The race is on: In the week since Amazon announced it’s seeking cities to bid on the company’s planned second headquarters, at least 101 municipalities in the U.S. and Canada have indicated interest in the megaproject, The Seattle Times reports. The cities range from big metros like Chicago to smaller towns in North Carolina. Some Baton Rouge Metro Council members even joined Mayor Sharon Weston Broome in putting forth a resolution expressing the city-parish’s interest in the project. Still, it’s unclear how many of the prospective bidders will send Amazon formal paperwork by the company’s Oct. 19 deadline. Some—including Baton Rouge—don’t appear to fit the criteria Amazon laid out for its second home. Read more.
Cuts on the horizon: Louisiana is poised to get about $307,000 for outreach efforts to help people sign up for the Affordable Care Act—an 80% decrease from last year and 49% less than the national average, The Washington Post reports. The funding typically goes toward “navigators” or grassroots organizations that assist with ACA outreach efforts. But The Washington Post reports it obtained a document that shows the Trump administration plans to cut the funding for such efforts by 41%, with states in the South and Midwest seeing the largest cuts. Many ACA supporters have called the move another attempt at making health care marketplaces fail while Health and Human Services officials have said the outreach efforts are a waste of taxpayers’ money. Read more.
Coming to light: Credit agency Equifax traced the theft of sensitive information about 143 million Americans to a software flaw that could have been fixed well before the burglary occurred. Equifax identified a weakness in an open-source software package called Apache Struts as the technological crack that allowed hackers to heist Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and full legal names from a massive database maintained primarily for lenders. The disclosure, made late Wednesday, cast the company’s damaging security lapse in an even harsher light. The software problem was detected in March and a recommended software patch was released shortly afterward. Equifax said the database intrusion began in May and continued until July. Read more.
