Overnight campers run up high electricity bill at York Public Library; WGME, July 29, 2026

Brad Rogers , WGME; Overnight campers run up high electricity bill at York Public Library

"The York Public Library is being used as an overnight campsite, and now, it's costing taxpayers money.

People were caught camping Monday morning in the far end of the parking lot at the York Public Library, after a camping app posted online about what a great place it was to camp...

"It's a great place to come," Sampson said. "We've got AC. We've got heat when it's cold. We've got Wi-Fi and all the good things. Laundromat right across the way, too."

The campers might explain the high electric bill the library just got: $300 to $500 more than last summer.

The library now has locks on its outlets, “No camping” signs on order and the town has told the app to take them off it."

IRS plan to scan your face prompts anger in Congress, confusion among taxpayers; The Washington Post, January 27, 2022

Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; IRS plan to scan your face prompts anger in Congress, confusion among taxpayers

"The $86 million ID.me contract with the IRS also has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans’ facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared. While the IRS couldn’t say what percentage of taxpayers use the agency’s website, internal data show it is one of the federal government’s most-viewed websites, with more than 1.9 billion visits last year."

Rumored executive order would change landscape of UC subscription partnerships; The Daily Californian, January 30, 2020

Alexandra Casey, The Daily Californian; Rumored executive order would change landscape of UC subscription partnerships

"Prominent Nobel laureate and chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs Rich Roberts has no online access to a paper he co-authored because his institution lacks a subscription to academic journal Nature Microbiology.

Roberts is one of 21 American Nobel laureates who submitted an open letter to President Donald Trump on Monday urging him to approve a rumored plan to make federally funded research free of cost and immediately accessible after publication. UC Berkeley’s Randy Schekman, who founded eLife — an open access scientific journal — led the Nobel laureates in their letter...

“This would effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free,” according to the letter from the publishers. “This risks reducing exports and negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration has negotiated with our trading partners.”

The letter added that the cost shift could place an “additional burden” on taxpayers and undermine both the marketplace and American innovation."