• A Google executive said he’d bet that AI will not lead to mass layoffs.
• SVP James Manyika said AI will eliminate some jobs, create others, and change many more.
• He joins other tech executives pushing back on AI job-loss fears as public skepticism grows.

Will AI crush the jobs economy? James Manyika, a senior Google-Alphabet executive, bets it won’t.

On Casey Newton’s “Platformer,” released on Tuesday, Manyika said he does not buy the most extreme predictions about near-term mass job loss from AI.

Newton asked Manyika about Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, predicting that unemployment is about to spike because of new tech.

“I’ll just say: let’s take the bet,” he replied. “Some of those predictions were made two years ago — that in two years, 50% of jobs would be wiped out. Well, two years is up. Let’s take a look. And anybody who makes that prediction for two years from now, I’m willing to take the bet.”

Manyika has a deep background in AI research. He has a Ph.D. in AI and robotics from Oxford, co-chaired the UN Secretary-General’s AI advisory body, and has served as chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute while studying automation and the future of work. He’s now a senior vice president at Google and Alphabet, where he focuses on research, technology, and society.

In 2017, he coauthored a widely cited McKinsey report titled “Jobs lost, jobs gained,” which argued that automation would produce a mix of effects on workers: some jobs would decline, some new jobs would be created, and many more existing jobs would change.

Manyika said that the framework is still accurate.

“The research hasn’t changed very much,” he said. “The debate that people have is, what’s the mix of those three things? As opposed to, are these three things going to happen?”

Public skepticism toward AI is growing. In early May, YouGov published a poll finding that seven in 10 Americans believe that AI is advancing “too fast.” Gallup also found that seven in 10 Americans opposed local construction of the data centers that fuel AI systems.

Those concerns are showing up in public life: some college graduates have booed commencement speakers who talk about AI, while several data center projects have sparked protests.

Manyika suggested the AI industry has contributed to public anxiety by talking about mass job losses, and said companies also need to show that AI infrastructure will not raise energy costs for communities.

“It doesn’t help when we in the AI field talk about wiping out 50% of jobs,” he said. “We’re probably impacting the possibilities of this technology having extraordinary impact by, quite frankly, scaring everybody — when in fact that fear is unfounded.”

He joins a growing number of tech executives pushing back on predictions of mass AI job losses.

Palo Alto Networks’ CEO, Nikesh Arora, called concerns that AI is supplanting jobs a “fallacy,” while Amazon Web Services’ CEO, Matt Garman, said his company is still planning to hire 11,000 software engineering employees this year.

Silicon Valley has gone through a fresh wave of job losses. Layoff-tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that through April, tech companies have announced 85,411 layoffs, a 33% increase from the same period last year.

“That’s not to say we shouldn’t worry about AI’s labor market effects. We should,” Manyika said. “I just don’t think they’ve happened yet at the scale anybody’s concerned about.”

Manyika maintains that AI’s largest impact will be on how workers complete their tasks.

“The biggest effect is the jobs-changed part,” Manyika added. “The nature of the job itself shifts. This is what happened with bank tellers. This is what happens with radiologists. We still have the category ‘bank teller,’ but I can guarantee what a bank teller does today is not what a bank teller in 1970 did.”

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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In New York State, phones are now banned in all public schools, from kindergarten to 12th grade. More than two dozen other states have enacted similar policies. The early data on such bans looks pretty ambiguous to me, less like a silver-bullet cure-all for what ails American teens and more as if we’ve achieved what might be a small uptick in well-being and achievement. But I can’t really object to the restrictions, even as a relative skeptic of the smartphone theory of everything. That’s because attention in class is pretty precious and there’s no way the presence of phones doesn’t degrade it, even if only on the margins. Nobody used to tolerate a Walkman or a gaming console in algebra either, and I can’t say I’m surprised that, in those places where phone bans have been implemented, teachers seem pretty elated.

But in many places where phones are being withdrawn and sealed in Yondr pouches, A.I. has infiltrated already. Not all technology is the same, of course, and A.I. tutors represent a different kind of educational promise, at least in theory. But over the past few decades, one dream techno fix has followed the last in the imagination of education reformers, sometimes with great fanfare: laptops in classrooms, tablets, Khan Academy video tutorials or MOOCs. The hope, each time, was that technology could do some of what we’d always relied on scarce humans to deliver, allowing more customization of learning and freeing up overworked teachers to spend their time in more targeted ways. And overall, the returns have been disappointing at best. Some researchers even suggest that it is precisely the arrival of technology in American classrooms, starting about 25 years ago, that best explains recent declines in American academic performance. “This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education,” Molly Worthen wrote in The Times last month — “the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess.”

“My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon,” The Atlantic’s Will Oremus recently lamented, observing that more than ten minutes of work his 11-year-old had done involved only about thirty seconds of math — and a few bursts of pop-up ads. Thanks to technology in the classroom, unsupervised video intrudes, too: Last month, The Wall Street Journal documented the experience of one seventh grader in Kansas who’d gained access to more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours between December 2024 and February 2025. In New York, one second grader had watched over 700 videos during school hours in just two months, The Journal’s Shalini Ramachandran reported. A 10th grader in Oregon watched 200 in less than three hours on a single day.

And now comes A.I. In New York City, Amira listens to children trying to read, offers feedback and correctives and collects data. It’s already in place in approximately 150 schools across the city, teaching many thousands of children, New York magazine recently reported, under the headline “Help! My Kindergarten Is All In on A.I.” In San Francisco, Amira administered reading assessments for first and second graders. In Boston, sixth graders have prepared for year-end standardized tests by working with ChatGPT and Claude, according to The New Yorker; in L.A., fourth graders using A.I. in art class produced a “highly sexualized” Pippi Longstocking book cover.

These are not exactly isolated incidents, small hallucinations in an otherwise sane and stable system. In April 2025, one month after he issued an executive order aimed at abolishing the Department of Education, President Trump issued one calling for A.I. to be incorporated into the curriculums of American public schools at all grade levels.

A majority of parents and high schoolers believe that doing so would be harmful to students, RAND found last fall. But only 22 percent of district leaders agreed. When New York City began soliciting public input on guidelines for A.I. use in schools this spring, the Department of Education gestured at the importance of human relationships, but also framed its outreach this way: “The question is not whether A.I. belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs A.I. to serve every student and every stakeholder.” As Winter put it last month, “It’s quite the rhetorical suplex — opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits.”

Parents and advocates haven’t entirely abided by such restrictions, as my colleague Natasha Singer reported last month. In late April, the new New York City schools chancellor announced that, in the face of public outrage, an A.I.-focused high school that had been scheduled to open next fall would now be put on hold. The city needed more time to plan, he suggested; the chairman of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy admitted that the panel had had no briefings on A.I. research at all. Soon thereafter, enough parents flooded a P.E.P. hearing that the meeting ran almost seven hours, with more than a hundred speaking out against A.I. even though it was not meant to be the focus of the meeting. “The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” the education advocate Leonie Haimson told The Times. She put it more baldly to me: “The opposition is growing like a tidal wave.”

You hear similar things, these days, about the broader A.I. backlash that has lately flooded into town halls and community meetings around the country, with data centers offering a focal point around which Americans have clustered various social and political anxieties — about water use and the cost of energy, about oligarchy and the immense power of a small handful of A.I. founders, about the rapid conquest of our imagined future by A.I. and how little democratic control has been exercised over that future. Whoever can channel the backlash into political energy has an enormous advantage in upcoming elections, political analysts have begun to project, as poll after poll shows resentment and hostility growing swiftly.

But the fight over A.I. in schools isn’t just a piece of the broader opposition. The logic of how A.I. infrastructure is being built remains somewhat intuitive and recognizably American — big companies with cash to burn buying up plots of land to develop for their own purposes. If a protester stands up at a Utah town hall to demand, about a 62-square-mile, $100 billion project proposed for Box Elder County, “who asked for this?,” the answer isn’t difficult to come up with. It’s the developer trying to build the data center and the hyperscalers desperate to make use of it.

With schools, it’s a lot less obvious how exactly we got here in the first place, with A.I. planted so quickly in classrooms and curriculums that parents and advocates are left to try to weed it out. Or at least institute some common-sense guidelines: more public input, more transparency about what products are being used, more restrictions on data collection and student privacy and above all, perhaps, more rigor regarding whether or to what degree the tools being used are actually helpful to student achievement. This isn’t just resistance from the familiar coalition, in other words. It’s parents shocked at how quickly some very new technology has so hastily remade school for their kids. These are 5- and 6-year-old brains we’re now running our Amira experiment on. Most Americans first heard of L.L.M.s less than four years ago, after all.

And it isn’t just the smartphone backlash that makes this rush to embrace A.I. so confounding. It was just four or five years ago that Covid-era school closures had produced widespread anxiety — among parents, among policymakers — about the inadequacy of remote learning and the costs to students of conducting school through a small, personalized screen. Much of that alarm looks to me, in retrospect, excessive, given the way that what was called “pandemic learning loss” did not significantly accelerate long-running declines in test scores that both predated school closures and have outlasted them. But the impression lingers enough that parents object when local officials propose that, in the wake of massive snowstorms, schools might go remote for a single day. Working from a laptop in class is not the same thing as remote-only school, of course, but the lessons we thought we learned five years ago — about the downsides of screen dependence and the importance of embedding learning in a social environment — would certainly seem to counsel some caution.

Three or four years ago, the arrival of sophisticated A.I. chatbots produced a wave of panic about the catastrophic impacts on learning in high school and especially college: an epidemic of cheating and plagiarism; a workaround for deep reading and critical thinking; and the onset of what has been called “cognitive atrophy,” the result of turning away from education as a kind of intellectual training and toward an approach to schoolwork as a matter of mechanical output. (You generate a term paper the way you buy a Snickers at the vending machine.) Much of the alarm was about how kids were essentially cheating themselves out of an actual education by using A.I. tools; the basic worry was that A.I. would find its way into the classroom, and into schoolwork, almost regardless of the precautions taken by teachers and administrators. But in many cases, now, it is the schools themselves that have incorporated A.I. tools into their curriculums, and while not all such tools are the same, to date there is pretty limited evidence that they might help.

So how did it happen all over again, and so fast, with yet another new technology? One partial explanation comes from genuinely hopeful evangelism, the possibility that new tools might allow us to do better. Another comes from a kind of related desperation about how hard it has been to end the stagnation of American educational achievement. (Would-be reformers have worried that American students were falling behind for many decades, and the past dozen years have traced some striking test-score declines.) To their boosters, the tools promise to unburden teachers and deliver something between a smaller class size and a genuinely personalized tutorlike school experience — a favorite fantasy for tech-minded reformers. And while many parents are likely to feel a reflexive queasiness about turning kindergarten over to A.I. tools, it’s not entirely clear how representative those voices are. There is also a fear of being left behind — among parents, schools and districts — and a sense that, if the world really is changing this fast, maybe kids really would benefit from early exposure.

But I’d add another factor, not specific to schools: the fact that technological history is now narrated by way of what the political scientist Henry Farrell called, memorably, “feral thought experiments.” By this he meant that, almost daily now, Americans are treated to glib forecasts of the technological future, with neat just-so stories about where we are headed — as though the changes had already happened, and the fights over them, too. The natural setting for these thought experiments might be the podcast studio or the conference stage, but they also beam out from opinion pages and congressional hearings. The result: Even amid remarkable resistance, the technology appears from many vantages to possess the shimmer and the solidity of a fait accompli. We tell ourselves that we know artificial intelligence will remake education and then race to make it so, without asking too many questions about what kind of future we’re actually building. “The obvious rebuttal is no: We actually can’t see the future of A.I.,” Farrell writes. And it’s not just in schools that we may be forgetting that.

The post What Schools Are Forgetting in Their Race to Embrace A.I. appeared first on New York Times.

Created by the L.A.-based multimedia collective Everything Is Terrible, WoWoW is alternately described as a “cosmic entity” and a “cartoony, root vegetable floating alien god.” The multi-eyed organism will serve as the centerpiece of “the N.E.S.T.,” an EIT-designed section of Meow Wolf’s new 26,000-square-foot immersive exhibition space.

That acronym has yet to be explained, and is cloaked in Meow Wolf’s intentionally mysterious messaging about its latest incarnation, which is set in an old Cinemark movie theater in West L.A. and will tackle the ephemeral joys and hardships of Hollywood’s dream factory. The L.A. location will be the Santa Fe, N.M.-based immersive art and entertainment company’s sixth outpost after Denver, Las Vegas, Houston and the Dallas suburbs.

The L.A. space boasts 45 local collaborating artists including Gabriela Ruiz, David Altmejd and more. Each is building their own unique installation featuring a variety of sculptures, dioramas and new media.

Everything Is Terrible is one of Meow Wolf’s most prolific partners, creating a variety of psychedelic characters for various installations over the years. The collective dreamed up the N.E.S.T. about two years ago as a way of paying tribute to maximalist roadside attractions like Wisconsin’s House on the Rock or New Mexico’s Tinkertown Museum. It also tells the story of the Noothies, a made-up community of former below-the-line film workers who stumbled upon a god — and a hidden truth about the nature of reality.

The installation presents a paradox by being a Hollywood idea that is completely un-Hollywood. It may wink at the industry’s unseen heroes, but who can afford to make art for art’s sake in the entertainment industry anymore? That seeming contradiction makes it a very Everything Is Terrible idea.

Founded nearly 20 years ago by a group of friends who met at Ohio University, Everything Is Terrible was launched as a found-footage website that created wild and singular art pieces using thrifted VHS tapes. It found viral success with videos about cat massage, and a dancing dinosaur who warns kids about the dangers of pedophilia, as well as its lauded quest to amass as many VHS copies of “Jerry Maguire” as humanly possible. (The group has about 45,000 at the moment, all stuffed in boxes and waiting to be unleashed on the world — perhaps as a pyramid in the desert or maybe featured in some sort of coffee table book.)

“I think our outlook on life has become, ‘look at the worlds that these people created,’” says EIT co-founder Dimitri Simakis. “No one asked them to do this. Someone just wanted to do a kids puppet show in some garage in North Carolina and now they’ve created a simulacra.”

That’s also what the collective is doing with its Meow Wolf exhibit, adds Nic Maier, another EIT member. “It’s what we’ve done for the last 20 years, really. We’re just a bunch of kooks who got together to obsessively make things in celebration of life and in appreciation of each other’s time.”

The marriage of Everything Is Terrible and Meow Wolf is a match made in heaven. The groups first met in 2009, bonded by a shared commitment to interactive art experiences that twist reality using an ornate handmade aesthetic.

A few years later, Maier was hired to work on what would become Meow Wolf’s first large-scale installation, Santa Fe’s “House of Eternal Return.” As he spent hours sculpting large, foam trees for the group, he says he fell in love.

“We always joke that ever since then, EIT has been a barnacle on the side of the Meow Wolf ship, just hanging on but also occasionally hopping in to contribute,” Maier says.

When Meow Wolf announced it was opening two new spaces, in Las Vegas and Denver, it called on EIT for ideas. Simakis and Maier threw out a few pitches for Denver and one landed: a McDonald’s-like retro freak-out known as Pizza Pals Play Zone, which went on to become one of the attraction’s most talked about, photographed and beloved spaces.

“Pizza Pals Play Zone is super character dense,” says Han Sayles, Meow Wolf’s director of artist collaboration. “It’s just one of those spaces that feels like Meow Wolf. There’s hundreds of different pieces of media framed all around, featuring all of these different characters they created. They even made a bible … that had the narrative backstory of every single character and every deliverable they wanted for that room.”

When Meow Wolf’s Los Angeles project became a possibility, Sayles says Everything Is Terrible was one of the first groups she pitched as a potential contributor. EIT ended up being offered a custom project, in which the group used Meow Wolf’s extensive production facilities and resources to create their vision for the space, weighing in on everything from the shape of their room to the merch it might inspire in the Meow Wolf gift shop.

“We had a super trusting relationship with them,” Sayles says. “We recruited them as partners and negotiated a deal without knowing what they were going to put in the room. Both Nic and Dimitri have such a beautiful, strong sense of the exact genre of whimsy that we go for and they always deliver super deeply, so we knew it would be amazing.”

Sayles says she also thought the group’s experience of Los Angeles would lend itself well to the overall theme of the venue. Shakti Howeth, a creative director at Meow Wolf, agrees, saying that while Meow Wolf attractions are typically pretty otherworldly, they’re always built around an overarching story.

The N.E.S.T., Howeth teases, will relate to some of the L.A. attraction’s character groups and themes, as well as its overall story. How audiences first encounter WoWoW and the N.E.S.T. will depend on which door they use to enter the room. From there, the points of visual interest will compound upon each other.

“We’re just incorporating all the things we love,” says Maier, noting that includes roadside attractions, folk art and anything “outsider.”

“It involves everything from the importance of dirt and worms to video games to experimental film to worker uprisings to entering literal other dimensions where you can meet what might be God, all within a [553]-square-foot space,” Simakis adds. “There have been times when we’ve been in the N.E.S.T. and thought we crammed in too much … but then you realize it has to be like that, because we’re trying to tell the whole story of the universe in just that room.”

For example, Maier spent much of the last two years building 45 beautifully weird costumes for the attraction, only two of which will be physically in the N.E.S.T. The other 43, he explains, are there for “world-building” and to make the story feel lived in. Everything in the space will have been created by Everything Is Terrible and Meow Wolf, including what seems like real found footage.

Simakis calls the group’s vision for the space “unrelenting joy mixed with benevolent chaos,” as well as “a beautiful folk art museum that’s also a space rave.” He likens what the group is doing to “building a puzzle out of thousands of other puzzles, gluing it together to make a new thing.”

“It’s like we’re making a movie that’s not a movie,” Simakis adds. “It’s a video game. It’s a living space. It’s all of these things, but you get to walk around in it.”

If that’s confusing, it’s because it’s meant to be — at least a little. How each visitor absorbs or receives the space will be entirely up to them. And while that could be a bit terrifying for some artists, to pour everything into a piece only to have the public possibly misinterpret or even ignore it, Maier and Simakis say they’re open to whatever comes.

“Millions of people are going to potentially walk through our space, so it has to be really special,” Simakis says. “We’ve also thought about all the different ways people could enjoy it, whether they’re a baby or a stoner or someone who’s just really into immersive entertainment or escape rooms. Even if you just go to take selfies, great. We’re pro-that. But also, if you want to keep going back or you want to spend hours there, I promise we’ve made it worth your while.”

Meow Wolf L.A. opens later this year. You can catch both Meow Wolf and Everything Is Terrible in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art Parade on June 20, marching in some of Maier’s 45 costumes from the N.E.S.T.

The post Part root vegetable, part deity: Inside Everything Is Terrible’s new Meow Wolf L.A. installation appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Ferebee will become chief executive of EdReports, a nonprofit that reviews instructional materials, officials there announced Wednesday. Dana Nerenberg, chair of the organization’s board of directors, praised Ferebee in a news release as a “student-centered educator whose leadership has driven meaningful outcomes in large public school systems.”

Ferebee, who plans to finish out the current school year with D.C. Public Schools, said he saw the new job as a chance to elevate his career to a national platform and “influence the conversation” around high-quality instructional materials.

The news of his upcoming departure came shortly before Ferebee appeared with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) at an event at Garrison Elementary School to celebrate the school district’s performance on the latest Education Scorecard, which analyzes student test scores from across the country. The report, produced by researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities and Dartmouth College, ranked the District first in academic growth in reading and math between 2022 and 2025 — though performance still lags behind pre-pandemic levels.

D.C. has offered intense tutoring to support students who fell behind during the pandemic — largely supported through emergency aid from the federal government. The school system has also boosted training and other support for educators.

Ferebee said Wednesday that he was confident those gains would continue even as federal aid has waned, noting that the city has continued to put local money toward the tutoring efforts.

“The goal, ultimately, has always been that we would have less students that would need that intensity of service as we continue to improve our outcomes,” he said. “And so we’re going to work our way out of that challenge.”

In addition to praising Ferebee for the post-pandemic math and reading recovery, Bowsersaid at the Wednesday event that he also helped the school system progress in other ways.

“You have built a talented team of educators, principals, central services staff and leaders who have consistently delivered results,” she said. The mayor noted that he oversaw the system as it reached record enrollment and graduation rates, secured crucial philanthropic investments in school improvements, and expanded career and technical education.

Ferebee was appointed D.C. Public Schools’ chancellor in 2018 after having served as superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools and, earlier, in district leadership positions in North Carolina.

His tenure in D.C. was marked by the challenge of leading the school system through the pandemic, as student outcomes suffered with remote learning and city leadership clashed with the Washington Teachers Union over school reopening plans. The pandemic also coincided with a protracted contract struggle with the union, further souring labor relations.

The most recent contract negotiations went relatively quicker; the two sides in 2024 ratified a five-year plan that included teacher raises, an agreement that Bowser praised Wednesday, saying it provided necessary stability for the school system.

Ferebee also has faced challenges with truancy, as city leaders failed to follow through on initiatives to reduce the number of students with excessive, unexcused absences, especially among middle-schoolers, and thousands of truancy-related reports went uninvestigated, a Washington Post investigation found last year. Recently, a truancy-related pilot offering case management for students who struggle the most with absenteeism has shown promise — and Ferebee said Wednesday that the city had plans to double down on what was working and expand it to more schools.

“I’m very optimistic about the truancy pilot that we have,” he said. “What we’ve seen is that the majority of those students who have been a part of that program in the pilot have improved their attendance outcomes.”

Ferebee said he was glad to be leaving the school system on a strong note.

“We have tremendous momentum that will carry us into years to come,” he said.

Bowser, who is not seeking reelection, said Wednesday that it would be up to the next mayor to appoint a permanent chancellor but that she would select an interim leader in the meantime.

The post Longest-serving D.C. schools chancellor to leave for education nonprofit appeared first on Washington Post.

They were looking for economic opportunities. Mr. Rubio’s father, Mario, eventually found work in Florida as a bartender, and his mother, Oriales, as a hotel maid, cashier and Kmart stock clerk.

Yet, Mr. Rubio talks about dismantling the Communist government with the same passion that galvanizes many political exiles who left the island after the revolution. The indictment of the Raúl Castro, 94, the patriarch of the family, is in line with Mr. Rubio’s enduring mission, and it is just the latest in a series of efforts by the U.S. government to weaken Havana that Mr. Rubio has supported or engineered.

“President Trump is offering a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba,” Mr. Rubio said in a brief video address on Wednesday that was directed at the Cuban people.

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said in Spanish. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”

Within Mr. Trump’s cabinet, Mr. Rubio’s focus on Cuba stands out, but it is par for course in the Cuban American milieu of South Florida. There, fiery anti-Communist politics are the norm, and casual banter can revolve around the ways in which the United States might one day oust the leaders in Havana.

“Rubio emerges out of the anti-Cuban politics of Miami,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times last December.

Mr. Rhodes managed Mr. Obama’s policy of trying to restore, to a degree, U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. Mr. Rhodes discussed the policy at the time with Mr. Rubio, who was a U.S. senator representing Florida.

“He’s always been rooted in a regime-change policy toward Havana,” Mr. Rhodes said. “It’s core to his identity.”

Mr. Rubio was one of the architects of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuela, which resulted in U.S. forces seizing Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, and bringing him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. In 2020, the Justice Department got a grand jury indictment against Mr. Maduro.

The aggression against Venezuela was in part aimed at knocking down the pillars of Cuba’s Communist government. Venezuela was the main supplier of oil for Cuba, and the Trump administration has pressured the country’s new ruler, Delcy Rodríguez, an ally of Mr. Maduro, to halt shipments to the island. As a result, Cuba’s economy has come under greater strain than it has seen in decades.

In 2019, during the first Trump administration’s efforts to unseat Mr. Maduro by trying to encourage an uprising, Mr. Rubio told NPR that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a Communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.

Months ago, Mr. Rubio began speaking directly with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of Raúl Castro, to try to negotiate an economic opening with Cuba that would include some political concessions. U.S. officials were pushing in early March for the Castro family to remove President Miguel Díaz-Canel, which would allow the Trump administration to argue it had successfully engineered political change in Cuba, The New York Times reported.

At the time, U.S. officials were willing to tolerate the Castros staying in power behind the scenes as long as they agreed to guide the country through economic changes pushed by the Trump administration. But U.S. officials have grown impatient with the slow pace of negotiations and what they see as stubbornness on the part of the Castro family.

Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.

The post Rubio Moves Closer to Decades-Long Goal of Transforming Cuba appeared first on New York Times.

“I don’t think AI—or actually, for me, hopefully forever, too—AI never replaces any human, and it just actually augments us, enables us, allows us to do higher quality work,” Jain recently said onstage at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit.

“There are many who will talk about [whether] you can replace this role with AI, or that role with AI. But practically we work with the largest enterprises in the world, and we’re not seeing any role getting eliminated—not today.”

The Glean CEO’s perspective stands out in a crowded group of executives forewarning of a jobs apocalypse. Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI company Anthropic, warned that the tech could wipe out up to half of white-collar jobs within the foreseeable future. JPMorgan leader Jamie Dimon has also predicted AI efficiencies could lead to the elimination of some roles, and supports a local-led ban on mass firing employees in the name of AI. Meanwhile Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford Motor Company, warned that AI could replace “literally half” of white-collar workers in the U.S.

But not every CEO sees it as doom and gloom—and Jain has first-hand experience with what the tools can actually do. The $7.2 billion business has spent years building out its enterprise search and creating AI agents to foster efficient workflows. And the innovation has hit breakneck speed as of late; the Glean CEO said that when the company was first founded in 2019 by a team of former Google search engineers and tech experts, AI tools were nowhere near its capabilities in the current.

“When we started the company seven years back, AI was actually not as powerful as it is today,” Jain continued. “So we never really thought about this as anything more than a tool, an assistant that can actually help us maybe go a little bit faster in work that we do.”

However, AI has since become a force to be reckoned with—and some workers are hand-wringing over the fate of their careers. In 2025, AI was tied to 54,836 layoff plans overall; and since 2023, the tech has been connected to 71,825 job cut announcements, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. However, some employers cutting headcounts en masse may be “AI washing” their layoffs to tout AI efficiency gains. And while AI is undoubtedly capable of taking over some job tasks, Jain is adamant it’s nowhere close to taking over human jobs.

“Of course, over the years [AI] has gotten better, so now it can actually not just find information for you, not just answer questions, but can actually do a lot of your work on your behalf,” the Glean leader said. “But it’s still not at a place where it replaces you…And actually my view, or my opinion, is that it’s going to be like that for [the] foreseeable future.”

The post While other tech CEOs warn of mass job losses, Glean’s chief says AI will never replace a single worker appeared first on Fortune.

However, according to longtime host and showrunner Jeff Probst, one thing that won’t be changing anytime soon is the CBS competition series’ location. Now on Season 50, “Survivor” has filmed at the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji since Season 33 in 2016, a departure from the many years spent traveling the world to dozens of exotic locations following the show’s debut in May 2000.

“The truth is, it’s a logistic issue; it’s not really a creative choice,” Probst told fans at an FYC event on the Paramount lot on Tuesday. “When we used to do ‘Survivor,’ you know, 20 years ago, there were all these islands we could go to and we would have a scouting team that would go off way in advance, and they’d go: ‘Well, next we can do Samoa, Philippines looks good, Cambodia has Angkor Wat.’ We would just have this list. We don’t have that anymore.”

“A lot of places, islands that were empty now have hotels on them because ‘Survivor’ brought a lot of awareness and tourism. There’s a lot of political unrest in place we don’t want to go to anymore. There’s the value of the dollar and how it stacks up in other countries. Weather is a real thing. We’ve evacuated twice in Fiji, but there are times when we’ve changed our whole shooting schedule,” he continued. “So, Fiji has actually saved ‘Survivor’ and our relationship with their government is amazing. All the land owners, where we stay, the islands we use … if that changed, we’d be back looking, desperately, for somewhere.”

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The evening also featured a sneak peek of Wednesday night’s live finale set, complete with tree mail scrolls and hidden immunity idols for two lucky attendees, as well as contestant meet-and-greets, food, drinks and iconic challenges from the show.

The final five players — Aubry Bracco, Jonathan Young, Tiffany Ervin, Joe Hunter and Rizo Velovic — are set to battle it out to see who wins the title of Sole Survivor and the $2 million grand prize. All 24 all-star castaways are also in the running to receive the $100,000 Sia Fan-Favorite prize, as voted by viewers.

Season 51 is scheduled for this fall on CBS, with Season 52 to begin production within the next 10 days, Probst further teased. All 50 seasons are available to stream on Paramount+.

The post Jeff Probst Explains Why ‘Survivor’ Won’t Be Leaving Fiji Anytime Soon appeared first on TheWrap.

This is the happy start of the 25th anniversary edition of the New York City Tap Festival, or Tap City. When mounting debts forced Tony Waag, the man in the hat, to cancel his festival in 2024, it looked like the end of a vital cultural institution. But the Joyce Theater came to the rescue, and Tap City has returned, with a week of shows there.

In some ways, Tap City is not what it was: no packed schedule of classes, no jam session on a Circle Line boat. But from an audience perspective, it’s very much like old times — same variety-show format with live music, many of the same old faces, a lot of the same old shtick.

There are flashes of the new. In Anthony Morigerato’s “Endless,” he and two other dancers tap to Bach on a rotating platform that is somehow able to light up in shifting patterns while still serving as an unobstructed surface for percussive footwork. The turning carousel stage gives Morigerato’s intricate, sensitive tapping an against-the-current quality that raises the number from cool gimmick to a kind of metaphor — perhaps for the festival itself, trying to keep its balance on shifting ground.

Most of the dozen or so numbers, though, are tributes to past masters. In the most thrilling of these, the present-day master Jason Samuels Smith reprises his evocation of the one-legged tap hero Peg Leg Bates. Holding his left leg as stiff as Bates’s wooden peg, Smith manages to be more inventive and musically expressive than most of the two-footed dancers on the program. Still, his left foot is fully functional; it would have been nice to hear him use it some.

The most fascinating tribute is Michelle Dorrance doing “My Mind Is on Mingus,” a solo that Tap City’s matriarch, Brenda Bufalino, made for herself years ago and taught Dorrance during a recent residency at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Bufalino is a highly mannered performer, but in Dorrance’s rendition, the mannerisms recede to ghostly traces. This makes it easier to appreciate Bufalino’s gifts as a technical innovator and top-notch musical arranger who deftly weaves her own tribute to the jazz bassist Charles Mingus with three of his songs.

Other tributes are less successful: the charming DeWitt Fleming Jr. rushing through Bill Robinson’s classic stair dance, the thoughtful Lisa La Touche matching the trumpet and scat solos of Louis Armstrong and quoting the steps of tap ancestors but not adding much. Tap is a reverential art, but to imitate the inimitable is to risk shooting yourself in the foot.

As ever in Tap City shows, some of the performers — including Waag himself — are sentimental choices, old friends who bring the level down. But other familiar faces are stellar, doing new versions of their signature stuff: Max Pollak in a one-man-band version of “Steam Heat” or Caleb Teicher and Nathan Bugh singing and swinging with perfect musical and comic timing.

That’s Tap City for you: frustratingly amateurish or underdeveloped in spots but also a sampling of the best in a great American art. Long may it thrive.

Tap City

Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

The post Review: Feels Like Old Times With the Return of Tap City appeared first on New York Times.

The bird dropped a surprise from above, hitting the king’s suit jacket and splattering others around him, including members of the press.

“It’s well it didn’t land on my head,” the king quipped, according to Irene Marting, who witnessed the incident and met the composed king shortly afterward.

“Being hit by a seagull, it’s supposed to be good luck,” Marting said. “We’re so thrilled he’s come to Northern Ireland to see us and it’s really nice to see him in Newcastle.”

Charles was visiting the southeast coastal town on the second day of a three-day visit with Queen Camilla. The queen was spared the spectacle because she was making a separate visit to Royal Hillsborough, where she tried her hand at pouring a pint of Guinness at a pub.

The king seemed to foreshadow his fate earlier in the day during a visit to a food pantry when he picked up a roll of toilet paper and said, “very important.”

The post Seagull splatters King Charles III during Northern Ireland visit appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

“Cuba is willing to talk about everything with the United States. There is no taboo subject in our conversations — on the basis of reciprocity and equality,” Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, the Cuban ambassador, said in an interview on Wednesday.

But, he added, “obviously it does not help a climate of dialogue and trust that every other day there are statements like, ‘We are ready to take over Cuba,’” referring to recent comments by President Trump.

“Warmongering rhetoric does not help,” he said. “Building different pretexts for military aggression against Cuba, which is what they are building, does not help.”

The hourlong conversation was the first time in years that a sitting Cuban government official had granted an on-the-record interview to The Times.

Mr. Soberón Guzmán said the government had decided to do so in an effort to tell the American public that Cuba wants peace and cooperation with the United States, despite the Trump administration’s intensifying pressure campaign against the island.

That pressure increased on Wednesday when U.S. prosecutors formally accused Raúl Castro, the former Cuban president and perhaps still the nation’s most powerful figure, of ordering the Cuban military to shoot down two civilian planes over Cuba in 1996, killing four people, including three American citizens.

It was one of the most aggressive steps yet in a monthslong U.S. campaign to squeeze the Cuban government into giving up power or making significant political and economic concessions.

The Trump administration has enforced an effective oil blockade on the island, with a few exceptions, that has helped lead to food shortages, health care failures, black-market gas prices over $40 a gallon and electricity blackouts that can last 22 hours a day.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a video addressed to the Cuban people on Wednesday — the day in 1902 the United States ended its military occupation of Cuba — that the United States was not responsible for those issues.

“The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people,” Mr. Rubio said in Spanish, referring to GAESA, a Cuban military-run conglomerate that controls, by some estimates, up to 70 percent of Cuba’s economy.

“President Trump is offering a new relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. But it must be directly with you, the Cuban people, not with GAESA,” Mr. Rubio added.

Mr. Soberón Guzmán said Mr. Rubio’s comments were, “for anyone who has a minimum of common sense, an insult to human intelligence.” It was the United States that stopped the flow of Venezuelan oil that once supported Cuba, he said, and it was the United States that threatened other nations to halt their own oil shipments to the island.

Mr. Soberón Guzmán reiterated recent comments from Cuban officials that the island has depleted its fuel reserves and was propping up its energy grid solely with domestic oil production and renewable energy, mostly from solar panels.

“You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician to realize that when you keep taking and taking without putting anything back, you run out,” he said.

Amid the increasing tensions, the United States and Cuba have been engaged in talks for months. John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, traveled to Havana last week to demand that Cuba make significant economic overhauls and block Russian and Chinese intelligence operations on the island.

The C.I.A. said in a statement that Mr. Ratcliffe told Cuban officials “that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”

Mr. Soberón Guzmán said that Cuban officials see a variety of areas of cooperation that could be mutually beneficial for the two countries, including migration, tourism, agriculture, medicine production and combating drug trafficking.

He declined to offer specifics about potential changes to Cuba’s economy or its political system, which has essentially one political party and no free press. But he said that Havana was not eager to take lectures from Washington on democracy, criticizing several aspects of the U.S. system, including the electoral college, redistricting and the influence of wealthy political donors. “Is that the democracy they want for Cuba? It doesn’t interest us,” he said.

He added that the United States has positive relations with a number of nations that lack democratic systems. “Thus democracy in Cuba is not the reason why the United States is applying this policy,” he said of the pressure campaign.”

Jack Nicas is The Times’s Mexico City bureau chief, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

The post Cuba: We’re Ready to Negotiate. appeared first on New York Times.

In an “official statement” shared by Consequence (and translated from Spanish to English), the tour organizers said: “We announce that Drowning Pool’s South American tour has officially been canceled. The decision was made jointly by all local promoters involved due to low ticket sales recorded in all cities on the tour.”

The statement added, “Customers who have already purchased tickets must request a refund directly from the company responsible for ticket sales in their respective city. For more information and specific guidance regarding the refund process, please contact the local promoter. We appreciate your understanding.”

Drowning Pool’s explanation for why their tour was canceled is not particularly in line with what the organizers said

Now, here’s where things get messy. Drowning Pool also commented on the tour cancellation, and they gave a different explanation.

“We were going to be doing South America. That just got put on hold,” Drowning Pool guitarist C.J. Pierce said on the Teaser Talk podcast, as transcribed by The PRP. “I was looking forward to going. Just the timing with it all, I’m hoping that that comes back up towards the end of the year because that’s supposed to be in a week and a half from now, and all the logistics weren’t put together for us to get there in time.”

“There’s a lot of, you know, again, red tape and stuff like that,” he continued, “because we didn’t meet the deadline for it. So, I’m hoping to go back. Love South America. We really want to play there. I want to go so bad. But yeah, that’s going to be it.”

Another long-time 2000s metal band had to cancel their upcoming tour dates

Tour cancellations seem to be going around lately, unfortunately. Notably, Drowning Pool’s 2000 metal peers in Static-X also had to cancel their forthcoming tour dates. This time, though, its health reason for the sidelined concerts.

“Due to serious medical issues, Static-X will be forced to cancel our remaining tour dates in 2026,” read a statement from the band. “The situation is unavoidable and requires immediate attention.”

“We are very sorry for the inconvenience, and we promise to return to the stage, bigger, stronger, and faster in 2027,” they added. “We appreciate your continued love and support and look forward to seeing you all again very soon!”

The post This 2000s Metal Band Canceled Their Tour Over ‘Logistics’, but Organizers Claim It Was Actually ‘Low Ticket Sales’ appeared first on VICE.

• A New Jersey city has banned new data center developments.
• The decision effectively blocks a proposed data center giant.
• The ban comes amid a backlash against a data center boom in southern New Jersey.

A city at the heart of an AI data center boom in southern New Jersey has voted to ban them.

That means one of the largest data center proposals in the state’s history is unlikely to happen.

The Millville Board of Commissioners made the decision during a meeting on Tuesday evening, writing in an ordinance that “data centers are incompatible with the City’s land use planning objectives, infrastructure capacity, and community character.”

“The Commissioners therefore determine that the construction and operation of data centers within the City would be detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare,” the commissioners said.

The decision brings to a halt the proposed 1.4 gigawatt Millville Energy & Data Center Campus, which would have spanned over 60 acres. A1 Data Center, the company behind the project, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Southern New Jersey has emerged as something of a hub for AI data center construction, in part because of its proximity to major cities like New York and Philadelphia and its access to natural gas and transmission networks.

Several other data centers have been proposed — or are already being built — in the area, including a 300-megawatt data center in neighboring Vineland that would supply compute to Microsoft.

While large data centers have been around for decades, their scale has grown exponentially as AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic seek more compute to power their products.

Many Americans — a majority of whom are unexcited about AI, according to a recent study — are now resisting these massive data centers in their communities. They worry that they could drain their water supply, raise utility bills, cause unwanted noise, raise temperature levels, and impede their quality of life.

In its ordinance on Tuesday, the Millville commissioners cited many of these issues, writing that “large-scale data centers and similar facilities generate significant infrastructure demands.”

It also said any jobs created by the project were limited relative to its size. The companies behind data centers have argued that they are good for communities because they create jobs, though many of those jobs are in construction and temporary.

The Climate Revolution Action Network, an environmental nonprofit based in New Jersey, told Business Insider in a statement that it spent months organizing residents to oppose the Millville data center.

“This is a winning coalition and something we need to see more of across the country,” one of the group’s leaders, Kayleigh Henry, said. “These corporations may have more money than us, but they’re no match for people speaking out and making their voices heard.”

The Climate Revolution Action Network and other groups are now working to secure a statewide moratorium on data center construction.

This month, a coalition of anti-data center groups asked New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill to impose a moratorium on approving and constructing new data centers that use at least 20 megawatts of power “until regulations or legislation are implemented to protect ratepayers and consumers, maintain electric grid reliability, and minimize environmental impacts.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post A city at the center of an AI data center frenzy just voted to ban them appeared first on Business Insider.

In a nine-page grand jury indictment, the department accused Carmen Lineberger, the former managing assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Pierce, Fla., where Mr. Trump’s classified documents case was handled, of defying a Jan. 21, 2025, order by Judge Aileen M. Cannon sealing a potentially damning final report by Jack Smith, the special counsel.

The indictment provided another twist in a politically freighted case that appeared to have ended after Judge Cannon dismissed the charges, and after federal prosecutors dropped their bid to reinstate them as Mr. Trump headed back to the White House. It comes as the president has tightened his grip on the Justice Department, in part by going after department employees who worked with Mr. Smith’s office.

The Justice Department charged Ms. Lineberger with four counts, including two counts of theft of government property; destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations; and concealment, removal or mutilation of public records.

In the indictment, prosecutors said Ms. Lineberger emailed an internal memorandum and a report — an apparent reference to the report by Mr. Smith — to a personal address, concealing the names of the files by labeling them as “chocolate cake recipe” and “bundt cake recipe.” The emails were sent in September and December of last year.

In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Lineberger was arraigned in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday. If convicted of the most serious charge — destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations — she would face up to 20 years in prison.

Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.

Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.

The post Prosecutor Is Charged With Stealing Sealed Report on Trump Documents Case appeared first on New York Times.

The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is a launcher mounted on the back of a military truck that can be rapidly brought out from concealment, fire its rockets, then move quickly to a new location to avoid counter-battery fire. The so-called “shoot and scoot” tactics are becoming increasingly important with the proliferation of drones over the battlefield, which make static positions more vulnerable.

The system has been used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most recently U.S. Central Command said it was employed in the opening attack on Iran where it launched a new precision-guided rocket that could reach targets hundreds of miles away.

That is particularly meaningful in the Pacific, where the U.S. hopes to deter a possible Chinese invasion of the island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own and has not ruled out taking by force. HIMARS systems with the latest missiles could easily reach targets in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and mainland China, if deployed on Japanese or other islands nearby.

The HIMARS is generally equipped with shorter-range rockets, however, and the exercise at the U.S. military’s Camp Fuji, about a two-hour drive from Tokyo, involved only dummy projectiles.

The exercise, only the second time the HIMARS was tested at Camp Fuji, was done in close coordination with Japanese military forces. A public road that ran between where the rockets were fired and where they landed was closed as a precaution during the exercise.

The post U.S. test fires mobile rocket system near Mt. Fuji in rapid ‘shoot and scoot’ drill appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Analysts expect revenue of $78.8 billion, almost 80% higher than just a year earlier. Earnings per share are projected at $1.77, nearly double last year. There’s ample reason to believe Nvidia will meet those lofty goals: according to data from The Motley Fool, the chipmaker has beaten Wall Street’s estimates in 21 of the last 23 quarters, totaling to five years of outperformance.

So the reason Nvidia’s earnings are so closely watched isn’t because anyone expects it to suddenly fail. A beat is almost a given. It’s because Nvidia is still the big winner of the AI boom, the company at the center of every hyperscaler’s capital spending plan and every investor’s portfolio anxiety. Its last earnings report in February was a 7% beat on earnings per share. The stock fell 6% that day, and was down 11% a month later, according to 24/7 Wall St.

CEO Jensen Huang has bemoanedthat no-win dynamic— a stock that can do everything right and still get punished — and it’s why why investors won’t be watching the headline revenue number. They’ll be watching a less famous line, called gross margin.

What is gross margin?

Gross margin is the percentage of every sales dollar a company gets to keep after paying to make its product. So if Nvidia sells a chip for $100 and it costs $25 to make, the gross margin is 75%. The remaining $75 goes toward everything else— profits, salaries, taxes—but the 75% itself shows how much pricing power a company actually has.

For context of how large that gross margin is, a grocery store runs on gross margins around 25%. Walmart hovers near 24%. Apple, often considered one of the most profitable hardware companies in the world, sits near 46%. Microsoft, which at this point sells mostly software, sits at around 70%.

Nvidia, which sells physical chips, runs at 75%, a number you almost never see in the physical economy. It exists because Nvidia’s customers—the hyperscalers like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and the frontier model providers like Google, OpenAI—currently have no real chip alternative. Nvidia is the first mover in the most important part of the AI supply chain; but that doesn’t mean competitor aren’t building.

Why it matters tonight

Nvidia told investors in February to expect a non-GAAP gross margin of about 75%, give or take half a percentage point, for the current quarter. There are a few ways it could miss.

The first is pricing pressure. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Meta have been Nvidia’s most reliable customers, but they have also been the loudest about wanting alternatives.

Google now sells access to its in-house TPU chips and recently signed a multi-gigawatt deal with Anthropic. Amazon released its Trainium3 chip in late 2025 and claims customers can save 30% to 40% versus Nvidia, according to AWS executive Dave Brown. Microsoft unveiled its Maia 200 chip in January and is already deploying it inside Azure data centers. Meta announced four generations of its own AI processors in March, and in April,they agreed to buy millions of Amazon’s custom AI CPUs—chips that compete directly with Nvidia’s own Vera CPU. The day the deal was announced, Amazon shares hit a near record.

That doesn’t mean the hyperscalers can afford to abandon Nvidia—they can’t. But its leverage that can squeeze on the price of Nvidia’s chips.

The second is the cost of building Nvidia’s current chips. Blackwell, the 2024 chip architecture that drove roughly 70% of Nvidia’s data center compute revenue last quarter, is more complex and more expensive to manufacture than its predecessor. If those costs are rising faster than expected, the margin shrinks.

The third is product mix. If a bigger share of revenue this quarter came from Nvidia’s lower-margin products, which it used to be known for—gaming cards, older chips—the average comes down.

Analysts’ consensus sits at 74.5%, slightly below Nvidia’s own guidance. A preview from CoinDCX put the stakes well: “A gross margin print below 74.5% would be the single most bearish data point in this Nvidia earnings report regardless of headline revenue.”

The post The one number that will actually move Nvidia’s stock Wednesday night appeared first on Fortune.

The withdrawal of U.S. troops “will not have an impact on NATO‘s defense plans” and will unfold in a gradual “structured” way, according to NATO chief Mark Rutte.

“We know that adjustments will take place, the U.S. has to pivot more towards, for example, Asia,” Rutte said at a press conference in Brussels Wednesday.

He went on to suggest it’s time for Europe to “take a bigger role together with Canada” advocating for “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO, taking more of the responsibility for the conventional defence.”

Rutte’s remarks came a day after the Pentagon announced it has “reduced the total number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) assigned to Europe from four to three,” returning the levels of BCTs in Europe to what they were in 2021.

BCTs are “stand-alone and self-sufficient tactical units that train and deploy together on a rotating basis,” according to the U.S. Central Command.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson flagged this change as the reason behind the delayed deployment of 4,000 U.S. troops to Poland earlier this month—a move which one Republican lawmaker had labeled a “slap in the face” to the European country.

The change of plans impacting Poland came shortly after Washington announced it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany.

But Rutte downplayed the tensions when asked by a reporter if Trump’s “surprise” announcements are undermining NATO’s deterrence. He insisted that the U.S. will remain “involved” with Europe, albeit with adjustments.

Rutte’s assurances echoed those made by NATO’s top commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who indicated Tuesday that he did not expect further withdrawals of American troops from Europe in the “near term.”

Instead, he said, the gradual process of redeployment will take place “over time as [European] allies build their capacity” and could take “several years.”

Still, concerns in Europe remain, as Trump has threatened to withdraw troops from E.U. countries he deems have been unsupportive to his mission during the Iran war.

These criticisms come amid Trump’s wider ambition to reduce the U.S. spending on NATO defense that the alliance currently relies heavily on, something which Rutte himself seemingly agrees should happen.

“Part of keeping this alliance strong involves shifting responsibilities. Moving away from unhealthy over-reliance on one ally to a fairer sharing of the responsibility for our collective security,” he said Wednesday.

But Trump’s criticisms of NATO run deep—and he has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance altogether, which has been met with warningsfrom European allies and an impassioned championing of the alliance from King Charles III.

Withdrawals come amid a growing rift between the U.S. and European allies

The Trump Administration’s move to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany followed Trump publicly clashed with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, after he took umbrage to the European leader’s assessment that the U.S. was being “humiliated” by Iranian leadership amid stalled peace talks between Washington and Tehran.

In response, Trump told Merz to focus on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and matters within his own country rather than “interfering” with the Iran war.

Trump has also threatened to pull U.S. troops from Italy and Spain, further signifying the discord between the U.S. and Europe.

The U.S. President has clashed with Spain over a number of key issues—from NATO defense spending to the Iran war, which Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has repeatedly called “illegal.”

Spain denied America access to its joint-military bases to attack Iran and also proceeded to close its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the conflict. The country’s position has drawn repeated criticism from Trump, who threatened to cut trade ties with Spain in March.

Reports of a leaked internal Pentagon email, which reportedly indicated the U.S. was floating the idea of suspending Spain from NATO as part of a move to punish “difficult” allies, also did little to ease tensions.

Trump previously had a close alliance with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but relations have become splintered due to Italy’s refusalto get actively involved in the Iran war and its leaders’ response to the President’s verbal attacks on Pope Leo.

Beyond this, disagreements between the U.S. and NATO allies over Greenland are still simmering, after major disputes developed earlier this year regarding Trump’s unwelcome push to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is due to travel to Sweden on Friday to meet with European counterparts and Greenland is set to be on the agenda.

It’s unclear if Rubio’s talks with European officials will serve as a step forward, but there is one leading force in NATO who has maintained a working relationship with the U.S. President.

Rutte’s strong relationship with Trump has persisted throughout splintering ties

Rutte’s interactions with the President—and the results they appear to yield—have helped earn him the moniker of “Trump whisperer.”

The NATO chief took a measured response earlier this year amid heightened tensions between Trump and European allies after the U.S. President renewed his efforts to annex Greenland.

While the NATO chief largely avoided commenting specifically on the threat to Greenland, he showed support for Trump’s concerns over Arctic security—an argument the President made when pushing his Greenland stance.

“When it comes to the Arctic, I think President Trump is right, other leaders in NATO are right: we need to defend the Arctic. We know that the sea lanes are opening up. We know that China and Russia are increasingly active in the Arctic,” Rutte said.

Rutte also suggested that NATO should be happy with Trump’s push for increased financial commitments from Europe, which last year resulted in most members of the alliance pledging to increase their national spending on defense to 5% of GDP by 2035.

“I’m not popular with you now because I’m defending Donald Trump, but I really believe you can be happy that he is there because he has forced us in Europe to step up, to face the consequences that we have to take care more of our own defence,” he argued.

Amid the rising tensions, Rutte and Trump enjoyed, what the latter referred to as, a “very productive meeting” on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum which ultimately led to Trump walking back his threats to impose tariffs on European partners over Greenland.

Despite some successful results, Rutte’s defense of Trump—and his one-time use of the nickname “daddy” has earned him criticism.

In March, he received blowback over comments regarding the Iran war.

“The President doing this is crucial… I really hope the American people will be with him, because he is doing this to make the whole world safer,” said Rutte, arguing that if Iran had nuclear and missile capability, it would be an “existential threat” to Europe and the stability of the world.

Rutte previously addressed how he is often critiqued for his praise of the U.S. President. “I hear the criticism, obviously. I’m not deaf,” he said earlier this year, but he insisted that the praise over Trump’s leadership is “warranted.”

The post U.S. Troop Withdrawals From Europe Won’t Hurt Defenses, Says NATO Chief appeared first on TIME.

But when it came time to find a job, she stumbled. U-Haul rejected her application for a typesetting role. Most companies never responded.

As her final days of college approached, Ms. Bognar, 22, began wondering if any businesses were hiring at all.

“I believe that I would be a great asset to any team that would hire me,” she said. “What’s frustrating is trying to convey that to companies.”

Her mother knows the feeling.

Jennifer Bognar was one of a dozen college seniors who spoke to The New York Times for an article in April 1991 about “the bleakest job market in a decade or more” for young graduates. A relatively mild recession, fueled by higher oil prices brought on by the Persian Gulf war, had jettisoned roughly 1.5 million jobs from the U.S. economy and intensified competition for entry-level positions.

Jennifer Bognar, then a 22-year-old political science and history major at Rutgers University in New Jersey, spent her spring break in Washington, D.C., knocking on doors asking if anyone had a job opening.

“I just can’t find anything out there,” she said at the time.

With young degree-holders today similarly desperate for jobs, The Times checked back in with three of the people featured in the article to see how graduating into a tough job market affected them.

Rather than floundering, they discovered fulfilling, if occasionally unexpected, careers. One has worked all over the world. Another is a communications executive at a pharmaceutical company. A third works in fund-raising at a university.

They have something else in common, too: They now have their own children who are going through the same thing.

‘You’ve got to keep going’

Sharon Dilling started looking for a job midway through her senior year at Rutgers in 1991. She had switched from a major in theater to journalism after her father questioned her career prospects.

“I was like, this is great because newspapers will be around forever,” she said.

A year later, the outlook was less promising. Newspapers were laying off workers or closing, and reporter positions were drying up.

Back then, job seekers paged through notebooks with listings at their career centers and perused classified ads to find open positions. They printed résumés on special paper and sent applications by mail.

Ms. Dilling, now 57, remembers scouring newspapers on Sundays for hiring announcements and trying to network her way into a job, without success. Demoralized and anxious to earn money after graduation, she accepted a job as a secretary at Rutgers.

“It wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she said.

Yet that first job led to a series of roles in communications and public affairs, including at local hospitals. She is now a communications executive at a global pharmaceutical company, punctuating a career she would never have predicted during the depths of her job search.

“You don’t have the luxury of sitting down and feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to keep going.”

She hopes her advice — be adaptable, be resilient — will help her son.

Dan Dilling, 23, graduated last year from the College of New Jersey with a degree in industrial organizational psychology. Unable to find a full-time job, he interned at a pharmaceutical company nearby until December.

To keep busy, he is working in the tools department at a Home Depot near his parents’ house in East Windsor, N.J. He plans to start a master’s program in analytics in the fall.

“Persistence is what’s going to create that opportunity,” he said.

‘Take what you can get’

At Arizona State, Julia Bognar honed her creativity and burnished her leadership credentials as president of the women’s rugby team.

Enamored with the warm Southwestern weather and confident she would land a job as a graphic designer, she lined up an apartment in downtown Phoenix for after graduation.

A host of challenges is working against her.

Economists have found that workers who graduate from college during periods of lousy hiring contend with long-term negative effects on their wages and employment. Some analysts have also estimated that graphic design is among the industries likely to lose jobs because of artificial intelligence.

The rise of A.I. is “definitely scary,” Ms. Bognar said, though she believes that anyone who thinks A.I. can replace graphic designers is mistaken.

“People are using A.I., and it’s obvious,” she said. “What we bring to the table is something a little intangible.”

Yet while her job search has been frustrating and stressful, she is optimistic that something will work out — in part because it did for her mother.

Jennifer Bognar, who is now 57 and lives in East Brunswick, N.J., never landed a job with a government agency or organization in Washington, as she had hoped. But shortly after the 1991 Times article was published, the district manager at a Social Security Administration field office expressed interest in interviewing her for a position.

“I put that interview suit back on, went downtown with my résumé and I got the job,” she said.

She went to graduate school to study arts administration and now works in fund-raising at Rutgers.

She sends her daughter job listings and encourages her to stay nimble and resourceful.

Julia Bognar is heeding her mother’s advice. As she waits for a full-time job to fall into place, she is considering taking a job at a coffee shop or as a waitress.

“She kind of gave me that perspective of, just take what you can get for now,” Julia Bognar said. “I’m like, yeah, I guess I don’t have to have it completely figured out.”

‘It does get better’

Glen Lockwood did not have it figured out.

In his senior year as a member of the class of 1991, he applied for the banking and consulting jobs preferred by certain soon-to-be graduates of Princeton University.

The recession shattered his vision.

“The standard career routes and sending in résumés just weren’t working,” said Mr. Lockwood, who is now 57.

A professor suggested he apply to a military academy in France. While there, he declined a parachuting excursion in Morocco with friends, staying behind because he was supposed to be organizing a marketing seminar that week as part of an internship with a computer company.

He was miserable and vowed not to let a once-in-a-lifetime experience pass him by again.

A month later, he received a fax from someone in Russia. Was he interested in joining a business that involved digging for woolly mammoth ivory in Siberia?

Mr. Lockwood said yes.

The woolly mammoth venture was a flop, but Mr. Lockwood met people in Russia involved in the fledgling tourism business. That led to his next job running rafting, hiking and helicopter tours for travelers eager to explore a Russia that was newly opened to the West. He also met a Russian woman who became his wife.

Over the next decades, Mr. Lockwood worked all over the world in a variety of jobs: as a contractor to the U.S. military in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and managing oil contractors in Russia and South Korea.

He worked in Zambia on a project to provide drinking water to rural villages and in Mozambique to construct and run a training center for small businesses. In 2023, he moved to Ukraine to help rebuild damaged schools. He now lives in Moldova.

“This is all because I didn’t get a job with Price Waterhouse,” he said.

Naturally, when his daughter, Anita Lockwood, started thinking about college, she wanted to study international relations.

Ms. Lockwood, 21, attends the Australian National University in Canberra and aims to work in humanitarian aid.

But U.S. federal funding cuts have limited those opportunities. Jobs in Australia are difficult to come by, especially for foreigners. A listing for a job at a pub near the university received over 1,000 applicants, she said.

With her graduation coming up in December, she is mulling a second degree in nursing to improve her chances of getting a job.

Mr. Lockwood wonders if he led his daughter down a fruitless academic path. He has encouraged her to apply to as many jobs as she can and to have a backup plan.

He also views any setback as an opportunity.

“His main advice to me so far has been pretty much to persevere,” Ms. Lockwood said.

“As difficult as it is, it does get better,” he tells her.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

Sydney Ember covers the U.S. economy for The Times.

The post To 2026 Graduates Facing a Bleak Job Market, 1991 Grads Have Some Advice appeared first on New York Times.

• Stony Brook University is using AI to improve recycling efficiency and reduce landfill waste.
• AI models help identify non-recyclable waste to prevent contamination in recycling processes.
• Researchers are testing whether AI recycling systems can scale in real-world plants.

A pizza box can feel like a recycling pop quiz. It’s cardboard, but there’s also the greasy bottom and cheese residue. Should the box go into the blue recycling bin or into the trash?

The wrong decision may seem like a harmless toss, but it can have serious consequences — ones that technologists are hoping artificial intelligence can remedy.

Recycling facilities, or materials recovery facilities, sort and process recyclable materials such as plastic, glass, and paper, which are then sold to manufacturers to create new products.

However, if an unrecyclable item, like the grease-soaked pizza box, gets mixed in with the other valuable materials, the whole batch can be rejected and sent to a landfill. Large landfills threaten the environment and human health, and the US is among the world’s largest per-person generators of waste.

At Stony Brook University, researchers are exploring AI as part of the solution by developing an AI-assisted system to analyze and characterize municipal solid waste with far greater speed and scale than traditional methods.

Stony Brook’s project reflects a broader national trend, as scientists and engineers across the country increasingly place AI at the center of efforts to streamline recycling programs and build more efficient, effective waste management and sorting systems.

Training AI to sort trash smarter

The Stony Brook project officially kicked off in January 2025. As part of her preliminary work, Ruwen Qin, an associate professor and the project’s principal investigator, visited material recovery facilities on Long Island and spoke with staff about the challenges they face and the solutions they are interested in. “Without the collaboration from local facilities, it is impossible to conduct this type of research, because that data is essential for developing artificial intelligence algorithms,” she said.

During these site visits, Qin and her team used low-cost cameras, such as GoPros, to capture video and audio. Qin said this data was used to guide the development of the AI model.

Subsequently, the Stony Brook AI model was trained to identify paper, plastics, food waste, and fabrics and automatically estimate their quantities. The work is supported by the Stony Brook University AI Innovation Seed Grant; after receiving the grant, Qin was able to involve graduate students in the research. Qin has also closely collaborated with the university’s Waste Data and Analysis Center throughout the initiative.

“A very important task is to sample and sort the waste and try to determine what materials are in the waste stream and what the quantity is,” Qin told Business Insider. “As we train the algorithm, we can analyze samples in large quantities more efficiently than a human being.”

This process of identifying, separating, and analyzing components of a waste stream is known as characterization. It’s time-consuming and detail-oriented work. But Qin said AI can ideally expedite the process. AI models, like the one she’s developing, can pinpoint whether something unrecyclable has been mistakenly mixed with other recyclable products and prevent it from being rejected and sent to landfills.

While the project is in its early stages, Qin said her short-term goal is to provide high-quality data to researchers, which she hopes will be used to develop more affordable and accessible open-source models.

Qin added that her team will continue training the model so that it can eventually “identify different waste materials under all conditions.” She also hopes to secure additional funding to transfer the technology into real-world applications, such as material recovery facilities.

In the future, Qin said that she’s interested in merging AI with robotics: the algorithm could instruct robots on what they can and can’t take from the waste stream.

Scaling the tech

AI’s recycling algorithms are starting to trickle into the waste management industry. For example, in Colorado, AMP Robotics has developed an AI-robotics system for the factory line. And Greyparrot, a London-based startup, has an AI sorting system used in more than 20 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Aurora del Carmen Munguía-López, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo who researches recycling solutions, said when it comes to developing AI-sorting systems, there’s still work to be done. As pilot projects move from different universities into plant facilities, Munguía-López told Business Insider that part of the challenge is determining whether these algorithms can work at the scale required in professional settings.

While AI’s energy-hungry data centers are creating environmental risks, Munguía-López said its overall impact could still be positive if the technology increases recycling rates, reduces reliance on fossil-fuel-based plastic production, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions.

Given the tech’s potential to improve recycling and reduce emissions, Qin wants to ensure that Stony Brook’s AI model is an intellectual product that anyone can use to their advantage. “We want to make the data, the model, and the technology publicly available to benefit society,” she said.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post Stony Brook University researchers are teaching AI how to sort your recycling appeared first on Business Insider.

The record of the most recent gathering, released on Wednesday, underscored the extent to which the war with Iran has upended the economic outlook and the policy options in front of a central bank that is on the cusp of a leadership transition. April’s gathering was Jerome H. Powell’s last as chair. On Friday, his replacement, Kevin M. Warsh, is set to be sworn in at the White House.

At the start of 2026, most Fed officials saw a path to lower rates this year based on their expectation that inflation would decelerate as the impact of President Trump’s tariffs faded.

But the energy shock stemming from the war has pushed inflation further away from the Fed’s 2 percent target, stoking concerns about a more persistent problem just as the labor market has stabilized. This backdrop has dimmed the prospects of any immediate relief in borrowing costs, with traders in federal funds futures markets now penciling in a rate increase in early 2027.

According to the minutes, a majority of the participants highlighted that “some policy firming would likely become appropriate if inflation were to continue to run persistently above 2 percent.”

April’s meeting was one of the most divisive in decades. Most policymakers agreed with the Fed’s decision to hold rates steady at a range of 3.5 percent to 3.75 percent. But three members of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee voted against what they described as an “easing bias” in the central bank’s policy statement. They wanted the Fed to make clear that the next move could just as likely be a rate increase as a rate reduction.

The minutes showed mounting support for that shift across the broader group of 19 policymakers, noting that “many participants indicated that they would have preferred removing the language from the post-meeting statement that suggested an easing bias regarding the likely direction of the committee’s future interest rate decisions.”

For now, however, most officials appeared comfortable holding rates steady “for longer than previously anticipated” given the recent string of elevated inflation reports and uncertainty about when the war might end. They also appeared to turn more upbeat about the growth outlook in light of recent evidence that the unemployment rate had stabilized, business investment had remained robust and consumer spending had stayed resilient.

A vast majority of officials, according to the minutes, appeared attuned to the possibility that it would take longer for inflation to fall back to the 2 percent target, with several people warning about that overshoot eventually impacting not only how employers set prices but also the wages that employees demand. That kind of spillover could result in a much more persistent inflation problem that would be harder to root out.

Mr. Powell will remain one of the Fed’s 19 officials weighing in on the policy outlook even after he steps down as chair, having decided to stay on as a governor because of his concerns about Mr. Trump’s attempts to encroach on the Fed’s independence.

That leaves Mr. Warsh to allay concerns about rising inflation risks because of the war, while forging consensus among his new colleagues about the path forward for policy. U.S. government bond yields have shot higher in the past week, indicating a drop in price. The yield on 30-year Treasuries at one point this week traded at its highest level since 2007.

This backdrop is likely to deny Mr. Trump the lower borrowing costs he wants and has said he expected Mr. Warsh to deliver.

Mr. Trump appeared to ease up on his demands ahead of Mr. Warsh’s swearing-in ceremony, saying this week that he would “let him do what he wants to do.”

“He’s a very talented guy — he’s going to be fine, he’s going to do a good job,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Warsh.

Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve and the U.S. economy for The Times.

The post Most Fed Officials Embraced Possibility of Higher Rates at Recent Meeting appeared first on New York Times.

Trump’s remarks to the class of 2026 were the first time he has given a commencement address at one of the nation’s military academies after sending U.S. troops to fight a new war.

He told the cadets that they will be America’s “first defenders” and “first responders.”

“You’ve all been tested. You’ll be tested further and probably at higher levels as your career goes on,” Trump said.

During his address, Trump quickly touched on the war with Iran, now in its 12th week, as a sign of U.S. success from “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

“The only question is, do we go ahead and finish it up or are they going to be signing a document? Let’s see what happens,” Trump said.

The Republican president had threatened to launch renewed strikes on Iran this week as talks with Tehran seemed to have stalled and a fragile ceasefire appeared to be teetering. But Trump on Monday said he was giving Iran a few more days because “serious negotiations” were underway.

He has not offered details and has in the past backed away from following through on threats to Iran, citing breakthroughs in talks that have not publicly materialized.

Earlier Wednesday, he told reporters that he’s “in no hurry” to strike a deal to wrap up the war because of political concerns and the November midterm elections.

The commencement was held on a day with scorching heat and there was little shade available as the crowd waited for the ceremony to begin.

At least one person required medical attention after passing out. Others pleaded with organizers for elderly attendants to sit in the shade under tents. Chilled water bottles were distributed freely but quickly became warm.

Trump, who spoke at the academy’s graduation in 2017 during his first term, said he was proud to be the first president to give two commencement addresses at the school.

“We’re going to have to try it maybe a third time, too, to keep that record intact,” Trump said Wednesday.

The president and vice president traditionally speak at one of the military service academies every year. Vice President JD Vance is set to give the commencement address on May 28 at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Before he flew to Connecticut, Trump told reporters that his message to the cadets would be, “Just enjoy your life.”

“You know, you don’t really realize how important Coast Guard is until you have a hurricane,” Trump said as he praised the maritime service.

Price and Kruesi write for the Associated Press. Price reported from Washington.

The post Trump tells Coast Guard graduates they will ‘be tested’ in their military careers appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Elsewhere in the solar system, other large moons orbit forward, reflecting a likely origin story in which they coalesced from swirling dust and gas when their planets were still young. Because of Triton’s exceptional behavior, astronomers have long theorized that it didn’t form around Neptune at all. Instead, four billion years ago, it flew in like a wrecking ball, kicking out any pre-existing moons and sending them off into spiraling orbits around the sun, never to be seen again.

But astronomers have long wondered whether at least one of the planet’s current moons, the 210-mile-wide Nereid, might be the lone survivor of that event. This could explain Nereid’s unusually wide and stretched-out orbit, which has it barely clinging onto the planet’s gravitational pull.

A study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances provides new evidence for this hypothesis. A team led by Matthew Belyakov, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, used the James Webb Space Telescope to look at Nereid for just 10 minutes; it appears only as a dot of light to telescopes because Neptune is billions of miles from Earth. The team found Nereid’s reflected light looked quite different from objects in the Kuiper belt, where it might have come from if it was not born around Neptune: Nereid has a slightly bluer tinge than the red objects in the belt. “It just doesn’t quite look like everything else,” Dr. Belyakov said.

Next, the team used computer models to simulate the arrival of Triton in Neptune’s orbit, to see how Nereid could have survived. Initially, Triton would have been on a wide, looping course around the planet; if it stayed like that for too long, 100 million to a billion years, no moons would have escaped its influence. “You need Triton to get out of the way fast enough,” said Matija Ćuk, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California who was not involved in the study.

This could have happened, the team’s models showed, if Triton was hit by one or two large objects in the first million years it was orbiting Neptune. “You just have to get lucky once or twice,” Dr. Belyakov said. That would have been enough to squash Triton’s orbit into a circle, leaving Nereid in its very eccentric — but crucially stable — orbit around Neptune that takes it millions of miles from the planet.

Benjamin Sharkey, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, said the findings could tell us more about the chaotic history of the early solar system — not just around Neptune but around Uranus, too, which is thought to have experienced its own catastrophic event early on when a giant impact knocked it on its side. “We don’t know what either Neptune or Uranus’s original systems looked like, and Nereid is a great example of this provocative mystery,” he said.

“Nereid is absolutely vital in understanding how satellites form,” Dr. Belyakov added.

While most of Neptune’s other moons would have been captured after Triton’s grand entrance, there might be some others that survived its arrival. In particular, a group of moons close to the planet could be fragments of the original moons that were broken apart in collisions. “They might also be the leftovers,” Dr. Ćuk said, “but they got reworked when Triton made a mess.”

To know the origin of Nereid for certain, we would need to send a spacecraft to Neptune to study it. With no mission to Neptune currently in development, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, but perhaps one day we might decide to go and take a closer look in search of answers.

“It’s a criminally understudied moon,” Dr. Belyakov said.

The post This Moon of Neptune Might Have Survived a Wrecking-Ball Event appeared first on New York Times.

The advisory calls on children and adolescents to “live real life” and go outside, and for parents to discuss boundaries around technology and to delay screen time for “as long as possible.” It highlighted social media platforms as a top concern, but also pointed to A.I. chatbots and gambling platforms as part of the “digital ecosystem” driving concerning levels of screen time. The report also recommends that schools ban phones during classes, and that doctors ask about screen use during annual checkups.

Screen time is a frequent target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who will unveil the report at an event on Wednesday in Iowa, where a law enacted last year limited cellphone use in schools.

The report was produced by the office of the surgeon general, however, that post has remained empty since January 2025. The Trump administration has withdrawn its first two nominees for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. The administration’s new nominee, Dr. Nicole Saphier, has yet to appear before the Senate.

Some studies have linked too much time online with health harms, like mental health issues. But much of the existing research does not suggest that social media use is a major predictor of whether a child will develop mental health issues, said Candice Odgers, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the health effects of screen use. Rather, she said, it suggests that children who are already struggling with mental health or other issues are more likely to spend time online.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated May 20, 2026, 2:41 p.m. ET

• May 20 isn’t just any day for Cubans. That’s why the U.S. chose it to act.
• The shooting down of the volunteers’ planes followed months of diplomatic wrangling.
• The Castro indictment is Trump’s latest move against Cuba.

Dr. John Torous, director of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the report “comes across as a little too certain” on the evidence. He said that it is difficult to make a blanket statement on whether screen time is beneficial or harmful for children. As the advisory itself notes, young people can also reap benefits from time online, such as new friendships, he added.

Researchers said that some of the strategies the report called for were common sense and that experts have recommended them for years. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued similar guidelines. Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general during the Biden administration, went so far as to call for a warning label on social media platforms because of their potential to harm adolescent mental health.

But screen time remains high. The advisory notes that starting around age 8, children spend an average of four or more hours per day.

Dr. Odgers said the advisory may represent more of a winning political talking point than a meaningful shift in policy. “They couch it in things people can agree with, like, go play in parks,” she said, noting that polls show bipartisan support for school cellphone bans.

The report was written by staffers in the surgeon general’s office and the Department of Health and Human Services, including Mr. Kennedy’s close adviser, Stefanie Spear, and Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos, a senior adviser and chief of staff for the surgeon general’s office. (The authors noted that the report was created with the help of a chatbot, “for text editing purposes.”)

On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy said that Dr. Haridopolos, a family medicine physician and the wife of Mike Haridopolos, a Republican representative from Florida, would take on some of the surgeon general’s duties, including promoting health guidance.

Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times.

The post A Vacant Surgeon General’s Office Issues a Warning About Screen Time appeared first on New York Times.

Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) appeared on CNN to react to Trump’s fund, created as part of a lawsuit settlement with the IRS. Anchor Dana Bash noted that Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he’s “not a big fan” of the $1.8 billion fund, which critics expect will benefit Trump allies.

“My first reaction was, ‘This doesn’t pass the smell test,’” Curtis said. “That said, I’m willing to learn more about it and its intent.”

Curtis said he expects to see “a lot of bipartisan questioning of whether this is a good idea,” but he refused to say whether he would block it.

“I have to know more about what it is,” Curtis repeated. “But my initial reaction is, look, from all outward appearances, this doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The post GOP senator admits Trump’s new scheme ‘doesn’t pass the smell test’ appeared first on Raw Story.

Hours later, the Justice Department indicted Cuba’s former president, Raúl Castro, for having given orders to shoot down two small civilian planes in 1996. The indictment was part of a multipronged U.S. strategy to topple Cuba’s communist government, which has included threats from Mr. Trump that he will “take” the country.

But the latest U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba, including its attempts to control who leads the country, reflects a dynamic that is more than a century old. And the U.S. government’s decision to indict Mr. Castro on May 20 carries particular significance.

On May 20, 1902, the U.S. formally ended its military occupation of Cuba, which it had maintained in the years after a rout of Spanish colonial forces by a combination of U.S. troops and Cuban guerrillas who had been fighting an independence war for three decades. While other Spanish colonies like Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines became U.S. possessions, Cuba was granted independence.

Many Cubans “celebrated their independence to the tilt” at the time, said Michael Bustamante, who directs the Cuban American studies program at the University of Miami. “But it came with a big asterisk.”

There was more than one asterisk. The biggest was the Platt Amendment, which “basically authorized the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs going forward,” Dr. Bustamante said. Cuba was essentially forced to accept those terms or allow the U.S. military occupation to continue. During that era, U.S. business interests, particularly in sugar, began buying large plantations on the island.

Another asterisk was the granting of a perpetual lease over a strategic port in Cuba’s southeast that became Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

The terms on which the U.S. lifted its military occupation “gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility,” Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University who studies U.S. colonialism, wrote in his book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”

Before the Platt Amendment was repealed in 1934, the U.S. would militarily occupy Cuba twice more, stepping in largely to protect its economic interests. The amendment helped destabilize Cuba, Dr. Bustamante said, because landowners would drum up unrest to precipitate U.S. intervention and the replacement of democratically elected leaders they opposed.

The communist government that came to power in Cuba’s 1959 revolution eventually abandoned May 20 as an official independence day. The White House, in a statement on Wednesday commemorating Cuban independence, said that the current government represented a “direct betrayal of the nation their founding patriots bled and died for.”

The choice of May 20 would resonate for most Cubans, said Dr. Bustamante.

“In the context of broader foreign policy worldview where the Trump administration is pushing to reassert U.S. dominance — their words not mine — in the Western Hemisphere,” he said, “they are hearkening back to this moment when the U.S. did treat Cuba as its backyard.”

Max Bearak is a correspondent for The Times focusing on breaking and international news.

The post Why the U.S. Chose May 20 to Seek Charges Against Raúl Castro appeared first on New York Times.

While many people across the U.S. lost their jobs over social media comments about Kirk’s death, Larry Bushart’s case stood out as a rare instance in which such online speech led to criminal prosecution. The 61-year-old retired police officer spent 37 days behind bars before authorities dropped the felony charge against him in October.

During his time in jail, Bushart lost his postretirement job and missed his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter, according to a federal lawsuit Bushart filed in December against Perry County, its sheriff and the investigator who obtained the arrest warrant.

“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” Bushart said in a statement announcing the settlement Wednesday. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”

Perry County Mayor John Carroll did not immediately respond to a Wednesday message left with his office seeking an interview.

Bushart was arrested in September after he refused to take down Facebook memes that joked about Kirk’s killing, which had prompted an outpouring of grief among conservatives, including in Perry County, which is near Bushart’s home and which held a candlelight vigil.

The meme Bushart posted that prompted his arrest read: “This seems relevant today…” and featured President Trump and the words, “We have to get over it.” That quote, the meme explained, was said by Trump in 2024 after a school shooting at Iowa’s Perry High School.

Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems told news outlets that most of Bushart’s “hate memes” were lawful free speech, but residents were alarmed by the school shooting post, fearing Bushart was threatening a local school, also called Perry County High School, even though Weems said he knew the meme referred to a school in Iowa.

“Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems said in a statement to The Tennessean last year.

Bushart’s bail was set at $2 million before he was released as the case drew national attention.

“It’s in times of turmoil and heightened tensions that our national commitment to free speech is tested the most,” said Cary Davis, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which helped represent Bushart. “When government officials fail that test, the Constitution exists to hold them accountable. Our hope is that Larry’s settlement sends a message to law enforcement across the country: Respect the First Amendment today, or be prepared to pay the price tomorrow.”

Rico writes for the Associated Press.

The post Tennessee man jailed over Charlie Kirk post wins $835,000 settlement appeared first on Los Angeles Times.