Federal regulators said they are expanding an investigation into Waymo this week, following reports that the company’s self-driving cars navigated around school buses stopped on the road in Austin, Texas.

In a letter to Waymo dated Dec. 3, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it will investigate the performance of the autonomous vehicles and their ability to follow traffic safety laws. Reuters first reported the news.

The Austin Independent School District told CBS News it is now aware of 20 incidents this school year in which a Waymo vehicle illegally passed a school bus. All 50 U.S. states have laws requiring vehicles to halt for a stopped school bus with flashing red lights and a deployed stop-arm signal, according to the NHTSA.

Waymo said it identified the software issue that contributed to the school bus incidents and that it implemented updates by Nov. 17, which it said improved its vehicles’ performance. The company is also planning to issue a voluntary software recall with NHTSA next week, Mauricio Peña, chief safety officer at Waymo, told CBS News late Friday.

“We will continue analyzing our vehicles’ performance and making necessary fixes as part of our commitment to continuous improvement,” said Peña.

Local officials in Austin say they remain concerned about road safety.

“As of Dec. 1, 2025, Waymo received its 20th citation since the beginning of the school year,” JJ Maldonado, a communications specialist for the Austin Independent School District, told CBS News. “This is after the company said it had fixed the issue through software updates that were implemented on Nov. 17.”

In a Nov. 20 letter to Waymo, the school district called on the robotaxi company to cease operations within the school district during the hours when students are loading and unloading from school buses until software updates are completed and Waymo can guarantee its vehicles will comply with the law. 

Maldonado said the company “refused to cease operations” during the hours the school district had requested.

In response to a request for comment about the NHTSA probe, Waymo pointed to its overall safety record.

“Safety is our top priority, and the data shows we are improving road safety in the communities in which we operate, achieving a fivefold reduction in injury-related crashes compared to human drivers, and twelve times fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians,” a Waymo spokesperson told CBS News in an email.

Waymo did not comment on its response to the Austin school district’s request to suspend service when students are getting on and off buses.

In October, NHTSA launched a probe into the company after an incident in Atlanta, Georgia, in which a Waymo vehicle drove around a stopped school bus with flashing red lights and its stop arm deployed. 

While maneuvering around the bus, NHTSA said the vehicle passed the bus’ stop arm and a safety device that swings out from the bus close to where students were disembarking. At the time of the incident, no safety operator was present in the self-driving vehicle, according to the NHTSA.

Atlanta Public Schools, a school district, told CBS Atlanta they are aware of six cases where Waymo cars illegally passed stopped school buses.

Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, first started offering its fully autonomous vehicle service to the public in October 2020 in Phoenix. The company now offers hundreds of thousands of driverless rides each week in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix and Atlanta.

Waymo recently announced it was expanding to Philadelphia, just one of two dozen cities where the company plans to expand.

Edited by

Aimee Picchi

Kathryn Krupnik

contributed to this report.

Evacuation orders have been lifted for Laguna Niguel’s Beacon fire, as firefighters stopped the progress of the 4-acre burn less than a few hours after the blaze began in a residential area Wednesday afternoon.

The fire, which was reported at 3:26 p.m. near the intersection of Alcott Place and Ridgeway Avenue, caused some minor damage to fences behind some homes, according to the Orange County Fire Authority. Firefighters reported no structures had been lost nor injuries sustained.

The fire’s progress was officially stopped at 5:26 p.m., and firefighters began tamping down hot spots within an hour.

The fire authority lifted all evacuation orders as of 6:33 p.m. Wednesday. Approximately 20 homes on Copps Hill Street were affected by the evacuation, while residents along Middleton Place and Alcott Place were advised to shelter in place, according to the city of Laguna Niguel.

“The response from our public safety partners was extremely well-coordinated and aggressive,” Laguna Niguel Mayor Ray Gennawey said in a statement. “On behalf of the entire Laguna Niguel City Council, I extend my heartfelt appreciation to our firefighters from the Orange County Fire Authority and our deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.”

WASHINGTON — Some Denver parents got texts during this winter’s brutal flu season with videos sharing why people in their neighborhoods chose flu shots for their kids, an unusual study about trust and vaccines in a historically Black community.

But no one will know how it worked out: The Trump administration canceled the project before the data could be analyzed — and researchers aren’t the only ones upset.

“For someone like me, from the Black community who income-wise is on the lower end, we don’t often have a voice,” said Denver mom Chantyl Busby, one of the study’s community advisers. “Having this funding taken away from this project sends a horrible, horrible message. It’s almost like telling us all over again that our opinions don’t matter.”

How to talk about vaccines with parents – or anyone – is taking on new urgency: At least 216 U.S. children died of flu this season, the worst pediatric toll in 15 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unvaccinated children are fueling one of the country’s largest measles outbreaks in decades, and another vaccine-preventable disease — whooping cough — is soaring, too.

At the same time Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. questions vaccines long proven to be safe and effective. Moves by the Trump administration are making it increasingly uncertain that COVID-19 vaccines will be available this fall. And the administration has slashed funding for public health and medical research, including abruptly stopping studies of vaccine hesitancy.

“We need to understand what it is that is creating this challenge to vaccines and why,” said Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and worries the country is entering “scientific dark ages.”

At Denver Health, Dr. Joshua Williams is a pediatrician who every day has vaccine conversations with confused or worried parents. Some even ask if they’ll get kicked out of his practice for refusing immunizations.

Nope, Williams says: Building trust takes time.

“The most satisfying vaccine-related encounters I have are the ones in families who had significant concerns for a long time, came to trust me over the years as I cared for broken arms and ear infections – and ultimately vaccinated their child,” he said.

But in the TikTok age, Williams wondered if digital storytelling – seeing and hearing what led other families to choose vaccination – might help those decisions. He chose flu shots as the test case — just under half of U.S. children got one this season. And Black children are among those most at risk of getting seriously ill from influenza.

With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Williams partnered with Denver’s nonprofit Center for African American Health to host workshops bringing volunteers together to discuss how influenza and the flu vaccine had impacted their lives. Professionals helped those who wanted to go the extra step turn them into 2- to 3-minute polished videos.

After two years of community engagement, five of those videos were part of the pilot study sending text messages to 200 families who get care at two Denver Health clinics.

In one video, a mother described getting her first flu vaccination along with her young daughter, making her own health decisions after leaving a controlling relationship.

In another, a grandmother explained how she’ll never again miss a vaccine appointment after her grandson spent his 4th birthday hospitalized with the flu.

Seeing “people that they look like, that they sound like, who have experiences they’ve been through that can go, ‘Hey, I felt like you felt but this changed my life,’” is powerful, said Busby, who OK’d her kids’ flu vaccinations after questioning Williams during multiple family checkups.

The study’s sudden cancellation means Williams can’t assess if the texted videos influenced families’ vaccine decisions – lost data from more than two years of work and already-spent NIH dollars. It also jeopardizes the researchers’ careers. While considering next steps, Williams has asked permission of community members to use some of the videos in his own practice as he discusses vaccination.

Williams gets personal, too, telling families that his kids are vaccinated and how his 95-year-old grandmother reminisces about the terror of polio during her own childhood before those vaccinations were developed.

“We’ve lost the collective memory about what it’s like to have these diseases in our community,” Williams said, ruefully noting the ongoing measles outbreak. “I think it’s going to take a collective voice from the community saying this is important, to remind those in power that we need to be allocating resources to infection prevention and vaccine hesitancy research.”

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AP video journalist Thomas Peipert contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

KAMPALA, Uganda — In Uganda’s Mbale district, famous for its production of arabica coffee, a plague of plastic bags locally known as buveera is creeping beyond the city.

It’s a problem that has long littered the landscape in Kampala, the capital, where buveera are woven into the fabric of daily life. They show up in layers of excavated dirt roads and clog waterways. But now, they can be found in remote areas of farmland, too. Some of the debris includes the thick plastic bags used for planting coffee seeds in nurseries.

Some farmers are complaining, said Wilson Watira, head of a cultural board for the coffee-growing Bamasaba people. “They are concerned – those farmers who know the effects of buveera on the land,” he said.

Around the world, plastics find their way into farm fields. Climate change makes agricultural plastic, already a necessity for many crops, even more unavoidable for some farmers. Meanwhile, research continues to show that itty-bitty microplastics alter ecosystems and end up in human bodies. Scientists, farmers and consumers all worry about how that’s affecting human health, and many seek solutions. But industry experts say it’s difficult to know where plastic ends up or get rid of it completely, even with the best intentions of reuse and recycling programs.

According to a 2021 report on plastics in agriculture by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics. Some studies have estimated that soils are more polluted by microplastics than the oceans.

“These things are being released at such a huge, huge scale that it’s going to require major engineering solutions,” said Sarah Zack, an Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Great Lakes Contaminant Specialist who communicates about microplastics to the public.

Micro-particles of plastic that come from items like clothes, medications and beauty products sometimes appear in fertilizer made from the solid byproducts of wastewater treatment — called biosolids — which can also be smelly and toxic to nearby residents depending on the treatment process used. Some seeds are coated in plastic polymers designed to strategically disintegrate at the right time of the season, used in containers to hold pesticides or stretched over fields to lock in moisture.

But the agriculture industry itself only accounts for a little over 3% of all plastics used globally. About 40% of all plastics are used in packaging, including single-use plastic food and beverage containers.

Microplastics, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as being smaller than five millimeters long, are their largest at about the size of a pencil eraser. Some are much smaller.

Studies have already shown that microplastics can be taken up by plants on land or plankton in the ocean and subsequently eaten by animals or humans. Scientists are still studying the long-term effects of the plastic that’s been found in human organs. Early findings suggest possible links to a host of health conditions including heart disease and some cancers.

Despite “significant research gaps,” the evidence related to the land-based food chain “is certainly raising alarm,” said Lev Neretin, environment lead at the FAO, which is currently working on another technical report looking deeper into the problem of microplastic pollution in soils and crops.

A study out this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that microplastics pollution can even impact plants’ ability to photosynthesize, the process of turning light from the sun into energy. That doesn’t “justify excessive concern” but does “underscore food security risks that necessitate scientific attention,” wrote Fei Dang, one of the study’s authors.

The use of plastics has quadrupled over the past 30 years. Plastic is ubiquitous. And most of the world’s plastic goes to landfills, pollutes the environment or is burned. Less than 10% of plastics are recycled.

At the same time, some farmers are becoming more reliant on plastics to shelter crops from the effects of extreme weather. They’re using tarps, hoop houses and other technology to try to control conditions for their crops. And they’re depending more on chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers to buffer against unreliable weather and more pervasive pest issues.

“Through global warming, we have less and less arable land to make crops on. But we need more crops. So therefore the demand on agricultural chemicals is increasing,” said Ole Rosgaard, president and CEO of Greif, a company that makes packaging used for industrial agriculture products like pesticides and other chemicals.

Extreme weather, fueled by climate change, also contributes to the breakdown and transport of agricultural plastics. Beating sun can wear on materials over time. And more frequent and intense rainfall events in some areas could drive more plastic particles running into fields and eventually waterways, said Maryam Salehi, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Missouri.

This past winter, leaders from around the world gathered in South Korea to produce the first legally binding global treaty on plastics pollution. They didn’t reach an agreement, but the negotiations are scheduled to resume in August.

Neretin said the FAO produced a provisional, voluntary code of conduct on sustainable management of plastics in agriculture. But without a formal treaty in place, most countries don’t have a strong incentive to follow it.

“The mood is certainly not cheery, that’s for sure,” he said, adding global cooperation “takes time, but the problem does not disappear.”

Without political will, much of the onus falls on companies.

Rosgaard, of Greif, said that his company has worked to make their products recyclable, and that farmers have incentives to return them because they can get paid in exchange. But he added it’s sometimes hard to prevent people from just burning the plastic or letting it end up in fields or waterways.

“We just don’t know where they end up all the time,” he said.

Some want to stop the flow of plastic and microplastic waste into ecosystems. Boluwatife Olubusoye, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi, is trying to see whether biochar, remains of organic matter and plant waste burned under controlled conditions, can filter out microplastics that run from farm fields into waterways. His early experiments have shown promise.

He said he was motivated by the feeling that there was “never any timely solution in terms of plastic waste” ending up in fields in the first place, especially in developing countries.

Even for farmers who care about plastics in soils, it can be challenging for them to do anything about it. In Uganda, owners of nursery beds cannot afford proper seedling trays, so they resort to cheaply made plastic bags used to germinate seeds, said Jacob Ogola, an independent agronomist there.

Farmers hardest hit by climate change are least able to reduce the presence of cheap plastic waste in soils. That frustrates Innocent Piloya, an agroecology entrepreneur who grows coffee in rural Uganda with her company Ribbo Coffee.

“It’s like little farmers fighting plastic manufacturers,” she said.

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Walling reported from Chicago.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

AUSTIN, Texas — A second attempt by Texas lawmakers to bring a man on death row to the state Capitol over doubts that he killed his 2-year-old daughter failed again Friday, dimming the likelihood of Robert Roberson testifying publicly after a last-minute subpoena halted his execution.

Roberson, who had been scheduled to be die by lethal injection in October, would be the first person in the U.S. to be executed over a conviction tied to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that medical experts have questioned.

The latest unsuccessful effort to have Roberson testify comes after Texas’ attorney general asked a court to block a second legislative subpoena issued by lawmakers, who are running out of time until the Legislature reconvenes in January and the subpoena expires.

“We have been attempting to fight accommodation since October, and they have never responded to anything meaningfully because they don’t want to have Robert here,” said Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, one of the lawmakers who led the effort to halt Roberson’s execution.

Roberson, 58, was convicted of killing his daughter in 2003. Prosecutors argued that he violently shook his daughter back and forth, causing severe head trauma in what’s called shaken baby syndrome.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, civil rights advocates and medical experts have expressed doubts over the shaken baby diagnosis used to convict Roberson and say his daughter likely died from symptoms of severe pneumonia.

The state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, has staunchly defended Roberson’s conviction and said the science around shaken baby syndrome has not changed enough to absolve his guilt.

In the court order, Paxton’s office said that “it is not the role of the Legislature to adjudicate offenses” and that lawmakers overstepped their power when they halted his execution.

The Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued their first subpoena for Roberson to testify one day before his scheduled execution — an unprecedent legal maneuver that successfully staved off his execution.

A new execution date has not been set.

Texas has a “junk science law” that allows people wrongfully convicted on dubious science to have their sentences overturned. The House committee said they wanted Roberson to testify about this law and how they believe it has not worked as intended for his case. Criminal justice advocates say the state’s highest criminal court has deliberately misinterpreted the law.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled in November that although the subpoena was valid, it cannot be used to circumvent a scheduled execution.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has maintained that Roberson was rightfully convicted. The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted unanimously to not recommend him clemency in October.

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Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.