success story. In Mexico, a third of people are unbanked, but 96% of the population owns a mobile phone. This creates the perfect launchpad for a digital-first payment system that can reach those historically excluded from traditional banking systems.
In fact, something already changed in 2025. Bloomberg reports that for the first time, digital payment transfers in the U.S.-to-Mexico remittance corridor exceeded cash transfers (with physical pickup locations like Western Union), according to Mexico's central bank. It's part of a Latin American market "worth more than $160 billion a year, roughly $62 billion of which goes to Mexico."

And Mexico's digitalization efforts will continue, according to the country's president, who said at a March banking conference that digital payments will now be encouraged for gasoline and tolls.

Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi.

"U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi's ruling means a Monday arraignment hearing for Kalshi has been called off." The order was issued in a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration. The judge's order said the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sufficiently shown that "event contracts" fall within the Commodity Exchange Act's definition of "swaps," and that it had demonstrated a reasonable chance of success in showing that the act preempts Arizona law... The commission had sued Arizona in response to cease-and-desist letters sent to Kalshi from state gambling regulators and the criminal charges filed against the prediction market operator. The commission argued Arizona is intruding on its exclusive federal power to regulate national swaps markets...

Earlier this month, the federal government filed lawsuits against Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois challenging their efforts to regulate prediction market operators. The Trump administration has so far backed the platforms. President Donald Trump's eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump's social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict.
Federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts have now issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports being in their states, according to the article, "while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi."

And Arizona's attorney general's office said it disagrees with the court's ruling and "will evaluate our next steps."

It's the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab.

They noted that one of the picketer's signs read "Thoughts not bots," : On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica's headquarters in New York City's Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication's offices in Chicago and Washington D.C...

The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica's management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking "just cause" protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption... Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a "unilateral implementation of AI policy." The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language... A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild's contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning...

Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won't be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms. "We're going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces," she said. For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild's initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training.
"Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal..." according to the article.

Phoronix staged "a showdown" between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04. JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications... Google Chrome 147 came in at 1.47x the performance of Mozilla Firefox 149. A very strong showing for Google's web browser and to not much surprise Google engineers have been heavily involved in JetStream 3 as part of its open governance model. Chrome debuts very well on JetStream 3 while it will be interesting to see what optimizations Mozilla engineers pursue in the months ahead...

In the recent Speedometer 3.1 benchmark update that is focused on browser responsiveness, Chrome was at 1.24x the performance of Firefox... Firefox picked up wins in the MotionMark and StyleBench browser benchmarks. Google Chrome meanwhile continued to dominate in the JavaScript heavy benchmarks... In some of the WebAssembly benchmarks, there was at least some healthy competition between Firefox and Chrome on Linux.

Across the web browser benchmarks, the Core Ultra X7 358H power consumption came in at 11.44 Watts on average for Chrome and 11.74 Watts for Firefox. Quite close. The slight CPU power difference may come down to the CPU usage with Chrome coming in slightly lower at 8.13% on average to 8.35% with Firefox. Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued (PDF) to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC. The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.

The legal saga began in US District Court for the Northern District of California. On March 12, the anonymous Reddit user whose information is being sought filed a motion (PDF) to quash a summons seeking a host of information from Reddit. The summons was issued by the Department of Homeland Security and directed Reddit to turn information over to an ICE senior special agent. The summons cited authority under 19 U.S. Code 1509, which is part of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The motion to quash said the summons is not authorized by the law, which deals with imports of boats, alcoholic drinks, and animals, among other things.

"J. Doe is a US citizen who has not traveled out of the country, is not engaged in any international commerce, has no business concerns outside the United States, and primarily uses their Reddit account to engage in political speech relevant to their local community," said the filing by the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), which represents the Reddit user. "Yet the government claims the right to obtain Doe's name, telephone number, home address, banking and credit card information, IP addresses, telephone model number(s), and the names of any other accounts associated with their Reddit account. The information sought by the government in no way pertains to customs or importing or exporting merchandise, and is clearly intended to chill free speech." "We should be very, very, very concerned that they've now taken one of these to a grand jury," said David Greene, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's something to be taken very seriously."

A Reddit spokesperson told Ars today that "we seek to inform users of any legal process compelling disclosure of their data, as we did in this case, because users should have the agency to protect their own information and are often better positioned to challenge requests that impact them."

"We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest. We review every inquiry for legal sufficiency and routinely object to requests that are overbroad or threaten civil rights. When legally compelled to disclose data, we provide only the minimum required and notify the user whenever possible so they can defend their interests."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the Trump administration seeks to fill a national shortage of air traffic controllers, officials are targeting a new talent pool: gamers. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday is making a recruiting push aimed at avid players of video games, as the agency strives to fill thousands of vacancies that lawmakers have said leave the traveling public less safe. In a new YouTube ad, the agency is using flashy graphics and the promise of six-figure salaries to convince video game enthusiasts to apply their trigger fingers in service of air safety.

In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a target demographic for recruiters at a number of federal agencies, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security. They are welcomed for their hand-eye coordination, quick decision-making in complex environments and ability to remain focused on screens for hours on end. "To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. Focusing recruiting efforts on gamers, he added, "taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller."

[...] The F.A.A. plans to begin prioritizing recruiting gamers over more traditional avenues like college fairs, officials said, pointing out that only 25 percent of controllers have a traditional college degree, while the vast majority appear to have logged hours gaming. During the presidential transition in 2024, incoming Trump administration officials polled about 250 new air traffic academy graduates over six weeks. Only two of those interviewed were not gamers, according to F.A.A. officials [...]. Students who failed out of the training academy were not similarly queried, officials said, though they have plans to conduct more comprehensive exit interviews in the future. Still, the overwhelming presence of gaming habits among graduates tracked with what they were hearing anecdotally from controllers already certified to work in towers and other air traffic facilities, the officials said, many of whom liked to play video games during breaks in their shifts.

NASA's Artemis II crew safely splashed down off the California coast after completing a 10-day trip around the moon and back. "This is not just an accomplishment for NASA," sad NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "This is an accomplishment for humanity, again, a historic mission to the moon and back." From a report: Isaacman is aboard the USS John. P Murtha Navy recovery vessel, where the astronauts will be brought once they've been retrieved from the Orion capsule, and he shared "there is a lot to celebrate right now on on a mission well accomplished for Artemis II."

Isaacman also complimented the crew as "absolutely professional astronauts, wonderful communicators and almost poets" "" as well as "ambassadors from humanity to the stars." "I can't imagine a better crew than the Artemis II crew that just completed a perfect mission right now. We are back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them back safely.

This is just the beginning. We are going to get back into doing this with frequency, sending missions to the moon until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base." Isaacman also said it's time to start preparing for Artemis III, expected to launch in 2027. You can watch the moment of the splashdown here.

Futurism found that Google News is surfacing Polymarket betting pages alongside traditional news sources. "The bets often appear in the 'For you' section of Google News, which is tailored to a user's personal interests," the publication reports. "In one instance, it was even the very top result, as with this bet on the price of Bitcoin." From the report: In our testing, Polymarket bets are also showing up on the Google News home page. But links from the prediction market can pop up all over Google News, including in searches. In further tests, looking up "will ships transit the strait," referring to the Strait of Hormuz, returned numerous credible sources like Financial Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. Just below them, however, was a Polymarket bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical oil passageway.

This doesn't appear to be an accident. When searching "Polymarket" in its search bar, Google News now allows users to choose it as a "source," directing them to a page that aggregates other Polymarket hits. It's not the only non-news site that's selectable as a source -- looking up "Reddit" and "X" offers the option, too -- but searching for "Kalshi," another prediction market and Polymarket's main competitor, doesn't give the option to use it as a source. [...] In light of all this, Polymarket appearing in Google News is a major victory for the prediction platform -- rubber-stamping its image as an authority on developing real-world events right alongside genuine real publishers of journalism.

France says it plans to move some government computers from Windows to Linux as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on U.S. technology. TechCrunch reports: In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to "regain control of our digital destiny" by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn't have control over its data and digital infrastructure. The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering. Microsoft did not immediately comment on the news.

[...] France's decision to ditch Windows comes months after the government announced it would stop using Microsoft Teams for video conferencing in favor of French-made Visio, a tool based on the open source end-to-end encrypted video meeting tool Jitsi. The French government said it also plans to migrate its health data platform to a new trusted platform by the end of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation's peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop in "general fertility" from 2024 to 2025 is part of a long-running downward trend. "Since 2007, there's been a decline in the general fertility rate [in the U.S.] of 23%," Hamilton told NPR.

The impact of that change in real numbers is sizable: In 2007, there were 4,316,233 babies born. Last year, even though the nation's population as a whole is larger, there were only 3,606,400 newborns. There's no consensus over why women and couples have shifted their behavior so significantly. Some experts point to economic factors, others say cultural influences, and better access to education and contraception for women are driving the change. "We're seeing big drops in fertility rates for young women, teenagers and women in their 20s," said economist Martha Bailey, head of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. "What's not yet clear is whether or not those same women will go on to have children later on."

"People are having the number of children they want and that they can afford at a time that makes the most sense for them," she said. "What I don't think anyone is in favor of is a Handmaid's Tale type policy regime, where we're trying to talk families into having children they don't want."

One silver lining in the data is the 7% decline in teen pregnancies in 2025. Bianca Allison, pediatrician and associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said: "What is actually affecting the birth rates are likely lower rates of teen pregnancy overall, which is in the context of higher use of contraception and lower sexual activity for youth, and then also continued access to abortion care."

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem.

The company also points to Microsoft's aggressive rollout of Copilot as another example of platform power being used to push Microsoft services. Copilot appeared pinned to the taskbar, arrived automatically on many systems with Microsoft 365, and even received a dedicated keyboard key on some laptops. Mozilla argues that when the maker of the dominant desktop operating system promotes its own browser and AI tools at the system level, it becomes far harder for independent browsers like Firefox to compete.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere's authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF) -- far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide "the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair" of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment's software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday's settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward. The report notes that a judge's approval of the settlement is still required but likely to happen. John Deere also faces another lawsuit by the U.S. FTC, accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs.

The FBI says (PDF) Iran-linked hackers disrupted internet-connected systems used by U.S. oil, gas, and water companies. Even with the recent two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States and Israel, hackers backing Tehran say they won't end their retaliatory cyberattacks. The Hill reports: The report warned that similar companies across the country should be aware of an increased push by hackers to take over programmable logic controller (PLC) systems, which can be used to digitally control physical machinery from remote locations. Secure internet access for PLCs from one company, Rockwell Automation, were removed by Iran-linked coders who then "maliciously interacted with project files and altered data," according to the report. Hackers first gained access to some of the platforms in January of last year. All access to compromised platforms ended in March, the report said. The FBI said the move resulted in "operational disruption" and "financial loss."

[...] Rockwell Automation wasn't the only company to recently face cyberattacks from Iran-linked hackers. Stryker, a major U.S. medical device maker, was targeted by Iran-affiliated coders in mid-March. It was unclear if physical operations were affected by the security breach. FBI Director Kash Patel was personally impacted by hackers who leaked his emails and records related to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago. [...]

The FBI urged companies to adopt network defenders and multifactor authentication to prevent future attacks. Tuesday's report was published alongside the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "Government and experts have been warning about internet connected systems for years, and how vulnerable they are," one source familiar with the federal investigation into the hacks told CNN. Many companies have "ealready removed those systems and followed the guidance," the person added.