General Motors said Friday it had stopped sharing details of how people drove their cars with two data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry.

The decision followed a New York Times report this month that GM had been sharing data on drivers’ mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the insurance industry for years. The drivers were enrolled — some unknowingly, they said — in OnStar Smart Driver, a feature in GM’s Internet-connected cars that collected data about how the car was driven and promised feedback and digital badges for good driving behavior.

Some drivers said their insurance rates increased as a result of the data collected, which GM shared with two brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk. The companies then sold the data to insurance companies.

As of Wednesday, “OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer shared with LexisNexis or Verisk,” GM spokeswoman Malorie Lucich said in an emailed statement. “Customer trust is a priority for us and we are actively reviewing our privacy processes and policies.”

Romeo Chicco, a Florida man whose insurance rates nearly doubled after his Cadillac collected his driving records, filed a complaint this month seeking class-action status against GM, OnStar and LexisNexis.

An internal document reviewed by The Times found that more than eight million vehicles were included in Smart Driver as of 2022. An employee familiar with the program said the company’s annual revenue from Smart Driver was in the low millions of dollars.

A federal court on Friday temporarily halted new Securities Exchange Commission rules requiring publicly traded companies to make more disclosures about the business risks they face from climate change. They sided with two oil and gas companies who criticized the requirements as costly and arbitrary.

Approved by the SEC this month, the rules require some publicly traded companies to disclose their climate risks, and how much greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Industry groups and their political allies have filed numerous lawsuits challenging the regulations.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents a broad cross-section of industries, filed suit this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit seeking to halt the rules, calling them unconstitutional. Ten Republican-led states have also filed suit to block the rules.

The emergency reprieve granted Friday by Fifth Circuit judges came in a case brought by two fracking companies, Liberty Energy and Nomad Proppant Services. “There is no clear authority for the SEC to effectively regulate the controversial issue of climate change,” the two companies wrote in their petition. They were “arbitrary and capricious,” the two companies said, and violated the First Amendment, which protects free speech, by “effectively mandating discussions about climate change.”

Moreover, the rules would cost companies “irreparable harm in the form of irreparable compliance costs,” they said.

Climate disasters, including extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, are taking an increasing toll on both people and businesses around the world. In 2023, the United States experienced a record 28 weather and climate disasters, each costing at least $1 billion. This was reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last year that losses could arise from climate change “cascade through the financial system.”

Environmental groups have also challenged the rules, saying the SEC has not gone far enough in protecting investors.

“As climate impacts like wildfires, floods and drought disrupt every facet of the U.S. economy, the SEC has chosen to bury its head in the sand rather than require companies to demonstrate the full climate risks they pose,” says Hana Vizcarra, an attorney at Earthjustice, which along with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups also sued the SEC

The SEC had initially proposed that large companies would be required to disclose planet-warming emissions not only from their own operations, but also from the emissions produced in a company’s so-called “value chain” – a term that encompasses everything everything from the parts or services purchased from other suppliers to how people who use the products ultimately dispose of them.

But after objections from companies, the SEC dropped that requirement and, under the final rules, only required the largest companies to report their direct emissions, and only if they determined the emissions would impact their bottom line. These rules gave companies a lot of leeway and exempted thousands of smaller companies. But some companies, including the fracking companies that won the court’s stay, still believed they went too far.

The Fifth Circuit granted the emergency stay over objections from the SEC, which had argued that the request was premature. Companies would not be required to provide climate information before March 2026.

Tesla was forced to halt production at its assembly plant outside Berlin early Tuesday after someone set fire to a nearby electricity pylon, sparking a blaze that cut off electricity to the factory and the surrounding region, police said.

Brandenburg police said they responded to the fire in a power pole in a field near the Tesla factory. The building was not damaged by the fire, but it did cause power outages in the central and wider region, where around 60,000 people live.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokeswoman for the US carmaker confirmed to German media that production had been halted and all employees had been evacuated. According to Tesla, about 12,500 people work at the plant, but not all of them would have been present when the power went out.

By early afternoon, residents reported that power had been restored in some areas.

Authorities said investigators from the Brandenburg State Bureau of Criminal Investigation had begun an investigation but urged speculation about who might be behind the arson, even as social media exploded with accusations blaming environmentalists.

Since last week, several dozen protesters have camped in huts and platforms built into the branches of trees in a wooded area next to the factory Tesla built. would like to destroy to build a railway yard, warehouses and educational facilities.

Last month, 65 percent of eligible voters in Grünheide, the community surrounding the factory, cast their votes against Tesla’s expansion plans. The vote was non-binding, but local officials said they would comply by going back to the drawing board to try to find an acceptable solution.

Environmental protesters have said they fear state and local governments, which have worked to lure Tesla to the site in 2022 and celebrated the economic benefits it has brought to the region, will override citizens’ wishes.

Brandenburg’s top security official, Interior Minister Michael Stübgen, condemned the suspected arson. “If the initial findings are confirmed, this is an insidious attack on our electricity infrastructure,” Mr Stübgen said. “This will have consequences.”

Tesla’s assembly plant in Grünheide is the company’s only one in Europe. It has a capacity to build about 500,000 cars a year, but the company is keen to double that. 1 million cars a year – more than the 800,000 Volkswagen produces at its long-standing factory in Wolfsburg.

A leading Berlin daily, Tagesspiegel, said a group calling itself “Vulkangruppe” and identifying itself as linked to the anti-fascist movement had sent a letter to the newsroom claiming responsibility for the attack.

“Turn off Tesla,” the letter said. according to the paper. A group of far-left extremists trading under the same name claimed responsibility for a 2021 attack that cut power to the Tesla factory construction site. That same year, security officials in the state of Brandenburg named the group in their annual report for committing several arson attacks in Greater Berlin.

Americans will get their first look at the likely presidential rematch coming this fall as President Biden and Donald J. Trump make dueling visits to the Texas border on Thursday, a rare convergence on the campaign trail that shows how volatile and powerful a political issue immigration is. has already become the 2024 race.

For Mr. Trump, the border is a familiar backdrop and almost represents the background music of his candidacy as he warns of a nation moving out of reach and an “invasion” that he vows to stop. For Mr Biden, immigration represents a major vulnerability as border crossings reached a record high in late 2023 and images of mass migration and its consequences have become fixtures in the news.

Republicans have long had a political advantage on this issue, with the Republican Party’s advantage growing even greater recently. According to the NBC News poll at the time, Trump gained as much as 16 percentage points more confidence on immigration in the fall of 2020. That margin has more than doubled to 35 percentage points from January – the biggest advantage either Mr Biden or Mr Trump had on any of the nine issues tested.

But Biden allies believe that the recent decision by Republican congressional leaders — at Mr. Trump’s urging — to abandon a potential bipartisan border deal has given the party a rare opening to reduce that deficit. The package would have made asylum claims more difficult, expanded detention capacity, expanded fentanyl screening and paid for more border guards.

Democrats hope they can draw attention to the package’s failure and contrast Biden’s push for bipartisanship with Trump’s belligerence.

“Donald Trump doesn’t want a solution,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a top Biden surrogate, said in a phone call arranged by the Biden campaign before the trip to Texas. “He wants a campaign slogan.”

Mr. Biden himself has said he would like to implement stricter policies made possible by the legislation. “If that bill were the law today, I would close the border now,” he said last month. Republicans in Congress have called on Mr. Biden to do this through executive powers.

The more immediate goal for Democrats is for Republicans to take at least some of the blame for a border situation that even Mr. Biden himself described as “in chaos” at a fundraiser in California last week. Border crossings set a monthly record from almost 250,000 in December.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are visiting border towns in Texas, hundreds of miles apart. Mr. Biden is headed to the Brownsville region and Mr. Trump will be in Eagle Pass, where Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, has clashed with federal officials over border security measures. Mr. Trump will later join Fox News host Sean Hannity in Eagle Pass for a program airing Thursday evening.

Mr. Trump was the first to announce his trip and Mr. Biden followed, although the president said Monday he did not know his predecessor would be there. “What I didn’t know is that my good friend is apparently going,” he said.

Biden is not expected to announce any new actions on Thursday, instead blaming Republicans in Congress — and Trump — for the failed border package.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, said in an interview that Democrats are gravely mistaken “if they think the collapse of this one deal will somehow change the entire paradigm of immigration voting.”

“Two things can be true at the same time: Republicans need to get their shit together, he said, using a word more colorful than stuff, and change the laws that need to be changed. And it is also true that the root of the problem is Biden’s policies.”

Mr. Crenshaw pointed to the softer actions and stance Mr. Biden took when he took office, including rolling back some of Trump’s executive orders. “It just feels opportunistic unless he makes a big announcement,” he said of a Biden border visit.

For Mr. Trump, the flow of migrants across the border has been a haunting issue from his first day as a presidential candidate in 2015, when he accused Mexico of sending drugs, criminals and rapists across the border into America.

More recently, Trump has targeted a 26-year-old immigrant from Venezuela who was arrested in Georgia for the murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student. She was found dead on a forest path, and her death has become the latest flashpoint over crime and immigration.

The suspect, who Mr. Trump has called a “savage monster,” had previously been arrested by Border Patrol in September 2022 for illegal crossing and was released with temporary permission to remain. In August, he was arrested again in New York City. Mr Trump has used the case to renew his call for the “largest deportation operation” in history.

Trump’s rhetoric on immigration was especially dark. He has said that those who enter the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of the nation.” The phrase was widely criticized, partly for its echoes of the language of twentieth-century autocrats, but was well received by the Republican primaries. CBS survey in January, it emerged that 82 percent of Republicans agreed with the idea.

Interviews with voters in the early primaries and public polling show that immigration is a critically important issue for Republicans. In South Carolina, this was considered the most important issue for 36 percent of voters – even higher than the economy. It was a close second in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to exit and entry polls.

After the 2022 midterm elections, Democratic strategists working on House races said internal research showed it was important for Democrats to directly address vulnerable areas — at the time that was inflation and the economy — to show voters that they empathize. Now, they said, the same approach should apply to immigration.

The recent special election for a House of Representatives seat near New York City was a test case, as internal Republican polls showed that 45 percent of voters viewed immigration as the most important issue — and the Democrat still won. However, there were plenty of extenuating circumstances. The reason the seat was open at all stemmed from the historic expulsion of a scandal-plagued Republican former congressman, George Santos.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso and is also national co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, said in an interview that it was clear that immigration would be “absolutely a very powerful political issue” in 2024.

“I hope the American public sees that it is Republicans who refused to find solutions,” she said.

The position of Ms. Escobar, who is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, highlights the high tightrope Mr. Biden must walk on this issue in order not to alienate the Democratic base. Ms. Escobar herself opposed the border package, saying it gave away too much to Republicans.