Michael Boulos, the husband of the president’s younger daughter Tiffany Trump, sat beside the secretary of state during a meeting on Wednesday with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and Rubio appeared to be caught flat-footed when asked Thursday in Kuwait about his role in the talks.

“Oh, he was there to see – his brother lives here,” Rubio told reporters. “He was just there to see me and catch up.”

Another reporter followed up and asked whether the meeting was a working lunch.

“There was, but he wasn’t, the conversations around him had to do with – he was just here because his brother lives here and I’m a good friend of Michael’s, so we had a chance to catch up,” Rubio said.

Social media critics weren’t satisfied with Rubio’s explanation.

“Puh-leese,” groaned Alan Eyre, a former State Department official and distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute.

“Trump’s son-in-law just happened to sit next to the Secretary of State at a meeting with the leader of the UAE,” pondered Josh Dorner, a Democratic communications specialist. “And Rubio basically says he was just there to see his brother who lives there and to see Rubio (?), which still doesn’t explain why he was at this meeting.”

“This is ridiculous from @marcorubio,” slammed Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council staffer under President Barack Obama. “He had to catch up with Trump’s son in law DURING a meeting with the president of the UAE?”

“Casual corruption is a regular part of this Administration and the Republican Doormat Congress has no interest in stopping it,” opined Democratic congressional candidate Fred Wellman.

“Listen, Marco Rubio has a thousand jobs, so probably the only time he has to catch up with friends is in official meetings ok,” joked journalist Jessica Huseman.

“Does every ancillary Trump family member need to be shoehorned into Middle East diplomacy,” wondered geoeconomics analyst Ali Ahmadi.

“Team Trump is just a bottomless pool of corruption,” sneered economist Dean Baker.

“This no way explains why this non-entity is sitting in an official meeting btw our govt+another nation,” noted author and journalist Bill Carter.. If he’s along for the ride to visit his brother he better be paying his way. Ivanks once SAT IN as Trump. No other Admin has treated official US actions like family gatherings.

The post ‘Bottomless pool of corruption’: Fury as Trump in-law tags along on Rubio’s UAE meeting appeared first on Raw Story.

According to documents obtained by PEOPLE, Sexyy Red rented a mansion for the party. She then hired a man named Carl Thompson to provide security for the getaway. She claims Thompson asked to bring three more security guards as well, so he could do his job more “effectively.” This request was approved.

On January 12, 2025, a masked individual entered the house and stole $500,000 worth of property. This included various types of jewelry, watches, and designer handbags. The unknown assailant entered the rented home through an unlocked door. In her lawsuit, Sexyy Red alleged that Thompson was negligent and was the one who left the door unlocked.

Sexyy Red’s security guard, Carl Thompson, denies any wrongdoing in the burglary

“I personally terminated Mr. Thompson’s duties as a security guard following an incident where a mansion rented by Sexyy Red to celebrate her mother’s birthday was burglarized by a lone subject who walked directly to an unlocked door while the party was out celebrating on yachts,” Jeremy Carter, a spokesperson for Sexyy Red, told PEOPLE. “Mr. Thompson was responsible for securing the property, however, failed in his duties to do so.”

Thompson’s attorney, Mason Richard Wolfe, also issued a statement, telling PEOPLE that the security guard “expressly denies anything to do with the burglary.”

“The police investigated the matter and filed no charges against him,” Wolfe said. “The only reason Sexyy Red filed the counterclaim regarding the burglary against my client is to try and avoid paying her employee what she agreed to pay them.”

Thompson claimed, in a separate lawsuit, that Sexyy Red owed him more than $80k in wages from 2023

Notably, Thompson previously filed a breach-of-contract suit against Sexyy Red and her management company. In the August 2025 filing, he claimed that they owed him $80,500 in unpaid wages from 2023.

In a counterclaim, it was revealed that Sexyy Red hired a private detective to investigate the burglary. The filing also alleged that Thompson failed a polygraph test at some point.

Thompson later filed a motion to dismiss Sexyy Red’s counterclaim. He stated that he had “no control over the premises,” and therefore was not responsible for the burglary. Sexyy Red responded in her subsequent filing by claiming that Thopmson could “provide reasonable security measures,” but simply didn’t. She cited the three additional guards as evidence.

“Only after Mr. Thompson was terminated, and rather than walk away, he sued us for alleged unpaid wages from years ago,” read a statement from Sexyy Red’s rep, Jeremy Carter. “Sexyy Red is mourning the loss of her close friend, Tay Keith, and we are more focused on her mental state at this time rather than ambulance chasing lawyers trying to shake down Sexyy Red and her label.”

The post Sexyy Red Suing Former Security Guard Over Alleged $500K Burglary at Her Mother’s Birthday Party appeared first on VICE.

• Ford says AI and automation helped its quality turnaround, but they were not enough on their own.
• Execs told reporters they hired or brought back 350 technical specialists to catch defects earlier.
• The overhaul helped Ford top JD Power after years of quality problems and expensive recalls.

Ford staged a quality comeback. The automaker credits part of the turnaround to pairing AI with something more old-school: veteran engineers.

Executives at Ford told reporters this week that the company had hired, promoted, or brought back about 350 experienced technical specialists as part of a sweeping effort to fix vehicle-quality problems. Those engineering veterans have helped mentor younger staff, lead design reviews, and improve the AI and automated quality tools Ford uses to catch defects before vehicles reach customers, they said.

They also offered a striking admission: AI and automation were not enough on their own.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.”

Poon said Ford had not done enough in prior years to preserve the knowledge of its most experienced engineers, some of whom left the company before their expertise was fully integrated into Ford’s systems. He said quality problems often showed up at the boundaries between teams, where design, manufacturing, software, and hardware collide.

Quality win, recall hangover

The comments came as Ford celebrated a major milestone.

Consumer data analytics firm JD Power named Ford the top mass-market brand in its latest initial-quality study, trailing only Porsche and Genesis overall, according to the study released Thursday. Ford narrowly beat Lexus, which has long been one of the strongest performers in the rankings.

That’s a big turnaround. Just three years ago, Ford ranked 15th out of 25 major automakers in the same study.

For years, Ford has faced headwinds on its product quality. In 2025, Ford issued 152 recalls, nearly doubling the previous record set by General Motors in 2014 with 77 safety bulletins.

As of Thursday, Ford had issued 51 recalls this year, according to the NHTSA’s dashboard. That’s still more than double Chrysler, the next-closest automaker, which had issued 19.

Ford executives said many of the continued recall issues are tied to vehicles and platforms designed between 2013 and 2020, calling recalls a “lagging indicator.” They framed the JD Power win as proof that a new approach is taking hold, and said internal data shows “clear improvement” in newer vehicles.

Still, the initial-quality study measures problems in new vehicles, not long-term durability, making it an early signal rather than a full verdict on whether Ford has solved its recall problem.

Ford says it changed how it catches problems

Ford launched its quality reset in 2023.

In that time, Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s COO, said the company has more than doubled its technical specialist population. Those specialists now lead mandatory design reviews and look for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor.

“They hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor,” he said.

The company also created an industrial system team to bring engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain closer together. Before that approach, Galhotra said Ford had previously relied too heavily on a “find and fix” approach — identifying problems after they appeared and trying to resolve them quickly.

Now, Ford says it is trying to prevent problems before they happen.

Ford previously told Business Insider that it had developed two bespoke AI-enhanced scanning tools that helped validate that cars were properly assembled before rolling off the lot. The tools, called AiTriz and MAIVs, both debuted in 2024.

While Ford has previously said the tools are helping improve product quality, the company did not say whether the 350 specialists worked directly on them.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post Ford says AI alone couldn’t fix its quality problems. It needed to rehire veteran engineers to help. appeared first on Business Insider.

The blowup came at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, where Mullin was testifying on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the panel’s ranking member, had invoked former President Donald Trump’s family separation policy, noting that 3,900 children were separated from their parents at the border.

Mullin interrupted her.

“450,000 kids were lost during the former President Joe Biden administration,” he fired back. “You didn’t say a word —”

“Mr. Secretary! Do not interrupt!” DeLauro shot back.

“Don’t you point your finger at me! You hypocrite!” Mullin charged.

“I will point my finger at you!” DeLauro replied, refusing to back down.

“Be a hypocrite then! You should be as upset about the 450,000 kids that were lost! You didn’t say a word about it! For four years, you never said a word!” Mullin exclaimed, refusing to stop.

DeLauro turned to Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV), the Republican chairman running the hearing.

“Could you put him in his place!” she demanded.

Mullin answered before Amodei could.

“You should be put in your place,” he snapped.

Amodei tried to restore order, reminding Mullin that members were entitled to their full eight minutes of questioning. Mullin ignored him.

“I will not let her sit there and lie and accuse something this ridiculous,” Mullin continued.

“Do not accuse me of lying! Do not!” DeLauro fired back.

The chairman banged his gavel twice.

“We are going to have something resembling order here!” Amodei warned.

Mullin, a former U.S. senator and professional MMA fighter, was confirmed by the Senate in March to lead the department. Thursday’s eruption came during his first major appropriations hearing as secretary.

DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who has served in Congress since 1991, refused to yield.

“I have a long history, Mr. Secretary, in this area,” she said. “3,900 kids were separated.”

Mullin did not apologize.

The post Angry shouting match derails Markwayne Mullin’s hearing: ‘Don’t you point your finger!’ appeared first on Raw Story.

The continent’s stifling heat wave — the second in two months — has disrupted education, transportation and other aspects of daily life for millions of people, with officials warning that older people or those who work outdoors, like on construction sites, are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat.

The heat has also proved deadly.

In Spain, where temperatures soared past 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 Fahrenheit, over several days, official statistical models suggested that more than 200 deaths could ultimately be attributed to the heat wave. The Health Institute of Carlos III, which is linked to Spain’s health ministry, cautioned that the figures were estimates, but officials and experts say there is a clear correlation between extreme temperatures and serious health issues.

In Italy, five people have died from heat exposure this week, according to the country’s main news agency, ANSA. Several of them died while working outside, and a homeless man died in Naples, highlighting the vulnerability of those who had little choice but to be outdoors.

In France, at least 40 people have drowned since the latest heat wave began in the middle of last week, many of them teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas. And French prosecutors said three children were found dead in parked cars this week, in two separate incidents.

Across much of Western Europe, temperatures were in the high 30s to low 40s Celsius, or around 100 Fahrenheit, on Thursday afternoon. Paris hit 39.6 Celsius, or 103.3 Fahrenheit, and was forecast to reach 42 Celsius later in the day. Temperatures in Britain broke a record for June that was set just a day earlier, with 36.4 degrees, or 97.5 Fahrenheit, recorded in southwest England by early Thursday afternoon, a number that was expected to climb.

More than a dozen countries were under high-level heat warnings on Thursday, including Austria, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia and Sweden.

Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common and severe because of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, experts say. And average temperatures are rising fastest in European countries, which are also some of the least accustomed to extreme heat. In Britain and France, for instance, many buildings don’t just lack air-conditioning — they are also designed to retain heat.

The heat is also testing infrastructure. At one point on Tuesday, nearly 120,000 homes lost electricity in France as the nation’s power grid struggled to meet demand, the national network, RTE, said. In southwest France, the authorities shut down a nuclear plant because the water temperature in the river, used to cool its reactor, was dangerously hot. Rail journeys in Britain, Germany and Switzerland were delayed or canceled as the heat risked buckling railway tracks, officials said.

Forecasters said temperatures were expected to gradually cool down across Western Europe starting on Friday.

Globally, last month was the second-hottest May in 177 years of record-keeping, after 2024, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A city in Pakistan set a new heat record in May of 51.5 degrees Celsius, or 125 degrees Fahrenheit. And temperatures in some parts of northern India approached 50 degrees Celsius last month, forcing millions of workers to choose between their health and their wages.

The post More Temperature Records Fall as Deadly Heat Stifles Europe appeared first on New York Times.

The request, sent in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on Wednesday, arrives as many Democrats have already said they will oppose the proposal while protesting the conflict.

Their opposition complicates the budget request’s path in the Senate, where legislation requires 60 votes to advance.

“I will closely review this request in its entirety and ensure we take care of our servicemembers, but I will not rubber stamp tens of billions more for this disastrous war of choice,” Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

The request mostly includes money for the Pentagon, with $67 billion going toward replenishing the military’s stocks of munitions and the cost of sending so many forces to the Middle East during the airstrike campaign.

But it also asks for billions of dollars in other priorities; for instance, $1.35 billion to fight the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa and $500 million for the National Park Service to repair the World War II Memorial in D.C., among other restoration projects.

Lawmakers had pleaded with the Pentagon for months to send the details of the supplemental so they could factor the military’s needs into their annual defense bills.

During a hearing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in May, Rep. Betty McCollum (Minnesota), the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, said they needed that information before the committee advanced its version of the annual Pentagon budget.

The panel was marking up the legislation Wednesday as the request arrived, with the Pentagon missing the deadline.

Still, Republicans signaled support for the package, calling it necessary to restore America’s military readiness after firing thousands of precision weapons and taxing some of the Pentagon’s premier warships during the campaign.

“Our forces performed their mission with extraordinary precision and professionalism, and we must now ensure they have the resources necessary to replenish critical munitions, sustain readiness, and reinforce the capacity of our military that made such success possible,” said Reps. Tom Cole (Oklahoma) and Ken Calvert (California), the top Republicans on the Appropriations Committee and its defense panel, respectively.

The request also included $10 billion in economic assistance to farmers, an additional $1.1 billion for Florida’s agricultural sector suffering after winter storms, $1 billion to modernize Penn Station in New York City and $1 billion for pensioners impacted by General Motors’ bankruptcy after the Great Recession.

At $88 billion, the final number is far less than the $200 billion the Pentagon initially argued for within the administration. That proposal, which came before the White House’s record $1.5 trillion defense budget, was considered unrealistic by some within the administration, The Washington Post has reported.

In April, The Post reported that the total had been slashed to between $80 billion and $100 billion.

The administration’s overall defense budget request has faced growing opposition in recent weeks as Republicans criticize the White House’s decision to split the package into two bills.

The base budget request of $1.15 trillion has faced immense resistance from Democrats, who argue the total is a wasteful splurge on the Pentagon despite the $40 trillion national debt.

A separate package of $350 billion meant to advance through a process known as reconciliation — requiring only a simple majority vote — has also come under fire as risky and unrealistic.

Some key Senate Republicans have publicly said that they doubt the package — which contains money for Trump priorities from shipbuilding to the Golden Dome missile defense system — and that they don’t think the proposal will survive.

Hegseth has been meeting with Republicans in recent weeks to make the case for the defense budget.

Riley Beggin contributed to this report.

The post White House seeks additional $88 billion from Congress for Iran war, other priorities appeared first on Washington Post.

Lawler wrote in a post on X that he thinks the situation in Haiti is a “humanitarian and political disaster and continues to warrant an extension.”

“While I have never disputed the ability of the President to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS), I strongly disagree with ending Haitian TPS at this time,” Lawler wrote, adding that the immediate ending of this status would “create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes.”

Conservative social media users and MAGA supporters made their dissatisfaction with Lawler known.

“Two things can be true at the same time. We can sympathize with those who have to leave our great country but also understand that applying the skills and education they received here back in Haiti is the only hope of ever saving that nation,” Julie Kelly, a MAGA-aligned political commentator and writer with more than 909,000 followers, wrote on X.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The worst GOP Congressman. He hurts our team more than a Democrat in his seat would. Vote him out– yes, even in the general,” Jeremy Carl, senior fellow at conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, wrote on X.

“They’ve been on this ‘temporary’ status for nearly 20 years,” Real Political Data, a conservative political commentary account with more than 58,000 followers, wrote on X.

“Exile this guy to Haiti,” conservative writer Paul Kersey wrote on X.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The worst GOP Congressman. He hurts our team more than a Democrat in his seat would. Vote him out– yes, even in the general. https://t.co/AUkPwOxgqs — Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) June 25, 2026

The post ‘Exile this guy’: MAGA turns on Republican for breaking with Trump on Supreme Court ruling appeared first on Raw Story.

In the 7-to-2 decision, written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the majority found that a federal law that regulates pesticides barred the Missouri man’s lawsuit.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Missouri case would “require a cancer warning on Roundup’s label,” which would directly conflict with the label required by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Because of this conflict, he wrote, federal law “expressly pre-empts” the Missouri man’s claim.

In an unusual pairing, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, was joined by Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, in dissent. Justice Jackson wrote that in her view the majority had misunderstood the scope of the federal law, leaving the Missouri man “without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered.”

The dispute focused on a single case, a $1.25 million award for John Durnell, a gardener in St. Louis who had used Roundup for decades and claimed that years of exposure to the product led him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. Mr. Durnell claimed that the company had failed to warn consumers of the dangers of the product.

The ramifications of the decision could be enormous, potentially jeopardizing thousands of lawsuits pending in state and federal courts against Bayer, the German company that acquired Roundup’s original maker, Monsanto, in 2018.

The legal question before the justices focused on a narrow slice of the broader litigation: whether Bayer can be sued in state-level courts given that a federal agency decided not to issue a warning label for the weedkiller.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which is in charge of labeling pesticides throughout the country, has determined Roundup is safe. Bayer claims that the finding, which allows Roundup to be sold without a warning label, should override claims by Mr. Durnell and others that under state laws, they were injured by the product.

The Trump administration joined the case on Bayer’s side, reversing the position taken by the Biden administration. The Trump administration’s support for the Roundup manufacturer has been controversial among the Make America Healthy Again movement, whose activists had largely supported Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign for the White House.

Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and an advocate for the MAHA movement, on Thursday called the decision “worse than treason” and said it reflected a betrayal of President Trump’s promises to the MAHA movement. “It really is chemical warfare on the American people,” she said.

Vani Hari, a food activist and leading voice in the MAHA movement known as “the Food Babe,” said, “It’s really sickening.” She said that glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, “becomes now the midterm issue.”

Government lawyers asserted that once the E.P.A. determined Roundup was safe, Bayer was in fact required to abide by the agency’s decision in its product labeling.

If the company had tried to unilaterally change the product’s label, they argued, it would have violated the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.

Roundup, which was created by Monsanto in the 1970s, is one of the most popular weedkillers in the world. But concerns over glyphosate — a chemical that is absorbed by plants, traveling into their roots and blocking an enzyme used for their growth — have prompted one of the biggest waves of class-action lawsuits in U.S. history.

Evidence in lab animals, along with more limited evidence in humans, has shown a link between glyphosate and cancer, and a 2015 report by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

The E.P.A. has studied the chemical and determined a cancer warning was not necessary. In February 2020, the agency announced findings that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label” and that the chemical was “unlikely” to cause cancer in humans.

After a court challenge, the E.P.A. withdrew those findings and the chemical’s safety currently remains under formal review.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Durnell said the company should be liable for failing to warn users about the risks of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma from exposure to glyphosate.

In 2023, a jury in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, a state court, sided with Mr. Durnell. The company appealed the case, which eventually landed at the Supreme Court.

Brian Leake, a spokesman for Bayer, said in a statement that the decision was “good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation.”

The decision by the justices drew sharp criticism, however, from both environmental advocacy groups and high-profile supporters of the Make American Healthy Again movement.

Earthjustice, an nonprofit environmental law organization, released a statement calling the decision “deeply troubling.”

Patti Goldman, a lawyer for the group, said that the ruling “allows Monsanto and other chemical companies to avoid responsibility when their labels leave people unprotected from serious harm.”

Alex Clark, a leading voice in the MAHA movement and a supporter of Mr. Trump, posted on X, “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a STUNNING betrayal. Farmers, families, and cancer patients currently in litigation with Bayer will never forget this.”

Dani Blum and Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.

The post Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer appeared first on New York Times.

The event, the sixth annual Pawcade show, combines the world of pro wrestling with a fundraiser for Mispits and Friends Rescue, a Louisville-based nonprofit that rescues and rehomes animals in need. The event, being held by local wrestling promoter Chad French, is part entertainment, part charitable effort, and a massive reunion for those in the area who love pro wrestling.

“Pawcade is more than just a wrestling show,” French told VICE. “Since its inception, it has been both a wrestling family reunion and a great cause that we can all get behind. I started doing these in 2020 because I wanted to try my hand at putting on a show that has a purpose, and I feel we have accomplished that.”

That sense of purpose is a major part of the event’s identity and represents the ethos of independent wrestling, where things are never as glamorous as what you might see on television when tuning in for an episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw. The show is built on local passion, word-of-mouth advertising, and a group of people who love watching other people get thrown through tables.

Pawcade 6 has drawn extra attention online this year, even earning sponsorship from Garage Beer, owned by Jason and Travis Kelce. The pairing fits beautifully, and hopefully, the “rub” from the Kelce brothers can help draw more eyes to the event’s fundraiser.

At Pawcade 6, Body Slams Help Fund Animal Rescue

One of the names on the card this year is STEVE! (real name Steve Williams), a beloved figure in wrestling social media circles and a full-time psychiatric nurse. Williams, a former pro wrestler who originally trained in 2006, stepped out of the ring to pursue a career in medicine. While he’s hung up his boots for the most part, Pawcade is the only show that can pull him back into the ring.

“I get a decent amount of booking offers every year,” Williams told VICE. “I’m not stepping in the ring unless it’s for a good cause. I support the cause, and I know Chad is a good man. I don’t want to lend my name to a show and find out later the promoter is The Unabomber.”

He also added that returning to wrestling is not exactly easy on him physically, especially since he only performs once a year at most.

“I’m likely the oldest person on the show, and my body is beat to hell every time I wrestle,” Williams said. “But you support the people who believe in you. And Chad believes in STEVE!”

For Chad French, Pawcade has become a way to use wrestling as both a social gathering and a way to help out his community. For wrestlers like STEVE!, it is a reason to throw on the spandex one more time. And for fans, it is a chance to support something good while watching a very particular kind of live entertainment that can only happen when a bunch of committed people decide, collectively, to knock the hell out of each other because they love to do so.

MWT Presents: Pawcade Six takes place this Saturday, June 27, at The World Famous Jeffersonville Arena as a benefit show for Mispits and Friends Rescue in Louisville, KY.

Tickets are available now, and anyone who cannot attend can still support the cause by making a donation through the show’s event page.

The post Pawcade 6 Proves Independent Wrestling Still Has a Heart appeared first on VICE.

• Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi left his $450K job to open a halal BBQ restaurant in Texas.
• Kafi BBQ made nearly $2.3 million in its first year and is on track to make even more this year.
• Despite working longer hours and living off savings, Abdul-Kafi has no regrets about leaving tech.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi, 35, who owns and operates Kafi BBQ in Irving, Texas. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I spent 14 years working in tech at companies including Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Shopify, and Cruise. At the peak, I was earning $450,000 a year. Over time, though, I became disillusioned with the industry.

It felt to me that the work had become increasingly focused on making money rather than improving people’s lives or helping businesses.

So, at 33, I left San Francisco for a job at a religious nonprofit in Texas, taking a pay cut of more than 50%.

While working at the nonprofit, I continued hosting dinner parties and cooking barbecue for friends. I started making halal briskets, and they kept telling me they couldn’t find anything like it.

Many also said that they avoided traditional barbecue restaurants because pork cross-contamination is common, even when beef is on the menu.

That’s when I started wondering whether there was room for something Texas barbecue didn’t already have.

The restaurant made over $2 million the first year, but I still haven’t paid myself

Kafi BBQ opened in December 2024. We prepared enough barbecue to last three days, but we sold through all of it on the first day. We started cooking again that same night.

The restaurant later earned recognition. D Magazine named us one of the top 12 barbecue restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Eater named us one of the 15 best new restaurants in America.

Last year, we generated just under $2.3 million in revenue, and we’re projected to reach up to $4 million this year.

That said, I still haven’t paid myself a single dollar since opening and have been living off of my savings.

Barbecue is an expensive business

Our food costs run about $125,000 a month. Labor costs are about $50,000 a month. Rent is about $15,000, and utilities, marketing, spices, and disposables add thousands more. In total, we spend roughly $215,000 every month just to maintain.

We are now profitable in the sense that we are turning a monthly profit, but not in the sense that we’re able to pay off all the initial investment of the restaurant, yet, which cost about $1 million.

Although I’m working more hours than I did in tech — about 70 to 80 hours a week — I find the work far more rewarding.

In tech, I worked closely with my engineering teams, designers, and other product managers, but my circle was relatively small. At the restaurant, I’m constantly meeting new people from different communities.

About half of our customers follow a halal diet and half don’t. Because we don’t serve pork and guarantee there is no pork cross-contamination, we attract people who often feel excluded from traditional barbecue restaurants.

At the same time, we get customers who are curious about the recipes and flavors we’re developing. One of the most rewarding parts of my day is walking from table to table, talking with guests and hearing their feedback. When someone enjoys the food, that’s super impactful for me.

Tech and BBQ aren’t as different as some might think

Even though I left the tech industry, I brought many of the same skills with me into the restaurant business.

Before signing a lease, I spent months testing demand by selling brisket from my house, running events, and gathering data. My goal was to reduce as much uncertainty as possible before making a major investment.

I became meticulous about tracking numbers. I worked with meat suppliers before opening so I could understand my costs. I measured how much a brisket weighed when I bought it, how much it weighed after trimming and smoking, and how much I could ultimately sell. I wanted answers to every question I could think of before opening the doors.

Even after opening, I’m still meticulous. I have a spreadsheet that contains all of the restaurant’s recipes, with every ingredient measured down to the gram. I wanted the recipes to be as precise and repeatable as possible. Whether it’s a side dish, a dessert, or a barbecue rub, I know exactly how much of every ingredient goes into it.

I also use a product-development approach when creating new menu items. Every month, I’m developing new sausages, desserts, and specials. When I launch something new, I don’t assume I’ve gotten it right the first time. Instead, I walk around the dining room and ask customers what they think. Then I make changes based on that feedback.

One example is our pomegranate beef belly burnt ends. I changed that recipe seven different times before arriving at the current version.

In a lot of ways, barbecue isn’t as different from tech as people might think. I’m still experimenting, solving problems, and constantly trying to improve a product. I think that’s why the transition felt so natural.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post I left my $450,000 tech job to open a halal BBQ restaurant in Texas. It made over $2 million in its first year. appeared first on Business Insider.

It’s a longstanding principle of investing in a publicly traded company that means that the number of shares an investor owns is equal to the number of votes he or she can cast on critical issues like mergers and acquisitions, board appointments and executive pay.

SpaceX’s entry in the stock market is the latest challenge to this principle, swelling the ranks of large and influential public companies that give shareholders little say in how they are run.

This month, SpaceX listed its shares on the Nasdaq with two tiers of stock: A-class shares, which are available to the public and carry one vote at the company’s annual general meeting; and B-class shares, which carry 10 times the voting power and are held by its founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, and a small group of insiders.

The arrangement means that even after Mr. Musk’s company sold more than $85 billion in shares in its record-setting initial public offering, he still maintains control.

It echoes similar moves by other founder-led technology behemoths like Alphabet, which went public in 2004, when the company was known as Google, and Meta, which went public in 2012 when it was called Facebook.

Mr. Musk owns about 40 percent of SpaceX shares but controls over 80 percent of the votes. Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Meta, owns about 13 percent of Meta shares but controls about 60 percent of votes. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, together own about 10 percent of Alphabet but control more than 50 percent of votes.

The sheer size of these companies means that these voting structures now carry enormous sway in the stock indexes used to benchmark millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

More than 15 percent of the S&P 500’s market value, or roughly $10 trillion, is accounted for by companies with unequal voting rights, according to data from Refinitiv. And that’s not including SpaceX, which is worth about $2 trillion in market value, since it is not yet eligible to join the index.

And more newly listed companies are choosing this structure. Last year, the share of I.P.O.s with unequal voting rights had risen to 20 percent, compared with 9 percent 20 years earlier, according to the analytics firm ISS-Corporate.

“Shareholders are the owners of the company, not the founder,” said Kyle Seeley, head of stewardship for the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the public employee pension plan, and board member of the Council of Institutional Investors, an advocacy group for shareholders. “You come to the market to get capital from the public, and they become the owners of the company.”

Many founders, he added, “do not see it that way at all.”

In May, the New York State retirement fund sent a letter to Mr. Musk and other top SpaceX executives, expressing its “serious concerns” with the company’s “novel and extreme governance structure and provisions.” They said SpaceX’s dual-class structure went further than other companies with multiple share classes did, even making Mr. Musk unfireable without his own consent.

SpaceX is incorporated in Texas, where the company is allowed to amend its bylaws such that shareholders must hold at least 3 percent of the company’s stock to establish legal standing to sue a board member on behalf of the company. At SpaceX’s current valuation, that’s tens of billions of dollars.

“It should be deeply concerning to any investors of this company, and it’s definitely for us,” Mr. Seeley said of SpaceX’s share structure.

Investors still retain one powerful form of influence — they can sell their shares and put pressure on the stock price. But realistically, it is difficult for investors to jettison companies that exert a large influence over financial markets, and over the indexes that fund managers are benchmarked to.

In the 20th century, the rule of “one share, one vote” became commonplace, according to Stephen Bainbridge, a law professor at University of California Los Angeles.

But media companies entering public markets opted for a different structure to balance the profit-maxing whims of their new shareholders against an assurance of editorial independence. Media organizations like The New York Times, Fox and News Corp all have multi-class share structures with unequal voting rights.

At times, shareholders at these companies have tried to challenge the dual class structure. But the structures have remained in place.

The Times and News Corp declined to comment. Fox did not respond to a request for comment.

In the early 2000s, Google emerged as the potential new arbiter of information in the world, as the power of traditional media became diluted by the internet. Taking a page out of those media companies’ playbook, the company, now known as Alphabet, went public with two share classes. Starting in 2014, it offered a third class under a new ticker, this one without any voting rights at all.

“The standard structure of public ownership may jeopardize the independence and focused objectivity that have been most important in Google’s past success and that we consider most fundamental for its future,” the company wrote in a regulatory filing when it went public in 2004.

Google was a “watershed moment” for dual-class shares, said Valeriano Saucedo, associate director of ISS-Corporate. He said the success of the company’s public offering — and its astronomical share price rise since then — showed that investors were willing to make an important trade-off: betting on financial returns while giving up their voting rights.

After Google, other companies followed. In 2012, Meta went public with a dual-class structure. In 2017, Snap took it further and listed with only nonvoting shares for outside investors.

“That led other founders to say, ‘Look, we can do this. We can have our cake and eat it too,’” said Robert Bartlett, professor of law and business at Stanford University.

In 2017, S&P Dow Jones, which manages indexes like the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average, barred multi-class share companies from entering some of its indexes. But in 2023, it relented and relaxed its eligibility criteria to “remain timely and relevant.”

There are 44 companies with dual class structures in the S&P 500 today, according to Refinitiv. Many of these are traditional companies, like Ford Motor, Ralph Lauren or Mastercard, alongside the technology giants.

Groups like the Council of Institutional Investors have lobbied fiercely to stop the tilting shareholder voting landscape. Shareholder proposals to scrap dual-class shares at annual general meetings over the years have garnered significant support but have nonetheless failed, precisely because of the unequal voting structure.

“This is a race to the bottom of corporate governance,” said Mr. Seeley of the council.

Alphabet, SpaceX and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Investors in Public Companies Are Losing Their Voting Rights appeared first on New York Times.

When someone brand-new to hydroponic gardening asks me which system they should start with, I almost always tell them to begin with an Aerogarden. These gardens have been around forever, and they’re famously foolproof and easy to maintain—just add water and nutrients every couple of weeks. That’s it. No futzing with pH or total dissolved solids or pipes and hoses.

You don’t even have to use the brand’s proprietary pods, either, though this model comes with a set to get started. While it’s still Prime Day, grab some sponges and baskets (also on sale right now—50 for $13) so you can eventually use your own seeds to grow right in the garden or transplant outside.

Typically, if you’re in the market for an Aerogarden under $100, you’re limited to a small, bare-bones model like the six-pod Harvest Lite, which has no smart features and just one button to turn the lights on and off and set a schedule. The Bounty is a larger, heavier-duty model with nine pods, plus it’s got stronger lights and a taller maximum height (24 inches) for bigger plants like tomatoes and peppers.

Buttons and a digital screen on the front panel make it easy to tell when to add more water or plant food (included), set a light schedule, or even activate vacation mode when you’re away. (Cheaper gardens typically don’t even have vacation mode.) It’s also Wi-Fi compatible and can be set up with Alexa.

If you’ve been interested in growing your own salad greens, herbs, tomatoes, or peppers right at your dining room table—and you should be, in this economy—this is the best deal you’re going to find all year on a user-friendly, compact system.

Aerogarden Bounty for $84 ($136 off)

Be sure to check out our roundup of the Absolute Best Deals, as well as all-day, every-day musings on our Prime Day Live Blog.

The post The Aerogarden I Recommend to Everyone Is Just $83 Right Now, a 63% Discount appeared first on Wired.

Some years ago, a young woman arrived at a clinic in Redwood City, Calif., for surgery. She’d been attacked with a knife in her home twelve days before, and she was there for reconstructive work on her hand. As she told her doctors about the attack, she broke down in uncontrollable sobs. After surgery, however, when she woke up from anesthesia, she was happy and relaxed, says anesthesiologist Dr. Harrison Chow, who was part of her care team.

While she was under, she had dreamed of being attacked. People who have had traumatic experiences often have nightmares about them. But this time, unable to wake up because of the anesthetic, this patient continued dreaming: She dreamed of going to the ER, having surgery, and then returning home and being back to normal. Waking up, she felt “wonderful,” she said. A follow-up with a psychiatrist suggested that before the surgery, she’d met the criteria for acute stress disorder, which is similar to PTSD. Afterwards, she did not. And she wasn’t the only one of Chow’s patients to have this experience.

Doctors have known for decades that sometimes people dream while under anesthesia. For the most part, doctors have thought that such dreams were not beneficial, worrying that they might be linked to an increased risk of waking up during surgery. But now, researchers are beginning to explore whether anesthesia dreams might be able to help resolve traumatic experiences, and whether—even for people without trauma—they might make surgery a more pleasant experience.

In a recent pilot study in Anesthesiology, Chow, who is at Stanford University Medical School, and his colleagues report that a protocol intended to help patients dream during surgery is a feasible addition to standard of care. In this study, in which the protocol was used in hundreds of surgeries, the team didn’t find that dreaming correlated with less pain or anti-nausea medication afterwards, but they did find that anesthesia-induced dreams were very common and overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that dreaming could improve the experience of surgery.

It’s not difficult to induce dreaming under anesthesia

Dreams during natural sleep are not necessarily positive. In fact, they’re “often somewhat negative,” says Karen Konkoly, who studies dreams at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and was not involved in the new study. But in this paper, 86% of the dreams recalled by patients on waking were good ones—a finding she calls “super interesting.”

What’s more, nearly 70% of patients who were primed to dream under anesthesia reported dreaming when they woke up, without a particularly complex protocol. First, patients who were receiving surgery were simply told that they might dream while under anesthesia. Then, they were given an anesthetic cocktail including the drug propofol, and their brain activity was tracked with EEG to monitor their level of sedation. Finally, after surgery, patients were given 10 minutes to wake up naturally and were asked immediately upon waking whether they had dreamed.

The 10 minutes of peace were the only part of the protocol that doctors in the study mostly didn’t follow. “Surgery,” says Chow, “functions like Southwest Airlines.” Most patients were awakened swiftly to clear space in the recovery rooms for the next patients. Still, the positive effects held.

Pilleriin Sikka, a researcher at Stanford and an author of the paper, hopes that with such a low-effort prompt, it may be possible to run other experiments investigating whether dreaming under anesthesia can help with patient satisfaction after surgery, and whether it can help patients better recover from trauma.

Can dreaming under anesthesia be therapeutic?

There are signs the answer may be yes. “With nighttime dreams, we don’t know what they do,” says Konkoly. “Messing with them is useful for understanding what they do, and potentially helpful when dreams go awry.” Anesthesia dreams, however, are happening in an artificial setting, she says, and inducing them and potentially manipulating them may have more in common with psychedelic therapies for PTSD, which are a subject of active research, than with manipulating dreams during natural sleep.

Dr. Boris Heifets, one of the paper’s authors and a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford who also studies psychedelic treatments, agrees. “Every paper that’s written about psychedelic therapeutics, you have this intense period of a psychoactive, non-ordinary state of consciousness, and then something changes, and people are better,” he says. When Heifets first met Chow and learned of his patients’ experiences, “the parallel was so clear.”

One breast cancer patient Chow wrote about in another study, who suffered from PTSD after the death of her son, felt her dreams during her surgery “saved her life.” “It still kind of gives me shivers thinking about what these patients have said,” Heifets reflects.

Going forward, the team hopes to use the protocol to explore dreams in PTSD patients more systematically. “The frontier is seeing how far this goes—if you can induce these dreamlike states and really make for transformative events in people’s lives,” Heifets says.

The post What Happens When You Dream Under Anesthesia? Scientists See Emotional Benefits appeared first on TIME.

In the latest incident, a 3-year-old boy was found dead in the family car on Wednesday evening, according to the public prosecutor in Pontoise, north of Paris, where temperatures rose higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit that day. Emergency responders, called to the home, could not resuscitate the child, who was pronounced dead at 7:35 p.m.

The prosecutor said it appeared the boy had locked himself inside the vehicle while his mother was taking a nap and his father was working in the yard. The child’s mother, who was in shock, has been hospitalized. Prosecutors said they had opened an investigation, with potential charges of involuntary manslaughter.

It was the second case of children dying in vehicles in France this week. On Monday, two children, ages 2 and 4, were found unresponsive in a family car, that was parked outside their home in Carpentras, in southeastern France, the local prosecutor said. Medical examiners said it was probable that they died from exposure to excessive heat, the prosecutor said.

The deaths came as the French government announced that 40 people had drowned in heat wave-related accidents between June 18 and June 23, when thousands of people jumped into canals, rivers and other waterways for relief.

To offer children a refuge from overheated houses and classrooms, French companies are allowing employees to bring their children to offices, which are among the few air-conditioned places in France.

Back Market, a French company that sells refurbished phones and laptops, posted a message on LinkedIn saying children were welcome at the office as part of their “heat wave plan.” Omnicom Media France, the French division of a global media communications agency, opened their doors to children for the second consecutive year.

“It was an obvious choice for us,” the company said in a message posted on LinkedIn, “given that many schools were closed and parents needed to make arrangements so they could work in good conditions.”

After nearly a week of scorching heat, France is beginning to stagger. The health minister, Stéphanie Rist, told reporters that in the past 24 hours, Paris had recorded four times the normal rate of people suffering cardiac arrest. A group of teachers’ unions demanded that government close schools, citing a spike in the number of staff members fainting or having to go to the emergency room.

The country’s state-owned train operator, S.N.C.F., said it had canceled 10 percent of its trains on Thursday because of the heat wave. Christophe Fanichet, the company’s chief executive, said that the company would refund passengers who wanted to cancel trips and allow them to rebook free of charge.

The post Latest Victims of France’s Heat Wave: Children Locked in Family Cars appeared first on New York Times.

Then, after the close on Tuesday, Micron Technology dropped its earnings report—and the theater filled back up.

Revenue of $41.5 billion. Gross margins of 84.9%. EPS of $25.11. Every figure landed well above what Wall Street had expected, blowing past a Street consensus of $35.9 billion in revenue and $20.86 in earnings per share. More startling than the numbers themselves was the guidance: Micron told investors to expect $50 billion in revenue next quarter — roughly $6.5 billion more than analysts had penciled in, at a consensus of $43.6 billion. Its stock, which closed Tuesday at $1,048.51, jumped sharply in after-hours trading, pulling up NVIDIA, AMD, and the broader semiconductor complex with it.

“Tech investors will be in a very positive mood and breathe a sigh of relief,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients, with the typically bullish analyst reaching for the kind of hyperbole that sounds extreme until you check the tape. He called it a “drop the mic quarter.”

Other analysts argued that this might be quite a bit more than that. Buried inside the earnings call and the cascade of analyst notes that followed was something that could reshape how investors think about memory chips—and possibly the entire AI infrastructure trade—for a generation.

The machine that ate the data center

To understand what Micron reported Tuesday night, you first have to understand what has happened to memory over the past two years.

Memory chips—the DRAM and NAND that store and move data inside computers and servers—have historically been the most brutally cyclical corner of the semiconductor industry. Prices spike, manufacturers overinvest, supply floods the market, prices crater, manufacturers pull back, and the whole thing starts again. For decades, buying a memory stock felt less like investing in a technology company and more like betting on the weather.

AI may not have broken that cycle, but it bent severely.

The explosion of large language models and AI inference infrastructure has created a class of memory demand that is qualitatively different from anything that came before it. High-Bandwidth Memory — the stacked, specialized DRAM that sits directly atop AI accelerators like NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips — cannot simply be manufactured faster by throwing more money at the problem. Building the cleanrooms takes years, the process nodes are among the most complex in semiconductor manufacturing and labor is constrained.

The result: memory demand is, right now, running significantly ahead of supply—and Micron says it expects that gap to persist beyond 2027. On Tuesday night, the company extended that forecast, telling investors there is no clear line of sight to when supply will catch up.

“The company states that, as the AI market expands, memory intensity will increase and memory will become a strategic device, and that this shift is still in its early stages,” Jefferies’ Tokyo-based analyst Masahiro Nakanomyo wrote in a note to institutional clients.

The data bore that out. DRAM revenue of $31.3 billion was up 67% quarter-over-quarter, representing 76% of total company sales. Average selling prices for DRAM rose approximately 60% in the quarter and core data center revenue—the segment most directly tied to AI infrastructure — more than doubled sequentially, reaching $11.5 billion, up 653% year-over-year.

“We are seeing no cracks in AI demand on the chips, hardware, or software front,” Ives wrote, “which gives us a bright green light to own the core tech winners into year-end.” In other words: what AI bubble?

The contracts that changed everything

But the numbers, extraordinary as they were, were almost secondary to the structural announcement buried deeper in the call.

Micron disclosed that it has now signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements — SCAs — with customers ranging from four large hyperscalers to medium-sized technology companies to nine smaller automotive suppliers. These are not soft letters of intent. They are five-year, take-or-pay contracts, running from 2026 through 2030, with binding volume commitments and rigid pricing terms. Customers who walk away from them do not get their money back: Micron has collected $18 billion in cash deposits and $4 billion in letters of credit—$22 billion in total financial commitments—as guarantees.

Each contract contains a ceiling and a floor. The ceiling is pegged to current market prices—roughly where DRAM was trading in the second calendar quarter of 2026. The floor is set at levels that, according to Micron’s management, would generate gross margins above the company’s best-ever quarterly performance in any prior industry cycle—a historical peak in the low-60% range. So the worst-case pricing scenario in these contracts is better than the best Micron has ever done in a downturn.

“The historical ceiling,” noted Stifel analyst Brian Chin, “is now a floor”.

For Wall Street, this represented something close to a paradigm shift. Memory companies have historically traded at depressed multiples precisely because their earnings are wildly unpredictable. The SCAs introduce, for the first time at scale, contractual earnings floors across a multi-year horizon. The boom-bust model that defined memory investing for 40 years may not be dead, but it has been materially altered.

Stifel’s Chin called it “concrete evidence of a paradigm shift” that “could temper the downside swings that characterized past cycles.”

“The memory tax”

Not everyone in the analyst community was unambiguously cheering.

Vivek Arya, BofA’s lead semiconductor analyst and one of the sharpest voices on the street, reaffirmed his Buy rating and raised his price target to $1,550 — the highest target among major banks — up from $1,500 previously. But he introduced a concept that other analysts danced around without naming: the memory tax.

Memory, Arya noted, now accounts for roughly 35% of AI infrastructure capital expenditure. As prices have soared, Micron and its peers have effectively become a toll booth on the AI highway — collecting an ever-larger share of every dollar that hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta spend building out their data centers.

That dynamic has a natural limit. Push the toll too high and the drivers start looking for alternate routes—or slow down. In price-sensitive markets like mobile phones and automobiles, already operating on thin margins, memory price spikes can tip purchasing decisions, crimp demand, and eventually feed back into oversupply.

“Elevated memory pricing could act as a ‘tax’ on data center customer capex growth,” Arya wrote, “while also leading to potential demand destruction in price-sensitive end markets like mobile and auto.”

The SCA pricing caps—which moderate Micron’s near-term upside—exist partly because Micron’s biggest customers pushed back. Locking in supply at current prices, for five years, with a ceiling on further increases, is a rational move for a hyperscaler facing its own cost pressures. Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore noted the dynamic candidly, writing that some Micron disclosures “have led to some sentiment that the company is capping prices.”

Of course, the bulls note, gross margins heading toward 90% and a structural floor well above prior cyclical peaks make the “capped” scenario extraordinarily profitable by any historical standard. BofA noted that gross margins are expected to peak in the high-80% range over the next few quarters before some normalization sets in, as rising bit costs from new capacity and technology transitions weigh on the other side. “While bears may focus on pricing moderation,” Arya wrote, “we see continued evidence supporting a structural rerating.”

The case for regime change

That word—rerating—is not one that Wall Street uses lightly.

For years, memory stocks have traded at single-digit earnings multiples during their best years, because investors assumed the good times wouldn’t last. The memory cycle was treated like a commodity: buy low, sell when the upcycle peaks, exit before the inventory pile-up arrives.

BofA argued explicitly that Micron should structurally rerate to 12x–15x P/E, versus a historical range of 8x–10x — a re-rating of 50% or more on the valuation baseline — driven by the SCA structure, the AI demand durability, and the FCF profile now taking shape. At current prices, Micron trades at roughly a 10% free cash flow yield, according to BofA’s model. BofA projects TTM free cash flow exceeding $100 billion within the next 12 months, with margins expanding.

Morgan Stanley’s Moore bumped his price target to $1,200 from $1,050, and kept his Overweight rating. He lifted his FY27 EPS estimate by 40% to $168 per share and his FY27 FCF estimate from $104 billion to $140 billion. “DRAM fundamentals are in uncharted territory, and should continue to improve as datacenter/AI markets continue their upward trajectory,” he wrote.

Micron’s 20-year, $200 billion U.S. investment plan, backed with support from the Trump administration’s CHIPS program, is already underway: Idaho Fab 1 is on track for its first wafer output in mid-2027, and construction on Fab 2 has accelerated with operations targeted for late 2028; the New York fab broke ground in January 2026.

The catalyst hiding inside all of this is the CHIPS Act clock. On December 9, 2026, two years after Micron signed its definitive CHIPS Act agreements, restrictions on certain uses of the company’s cash expire. Management has committed to returning 100% of excess free cash flow to shareholders thereafter. BofA models $31.7 billion in buybacks for fiscal year 2027 alone — and notes, pointedly, that this represents only approximately 25% of the free cash flow Micron is likely to generate that year. Net cash on the balance sheet is projected to reach $140 billion by the end of fiscal 2027.

For context on the scale of that number: Micron’s net cash was negative as recently as late 2025.

The global ripple

Micron’s results do not exist in isolation. They are, in effect, a real-time audit of the AI infrastructure buildout—conducted by the company supplying one of its most critical and constrained inputs.

When Micron says memory demand will exceed supply beyond 2027, that is also a statement about NVIDIA’s order book, about Microsoft’s Azure expansion, about Meta’s data center ambitions, about the capex plans of every hyperscaler that has bet its next decade on AI. When it says it is accelerating construction of new fabs in Idaho, New York, Taiwan, and Singapore—with FY26 capex now guided to $27 billion, up from a prior guide of $25 billion, and FY27 capex projected at $45 billion—that is a statement about the earnings outlook for Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, ASML, Advantest, and the entire semiconductor equipment supply chain.

Beyond data centers, Micron flagged an emerging demand driver that most AI coverage has yet to seriously price in. The penetration of Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and above systems is expected to more than double to over 20% of new vehicles in 2026 and reach 40% by 2030. Level 2+ vehicles carry over five times the memory content of an average car. More striking still: humanoid robots carry 10 times the memory content of a Level 2 vehicle, and Micron described a “multi-decade memory demand cycle” in robotics expected to begin in the latter part of this decade.

There are risks, of course. A recession that slows enterprise IT spending. A faster-than-expected ramp of Chinese memory competitors. A sudden softening of AI model training demand if frontier labs hit architectural walls. A geopolitical flare-up disrupting the Taiwan supply chain. Stifel’s Chin enumerated the bear case in his own note: economic recession, over-expansion of supply, AI datacenter projections proving too aggressive, irrational pricing from new entrants, or delays on technology roadmaps, including HBM4 and next-generation NAND. Memory has surprised to the downside before, suddenly and violently, and the very complacency that comes with long-term contracts can mask the inventory buildup arriving at the margin.

But Tuesday night’s results made the bear case considerably harder to argue.

For now, the sell-off is over. The memory tax is real. And the valuation regime may be changing faster than anyone expected.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

The post How one chip stock reversed the global tech selloff, exposed AI’s ‘memory tax’ and made the case for an entire valuation regime change appeared first on Fortune.

Re “What Liberals Get Wrong About the Middle Class,” by Stephen J. Rose and Scott Winship (Opinion guest essay, June 9):

In their analysis of the American middle class, Mr. Rose and Mr. Winship state clearly that they believe that a “rising tide has lifted all boats.” Had a Democrat been president, the study the authors conducted would be lauded in Congress and the media for the success of liberal policies. Instead, senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are likely to cite the increasingly growing middle class as evidence of inequality.

Though the poor grew richer, according to the authors, their increase in wealth didn’t match the meteoric rise of the middle class. But the middle class being much better off than the moderately better off poor is more an issue of perception. Who doesn’t feel envy driving a new Toyota while a neighbor sports a BMW?

We have a long way to go to lift all poor people into the middle class, or higher. But we shouldn’t aim to do this by taking away what the middle class and the wealthy have earned, or by building resentment. We should instead give them the same options and tools that members of the middle class used to build their own wealth.

Joseph P. Petito Sarasota, Fla.

To the Editor:

Kudos for publishing this guest essay. It has been quite clear to anybody looking at the data that Americans have been climbing the economic ladder quite successfully despite liberal media stories focused on income inequality.

More and more of our friends and neighbors have upgraded their homes, purchased second or third cars (some even second homes), as well as all the toys we enjoy every day (cellphones, laptops, wireless earbuds, etc.) that either didn’t exist or weren’t affordable a few decades ago.

So maybe liberals lamenting the false “hollowing out” of the middle class should find another demographic group to worry about.

Charles H. Gessner Marblehead, Mass.

Israel’s Artists, Isolated

To the Editor:

Re “The New Isolation of the Israeli Cultural Scene,” by Sharon Waxman (Opinion guest essay, June 16):

Artists have been a beacon for social criticism and commentary throughout history. It is an irony that the Israeli artistic community finds itself quarantined from its colleagues around the world when we need creative inspiration, now more than ever.

I would encourage the world cultural community to use opportunities to engage in dialogue with Israeli colleagues rather than censor them. The process can be the product.

The Israeli film mentioned, “The Sea,” which sparked so much controversy, was one of the most sensitive and motivating films I have seen about the humanity of Palestinian and Israeli individuals in the face of the challenging divide that separates them. It was a catalyst for possibilities.

We need wisdom and creativity, not judgment, from the cultural community in our world today.

Lois Frank Atlanta

To the Editor:

Re “Why Are Anti-Zionists Boycotting This Portrait of Israeli Depravity?,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, June 13), about the inanity of leftists boycotting Nadav Lapid’s film “Yes,” which is critical of his native Israel’s policies:

This column does two things: It makes me passionately want to see the film, and it reinforces my belief that cultural boycotts of countries we may disapprove of are shortsighted and dangerous, verging on book banning.

Boycotting weapons sales is one thing, but boycotting cultural expression simply because one disapproves of an artist’s country of origin is foolish, and harmful to any cause.

Susan Jhirad Peabody, Mass.

The True America

To the Editor:

Re “Host Cities and Soccer Squads Locked in a Mutual Embrace” (front page, June 24):

Thank you for this article describing the warm welcome that cities around the country are extending to visiting World Cup athletes.

President Trump’s antics have reduced us to protesting almost daily that this is not who we are.

Your article, without ever using the words, demonstrates who and what the United States really is.

Michael P. Cuno Oro Valley, Ariz.

The post The ‘Rising Tide’ of America’s Middle Class appeared first on New York Times.

‘Gilmore Girls’ Seasons 1-7 (July 1)

Stream it here.

The seven-season multigenerational comedy-drama has been one of Netflix’s standbys for years, so popular on the service that Netflix even reunited the characters for a 2016 mini-series. That will stay, but the original series will go (at least for now), and that’s a shame; it’s the kind of comfort television that one likes to have at the click of a button. Its pleasures are numerous: the rat-tat-tat dialogue; the lived-in chemistry between the stars, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel; their parade of potential beaus (every fan has a favorite); and the screwy energy of tiny, tucked away Stars Hollow, Conn., whose oddballs and eccentricities are just a shade on the sane side of Twin Peaks.

‘The Great Waldo Pepper’ (July 1)

Stream it here.

Robert Redford re-teamed with George Roy Hill, the director of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting,” for this 1975 combination of character drama and aviation adventure. But they did not seek to replicate the good-time crowd-pleaser energy of those earlier collaborations. This story of a World War I pilot who spends the late 1920s making a living as a barnstorming flyer takes on a darker and more deliberate tone, as the high risks taken by Redford’s Waldo Pepper and his rival-turned-partner, Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson), have real consequences. The aerial photography, shot by the great cinematographer Robert Surtees (“Ben Hur”), is stunning, and the supporting players are excellent, particularly Susan Sarandon in an early, important role.

‘Slap Shot’ (July 1)

Stream it here.

Hill followed up “Pepper” by reuniting with Redford’s “Butch Cassidy” and “Sting” co-star Paul Newman, who spent the ’70s making a series of unpredictable and often bold career choices, lending his movie-star good looks and off-kilter line readings to characters that weren’t traditionally heroic. One of his juiciest came in this delightfully, unapologetically bawdy sports comedy from screenwriter Nancy Dowd, with Newman as Reggie Dunlop, coach and player for the Charlestown Chiefs, a Pennsylvania hockey team that offsets its low scores with cheerful violence. “Slap Shot” both skewers and slyly indulges in the conventions of the underdog sports movie, daring us to cheer for these beer-guzzling, profanity-spewing cave men — and we do.

‘Night of the Living Dead’ (July 4)

Stream it here.

Few films have proven as influential (certainly within the world of horror) as this wonder from George A. Romero, which set the template for low-budget genre filmmaking and set many of the rules that have governed zombie movies ever since. It was a classic case of a filmmaker turning his limitations into virtues; his Pittsburgh home base gave him access to an untapped talent pool of actors, who lend the film an authenticity it might have lacked if it had been filled with familiar faces. And his crew of industrial filmmakers shoot in an off-the-cuff newsreel style that makes the zombie apocalypse feel observed rather than created. Nearly 60 years on, “Night of the Living Dead” retains its ability to shock and scare.

‘Sneaky Pete’ Seasons 1-3 (July 10)

Stream it here.

Created by David Shore (who also created “House”) and Bryan Cranston, this three-season Amazon original stars Giovanni Ribisi as Marius, a fast-talking, faster-thinking con artist who is released from prison and steps into the life of his cellmate Pete, whom he impersonates to take advantage of Pete’s long-lost grandparents. But it turns into a longer con than he anticipates, particularly when his past starts catching up to him. Ribisi is perfect in the lead, while a cast of stellar character actors — including Jane Adams, Marin Ireland, Margo Martindale and Cranston himself — shine in support.

ALSO LEAVING: “30 Minutes or Less,” “All About the Benjamins,” “Along Came Polly” “American Hustle,” “Backstabbing for Beginners,” “The Bernie Mac Show” Seasons 1-5, “The Best of Enemies,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Colombiana,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “Domestic Disturbance,” “Field of Dreams,” “Hellboy,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” “Just Go With It,” “The Lost Husband,” “Madagascar,” “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” “Money Talks,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “My Girl,” “Paw Patrol: The Movie,” “Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie,” “The Rover,” “Runaway Bride,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Thank You for Your Service,” “Tower Heist,” “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall,” “Wild Things,” “The Wiz,” (July 1); “Attack on Pearl Harbor: Minute by Minute” (July 4); “Under the Silver Lake” (July 5); “The Roommate” (July 7); “Silent House’ (July 8); “Bob Marley: One Love” (July 12); “Side Effects” (July 15) “A Fortunate Man” (July 16); “Dark Tide” (July 17); the “Saw” series (July 19); “Saturday Night” (July 25); “Sliding Doors” (July 27); “Tallulah” (July 29).

The post Stream These 5 Movies and TV Shows Before They Leave Netflix in July appeared first on New York Times.

The case came before the justices after a tidal wave of litigation that included some multibillion-dollar verdicts against the global agrochemical manufacturer Bayer, which acquired Roundup when it bought its original manufacturer Monsanto in 2018.

The decision is a victory for the Trump administration, but one that could be tricky politically since allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement want to rein in pesticide use.

The high court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the company can’t be sued in state courts because federal regulations have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label.

The decision “is good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation,” Bayer said in a statement. “It should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles.”

Though Bayer said the ruling should result in the dismissal of pending lawsuits containing failure-to-warn allegations, the company said it plans to proceed with a proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement intended to resolve many of the remaining claims.

Lawyers for some residents pursuing Roundup litigation criticized the court’s decision.

“This Supreme Court ruling wrongly slams the courthouse door on Americans sickened by pesticides,” said attorney Christopher Seeger, who is proposed as a claimants’ representative in the settlement. But he said a settlement still would allow some people to receive compensation.

The case before the Supreme Court was filed by Missouri resident John Durnell. He developed a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after more than 20 years of serving as the neighborhood association’s “spray guy,” using Roundup on parks in his historic St. Louis community.

A jury agreed that the company failed to warn him about possible cancer dangers and awarded him $1.25 million. It’s one of thousands of similar cases, including some multibillion-dollar damage awards.

There’s still fierce debate about cancer and Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that it’s not likely to cause cancer in humans when used as directed.

The agency approved a label without a cancer warning, and Bayer argues that it’s required to follow those federal standards — not the state laws that Durnell and others have sued under. The ruling still could allow other suits alleging problems with the way the product was designed, his attorney Ashley Keller has said.

Bayer disputes the cancer claims but previously set aside $16 billion to settle cases, and earlier this year proposed a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. A federal judge recently ruled that the proposed settlement will be heard in a Missouri state court, where many of the lawsuits have been filed. At the same time, the company has tried to persuade states to pass laws shielding it from liability in failure-to-warn lawsuits, and three states have agreed.

About 200,000 Roundup-related claims have been made against Bayer, mostly from home users. It has stopped using glyphosate in Roundup sold in the U.S. residential lawn and garden market.

The company has said it might have to consider pulling glyphosate from U.S. agricultural markets if it keeps getting sued. Agricultural industry group say could have a devastating effect on the food supply.

But pesticides have also created a rift between the Trump administration and members of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s MAHA movement, adding to their frustration with an executive order aimed at boosting glyphosate’s production.

Kennedy himself has said repeatedly that glyphosate causes cancer, even as he says he recognizes the executive order was necessary for food supply and national security reasons.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press. AP writer David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Mo., contributed to this report.

The post Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

The ruling from Judge Indira Talwani amounted to a broad rejection of the Trump administration’s attempts to change federal election procedures through an executive order, repeatedly emphasizing that the Constitution grants authority over elections not to the executive branch but to individual states and Congress.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Judge Talwani wrote, adding emphasis by underlining the words “does not.”

More than 20 Democratic attorneys general representing states across the country brought the legal challenge in federal court in Massachusetts.

Mr. Trump’s executive order, signed in March, called on the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizen lists to help determine voter eligibility. It called on the Postal Service to verify voters based on lists provided by states. Earlier this month, the Postal Service complied with the order, releasing a proposed rule consistent with many of Mr. Trump’s demands.

The decision comes as Mr. Trump has renewed his push to pass federal legislation that would impose fresh voting restrictions, canceling the signing of a celebrated bipartisan housing measure on Wednesday and instead demanding that Republicans first pass the president’s priority voting legislation, known as the SAVE America Act.

A spokesperson for the Postal Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, defended the executive order’s legality and said that the administration was “confident that we will ultimately prevail” in putting in effect the executive order. She reiterated the administration’s intent to pass the SAVE America Act in Congress.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of our elections,” Ms. Jackson said.

Multiple lawsuits have challenged the executive order, including a separate case in Washington, D.C., where a judge initially decided not to block the order after concluding that, because it had not yet been carried out, no state or party had suffered legal harm.

Judge Talwani, however, found that the executive order had already forced many states that were part of the Massachusetts lawsuit to change election policies and procedures. Connecticut had already shifted election workers away from other duties to begin planning for the executive order, and nearly half the states were grappling with the fact that they had already purchased mail ballot envelopes that were not in compliance with the directive.

“Not only are Plaintiff States experiencing injury now with respect to planning, but it is undisputed that, should the E.O.’s directives go into effect, Plaintiff States will incur compliance costs,” Judge Talwani, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote.

The ruling focused on two sections of the executive order that sought to create state-by-state citizenship lists within the Department of Homeland Security and direct the Postal Service to use an approved list of voters to guide election mail.

Judge Talwani found that the authority to create voter lists and to determine voter eligibility rests with the states, writing that “the Constitution reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.”

But she also questioned whether records that the government would be relying on would be able to “track name changes (such as when a woman changes her name at marriage) or residence changes when citizens move from State to State.”

“It is clear that the federal agencies charged with compiling Confirmed Citizen Lists lack the ability to create complete and accurate lists of the U.S. citizens residing in every State,” Judge Talwani wrote.

And the judge returned to the question of executive authority, finding that “the President lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State.”

Similarly, regarding the provision directing the Postal Service to take a more direct role in overseeing mail voting, Judge Talwani found the agency lacked authority over elections.

“No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to U.S.P.S.,” Judge Talwani wrote, adding that the service “lacks statutory authorization to promulgate any binding regulations on mail-in voting.”

The judge’s ruling comes a day after Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed in a hearing before the Senate that a proposed rule would block mail ballots in states that do not hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government.

Mr. Steiner has repeatedly said that the Postal Service would follow court orders.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, he said that he would defer to the courts on the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order and reaffirmed that the service would “absolutely” continue to deliver mail-in ballots.

Zach Montague contributed reporting.

The post Federal Judge Strikes Key Parts of Trump Order Restricting Mail Voting appeared first on New York Times.

More often used as a music venue, Alice Tully has become a space for sophisticated dance, courtesy of the inaugural Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival. For years, there has been too much ballet at Lincoln Center, which I say as someone who loves the form. Modern dance is part of the center’s history, too, and now it is finally being given a stage.

The festival, part of the Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance, opened with three international productions by choreographers who aren’t more of the same old, same old seen in New York. Jeremy Nedd and Yinka Esi Graves, in particular, showed themselves to be dance artists with discerning visions.

In Nedd’s articulate and soulful “from rock to rock … aka how magnolia was taken for granite,” five dancers draped over one another on the floor like a boulder. The point of departure is the Milly Rock, a viral dance born from the song and video by the Brooklyn rap artist 2 Milly.

Eventually the performers, wearing sweatsuits, rose to sway in collective motion, their knees softly bending as their arms snaked across their torsos in hypnotic, repetitive swoops. At first, they danced in their own worlds with hoods pulled over their heads. But eventually the mood shifted.

As the work placed the Milly Rock under a microscope, the performers bared their faces. Nedd, a Brooklyn-born choreographer who lives in Switzerland, doesn’t simply shine a spotlight on an addictive social dance, he takes a sly look at the way social dances, unprotected by copyright law, can be misappropriated. At one point, a dancer, wearing platform shoes made of cement, plodded heavily and loudly across the stage.

The set, with its curving wall, had a glacial feel; at times fog blew through. But when the dancers joined forces for the Electric Slide, glee washed over their faces and radiated from their bodies. They splintered out of a unison formation and, spinning and swirling across the stage, went their own ways.

And as the dance flowed on, it warmed up, galvanized by songs including the dreamy and soulful anthem “Free” by Deniece Williams. In this winning work, Nedd gives social dance independence and places it on the mantle of high art.

In the festival’s second presentation, “The Disappearing Act,” flamenco was examined and reclaimed by Graves, an artist born in London with family from Ghana and Jamaica. Graves explores the Afro-diaspora presence in flamenco — its lineage, its traces — which she has studied for years. Throughout her 70-minute piece, she illuminates the dance form’s African roots.

Joined by a drummer (Donna Thompson), a singer (Antonia Fernández) and a guitarist (Raúl Cantizano, the production’s music director), Graves danced as if possessed, with a ghostly, shape-shifter ability to rattle the air with stops and starts. Her fingers flickered with dizzying speed like the frantic wings of moths drawn obsessively to the light.

Graves, referencing Miss La La, a circus artist whom Degas famously painted in 1879 (her body is visible but not her face), wore a fuchsia romper that expanded into a jumpsuit as its folds of fabric were let out to extend over her legs and arms. As the dance built momentum, Graves used her quicksilver feet to pound out complex rhythms, swishing her legs and morphing her body into positions sharp and taut, or elastic and elongated.

Increasingly, she seemed to glow — until her presence was somehow diaphanous. She pulled off the impossible: making it seem like she had disappeared inside of her performance.

The festival’s third show, “1 Degree Celsius” by Sung Im Her/Her Project, danced around the theme of climate change. Seven performers busily inhabited a stage as their rhythmic footsteps and wilting, dipping bodies found community or distance alongside driving music and pulsing lights.

It began with Her, a South Korean choreographer, rolling slowly on the floor, a mound with splaying fingers and twisting feet. Soon others crossed the stage in unified formations that disintegrated as bodies gradually bent forward and back as if slipping away from gravity’s grip.

The title refers to a warming planet. But Her’s action-filled choreography syncs up with environmental concerns in only nebulous of ways. The dance, with its patterns of walking, rolling and falling, is soon overtaken by a predictable flow of structure and geometry.

“1 Degree Celsius” may be framed as a choreographic call to action for a planet in peril, but while effortful, the work has a slick veneer that works against any notion of actual strife. The music’s beat pumps loudly until the final moments when the lights dim and all you hear is the performers, huffing and puffing in the dark. Hard dancing can zap the lungs of power, but “1 Degree Celsius” ends up as little more than generic dancing — hard, yes, but unconvincing in its struggle to really heat up the stage.

The post A New Dance Festival Moves Beyond the Same Old, Same Old appeared first on New York Times.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the 12-minute call in which Kennedy told Rick Stewart, the Libertarian candidate in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, that he was acting as a “liaison” with the White House, and he warned that a Democratic takeover of the House would derail President Donald Trump’s agenda and suggested he could help Stewart if he exited the race.

“I can’t go into specifics because there’s legal prohibitions about that,” Kennedy told Stewart in the June 11 call. “If it’s something that you want to talk about, you know, you and I can talk about specifics.”

Stewart said he interpreted the call as a clear, if carefully worded, attempt at a quid pro quo. “He was very careful about the words that he used, but the whole implication is: You help us, we’ll help you,” Stewart said, adding that he has no intention of dropping out.

Marco Battaglia, a Libertarian running in Iowa’s 3rd District, said Kennedy made a similar, unrecorded appeal to him on June 8, warning that the House could flip to Democrats if Battaglia stayed in the race. Battaglia said he rebuffed Kennedy, invoking the legacies of Kennedy’s father and uncle.

Government ethics experts said the confirmed recording bolsters concerns that Kennedy’s calls may have violated federal law.

Danielle Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center said federal officials should not be “tipping the scales, behind the scenes” by pushing candidates to withdraw, though she noted proving a Hatch Act violation could be difficult. Stanley Brand, a Penn State law fellow, said Kennedy could face exposure under separate criminal statutes barring officials from using their authority to interfere with elections or offering benefits in exchange for political activity.

Kennedy declined to comment when reached by the Post and referred questions to a spokesperson, who did not respond. Neither the White House nor the Department of Health and Human Services answered questions about whether the calls were cleared by administration lawyers or made at the White House’s direction.

The recording lands as the White House intensifies its midterm focus, wary that a Democratic-controlled House could subpoena officials like Kennedy over his health policy changes. On the call, Kennedy appeared to allude to that risk directly, telling Stewart, “I don’t want to be fighting subpoenas for the next two years instead of improving America’s health.”

Iowa’s 2nd District, rated as leaning Republican by the Cook Political Report, is among the battleground races that could determine control of the House in November.

The post RFK Jr. caught on tape possibly violating federal law: ‘Tipping the scales’ appeared first on Raw Story.

The proposed deal, released Wednesday, immediately came under attack from North Carolina, which said it did nothing to clean up water contaminated by the chemicals. Several environmental groups also called the deal inadequate.

For decades, Chemours’ facilities in West Virginia, New Jersey and North Carolina illegally released the chemicals into major waterways including the Ohio, Cape Fear and Delaware Rivers. The widespread contamination from Chemours, which was spun off from Dupont in 2015, came to light after the Environmental Protection Agency and independent scientists started to detect high levels of PFAS, particularly in the Cape Fear River.

PFAS, a class of synthetic chemicals remarkably resistant to water and grease, are used in everyday items like nonstick pans, water-repellent clothing and stain-resistant carpets, as well as in firefighting foam and cosmetics.

But exposure to the chemicals, which do not easily break down in the body, has been linked to serious and adverse health risks. Those include low birth weight, birth defects and developmental delays as well as increased risk of some kidney and testicular cancers.

Under the proposed settlement, Chemours will pay a $22.5 million civil penalty for illegally discharging PFAS from plants in North Carolina, New Jersey and West Virginia.

Chemours will also spend $337 million to bring its facilities into compliance with the law, and to test and provide clean drinking water to communities near its plants in West Virginia and New Jersey. And it will pay $90 million over a 15-year period to further reduce PFAS emissions and treat drinking water.

“This first comprehensive federal settlement against a major PFAS manufacturer delivers on the Trump Administration’s promise to make polluters pay and stop PFAS contamination at the source,” said Jeffrey A. Hall, assistant administrator at the E.P.A.’s Office of Enforcement.

Governor Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, which is a party to the settlement, called the settlement an encouraging first step. New Jersey did not comment on the federal settlement. The state has pursued its own settlement against Chemours.

Chemours disputed the E.P.A.’s claims that PFAS harms human health, and made no admission of liability, while agreeing to the overall settlement.

North Carolina denounced the settlement, calling it a “backroom deal” that allocated virtually nothing to the state. Fayetteville Works, a chemical plant on the banks of the Cape Fear River, was Chemours’ center for manufacturing GenX, a synthetic chemical that was intended as a PFAS replacement but has itself raised health concerns.

“This deal is an insult to the people of eastern North Carolina,” the state’s attorney general, Jeff Jackson, said in a statement. “This deal does practically nothing to clean up our water. Chemours made this mess and Chemours should clean it up. The E.P.A. will be hearing from my office.”

Corinne Bell, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the settlement inadequate, particularly coming from a corporation that reported $1.4 billion in net sales in its first quarter. “The harm done to our water supply and health by these ‘forever chemicals’ is massive, and the penalty should have reflected that,” she said. “This settlement is not a serious effort by a corporate polluter to clean up its damage.”

Local groups also expressed concerns about future pollution from the plant.

The settlement lays out how Chemours must handle hazardous chemicals still made at its Fayetteville Works plant in North Carolina. But it does not include enough identifying details about the chemicals for the public to properly assess the plan, said Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, a grass roots coalition that works to secure clean drinking water for communities in the river basin.

“The community downstream cannot weigh a hidden risk,” she said.

The proposed settlement must go through a public comment period, and a federal judge must officially approve it, before it becomes legally binding.

The Department of Justice and E.P.A. said in a joint response to North Carolina officials that all states would benefit from the settlement. It had been North Carolina’s own imperative not to participate in settlement discussions, the agencies said.

Jessica Loizeaux, a spokeswoman for Chemours, said that the settlement included hiring an E.P.A.-approved third-party auditor to review manufacturing processes at its plants to determine whether additional measures to control pollution were needed. Fayetteville Works had invested more than $400 million in recent years to reduce its PFAS emissions, and ran a private well testing program to help ensure residents with private wells had access to clean drinking water, she said.

The Trump administration has come under fire for repealing some Biden-era limits on PFAS in drinking water, including limits on GenX, that were set to take effect in coming years. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, has sought to counter anger over the move, announcing nearly $1 billion to help states address the contamination.

The post ‘An Insult:’ North Carolina Assails Administration’s PFAS Pollution Deal appeared first on New York Times.

The Offspring attempted to set this unofficial record during their June 21 performance at Hellfest. They closed out the French metal festival this year with a high-energy headlining set, complete with pyrotechnics and an enthusiastic crowd.

So enthusiastic, in fact, that the pop-punk icons were able to get 50,000 people to mosh to “Love Story” seemingly without complaint. The pit happened around mid-set, after classic Offspring hits like “Come Out and Play”, “All I Want”, and “Staring at the Sun”. Then, frontman Dexter Holland got the crowd’s attention to pitch his plan.

The Offspring Keep Fans Guessing with Taylor Swift, Ozzy, and 19th-Century Classical Covers

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“We’re going to have the biggest mosh pit to a Taylor Swift song ever,” said Holland. “You guys are going to help us. We’re going to make history tonight.”

Footage from the crowd shows a pit opening up near the stage, with a few fans starting to kick things off. The Offspring launched into the 2008 Swift hit with their own pop-punk flair, starting near the bridge. When the final chorus kicked in with the key change, the crowd converged in the center of the pit as easily as a zipper being pulled shut.

The fan-cam video posted on the band’s social media shows a rowdy pit that would typically be at odds with a Taylor Swift early smash hit. If it were anyone else performing it, most likely. But with The Offspring’s familiar sound, it suddenly becomes a song you want to punch your friends to.

Elsewhere in their set, the band covered Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”. They also included a snippet of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. Before playing their fan-favorite hits, however, they pulled out their rendition of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, a classical piece from the 1800s. A punk re-imagining of a classical composition and a mosh pit to Taylor Swift on the same night? No one ever said The Offspring doesn’t know how to have fun.

The post Did The Offspring Actually Start the Biggest Mosh Pit to the Least Likely Mosh Pit Song Ever? appeared first on VICE.

• A new organization called Raise US aims to help states prepare their workforces for AI disruption.
• The OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are all supporting it.
• The group wants to do real-world pilots of policies like wage insurance.

Some of the biggest names in tech and AI are behind a new organization with ambitious plans to help workers navigate the AI transition.

The OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are all “anchor partners” on Raise US, a new nonprofit that aims to raise $1 billion to build a national platform to advise governors on how best to prepare their workforces for AI disruption. According to the organization, they have already raised $500 million. (The OpenAI Foundation was a nonprofit created as part of OpenAI’s restructuring, which holds a $100 billion equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm.)

“America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition. It does not yet have a people strategy — and we cannot lead without one,” former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is leading the group, said in a statement announcing the initiative.

Raise US’ initial partnerships are with Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah, an even split between states run by Republican and Democratic governors.

“By working directly with state governments to pilot and scale new workforce models, we can move faster and reach more people than any of us could independently,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer, wrote in a post explaining the partnership.

In Arkansas, the group is working with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to stand up an “AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas LAUNCH that connects students and job seekers to personalized learning and employer-linked career pathways.”

In Maryland, Raise US is working with Gov. Wes Moore to expand service-years for recent high school graduates into fields such as healthcare and education.

Of the initial group, Utah may be one of the most interesting. The state has found itself at the center of backlash over the buildout of AI data centers. Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary scaled back his proposed data center by nearly half after intense public backlash and political pressure.

The organization said more states will join in the coming months. Elsewhere, Raise US said it wants to work on “real-world pilots” for policies like “short-time compensation and wage insurance.”

Raimondo, who was governor of Rhode Island before joining the Biden administration, is leading the effort alongside former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. David Sze, a partner at Greylock, is among the four people who will serve on the organization’s board of directors.

In addition to the AI partners, the Raise US advisory board includes a who’s who of Corporate America, politics, labor, philanthropy, and economics, including Laurene Powell Jobs, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Bank of America co-President Jim DeMare, former IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, and renowned economist Raj Chetty.

The extent to which AI will disrupt the labor market is hotly contested. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been outspoken in his warnings that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next 1 to 5 years.

AI and tech CEOs have recently sought to pivot away from the job “apocalypse” discussion amid concerns that the rhetoric has fueled AI’s declining popularity in the US. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to say he was “delighted to be wrong about this.”

“I thought that there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar work jobs being eliminated by now than it’s actually happened,” Altman said during a May event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon are behind a new organization that aims to help prepare workers for AI appeared first on Business Insider.

“One of the things that I saw was a statement from them in this ad campaign that says the FCC is trying to control who can appear on the show. Look, Disney has a lot of high-priced lawyers, so I would assume that they understand the law and the law is actually very clear. If you’re not bona fide news, the law simply requires the offering of comparable time and placement. It doesn’t dictate that you have to be on any particular show,” Carr told reporters during the FCC’s monthly press conference on Thursday. “So to accept that was a statement of law, that’s not consistent with what the law provides.”

To date, the proceeding evaluating ABC’s petition that “The View” should qualify as a “bona fide” news program has received over 16,000 public comments. When asked about the comments, Carr said that Disney is “running a fairly standard, off-the-shelf strategy” and argued that the FCC is simply enforcing the provisions of the Communications Act.

“Disney has a dispute with the law that Congress has passed and that’s fine, but Congress is the forum for that. We’re going to apply the law,” he added. “We have not made a decision one way or the other, we’re open-minded, we’ll see what they say, but that was, I think, probably the basis for some of those comments.”

ABC’s petition comes after the FCC issued new guidance in January warning that late night and daytime talk shows will not be exempt from the equal opportunities requirements put in place by Congress.

Under the Communications Act of 1934, Congress put protections in place to ensure equal access to broadcast station facilities for legally qualified candidates for office, regardless of political affiliation. The rule covers individuals who have publicly announced their intention to run for office and qualify under applicable state or federal law to hold the office being sought.

In 2006, the FCC determined that “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” qualified for an exemption from the rule as a “bona fide news interview” — the first time that such an exemption had been applied to a late night talk show.

At the time, the agency said it has “not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.” It added that any program that is “motivated by partisan purposes” would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent.

A month later, Carr confirmed that the regulator launched an investigation into “The View” for allegedly violating the “equal time” rule when it aired an interview with then Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico.

Then in April, the FCC demanded that ABC submit an early license renewal for its eight owned affiliate stations as part of an investigation into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices. A month later, ABC said it was filing the early renewal “under protest” in response to the agency’s “unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional” order.

The public can comment via the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System online and enter the corresponding docket number along with their submission.

The deadline for public comment in “The View” proceeding was Monday, with replies due July 6. Meanwhile, the deadline for petitions to deny the license renewal are June 29, while opposition is due July 29 and replies are due Aug. 5.

The docket for “The View” inquiry is No. 26-124, while the docket for the license renewal inquiry is No. 26-131.

The post FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Accuses Disney’s ABC of ‘Misinformation Campaign’ Amid ‘The View,’ Broadcast License Reviews appeared first on TheWrap.