Prediction markets have now turned their focus to hantavirus, a rare but severe category of viruses transmitted from rodents to humans, after several cases were identified earlier this month aboard an Atlantic cruise operated by Oceanwide Expeditions.

There were moments leading up to the 30th WNBA season where it appeared as if it wasn’t going to happen.

An aggressive new policy from the U.S. State Department will force a group of Americans to give up their passports.

Chili’s has had a major comeback in recent years. The casual dining chain turned 50 last year, and recently reported 20 consecutive quarters of growth.

Wendy’s shares rose on Friday after the fast-food giant reported stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings, beating analyst estimates despite poor U.S. store performance, with U.S. same-restaurant sales falling 7.8%.

An in-person remote position sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s exactly what fitness and athletics supplement company Inno Supps advertised in a LinkedIn job posting that’s gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos, and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform.

The Pentagon is releasing “never-before-seen” files on UFOs. The files, many of which have been under wraps for decades, can now be accessed by anyone online.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just one month away. The annual event will see Apple launch the next iterations of the software that powers its various devices, including iOS 27 for the iPhone.

If you’ve taken the New York City subway lately, you might’ve seen an ad that’s driving social media wild.

While many AI companies are betting their products can be useful to a broad segment of businesses, a startup called Emanate is taking the opposite approach, building highly targeted tools designed for complex sales transactions in the industrial materials sector. 

As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion.

Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

Tech executives need to recognize their power — and their responsibility — to make the right decisions, said Baroness Joanna Shields, a key partner in the initiative. She worked as a tech executive with stints at Google and Facebook before pivoting to British politics.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. But the leaders of the world’s religions, with billions of followers globally, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety,” she reasoned. Faith leaders ought to have a voice, Shields said.

“This dialogue, this direct connection is so important because the people who are building this understand the power and capabilities of what they’re building and they want to do it right — most of them,” she said of AI tech executives.
The goal of this initiative, according to Shields, is an eventual “set of norms or principles” informed by different groups and faiths, from Christians to Sikhs to Buddhists, that companies will abide by.

The literature world is up in arms after a prominent author, who also serves as the national ambassador for young people’s literature, denigrated the quality of the majority of children’s literature. 

If you’ve been debating whether or not to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 then you’ll want to act soon. 

It made sense 50 years ago to market to entire generations as if they were one persona. It was a way for companies to understand consumers when there was little else to go on.

Libyan Dr. Faysal Alghoula must renew his green card to continue caring for roughly 1,000 patients in southwestern Indiana, but hasn’t been able to since the Trump administration stopped reviewing applications for people from several dozen countries it deemed high-risk.

Alghoula’s current visa will expire in September if his application is denied.

But last week, the administration quietly made an exemption for medical doctors with pending visa or green card applications, possibly allowing Alghoula’s case to move forward. It’s a move physicians organizations and immigration attorneys had sought for months, citing widespread shortages and a high proportion of foreign-trained doctors, who disproportionately work in underserved areas, according to the National Library of Medicine.

The lack of doctors is top of mind for Alghoula, a pulmonologist and Intensive Care Unit doctor who serves a mostly rural population spanning parts of Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.

“It is about four to five months wait to get the pulmonologist here,” he said.

Still, applicants and immigration attorneys say its unclear how big a difference the exemption will make. The change means doctors can have their cases reviewed, but it doesn’t guarantee their green cards or visas will be renewed. It is also unclear whether U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be able to process those applications in time to meet immigration deadlines like Alghoula’s.

Alghoula said he doesn’t trust the administration will approve him due to numerous stories about immigrants being detained at appointments to renew their paperwork like the one he has next month.

“I’m still scared to go to my interview,” said Alghoula, who has lived in the U.S. since 2016.

Meanwhile, the pause remains in affect for thousands of others including researchers and entrepreneurs from 39 countries including Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela. While they’re on hold, many can’t legally work, get health insurance or a driver’s license. If they leave the U.S., they won’t be let back in.

The once-empty space over 14 lanes of interstate highway traffic coursing through the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas is now an exceptional new development open to the public: Halperin Park. The $300 million freeway capping project includes a playground, splash pad, band shell, large lawn, and linear walkway that resurrects an erased section of a historic street.

April was not a good month for the tech industry in terms of job losses. Last month, major firms—including Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Snap—all announced significant workforce reductions.

Many people finish the workday not just tired but wired. Their mind keeps racing, their body feels tense, and even in moments that should be restful they feel a lingering sense of urgency. Conversations replay in their mind, unfinished tasks resurface, and their nervous system seems unwilling to power down.

The Iran war has caused the biggest disruption of global oil supplies in history and sent average U.S. gasoline prices surging past $4.50 a gallon this week.

But the conflict hasn’t done much damage to the American job market – at least not yet.

When the Labor Department’s report on April hiring and unemployment comes out Friday, it’s expected to show that U.S. companies, nonprofits and government agencies together added 65,000 jobs last month, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet. That would be down from a surprisingly strong 178,000 in March.

Ordinarily, 65,000 net new jobs a month would be unimpressive. But these are not ordinary times. Baby Boomer retirements and President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown mean that fewer people are competing for work and that the economy doesn’t need to generate as many jobs as it used to.

Matthew Martin of Oxford Economics says the so-called break-even point — the number of new jobs required each month to keep the unemployment rate from rising — is now near zero. The jobless rate is expected, in fact, to have remained at a low 4.3% in April, according to FactSet.

After the U.S. and Israel launched their attacks Feb. 28, Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes. The disruption has caused a painful increase in the price of energy and led many economists to downgrade their estimates for global and U.S. economic growth.

But the fallout isn’t showing up yet in the U.S. job market.

Payroll processor ADP reported Wednesday that private employers added a solid 109,000 jobs in April. The ADP figure isn’t a reliable guide to what the Labor Department will report Friday – but the pace of hiring it showed was the fastest since January 2025. And on Tuesday the Labor Department reported that a measure of gross hiring – before subtracting those who left or lost their jobs – was stronger in March than it had been in more than two years.

The economy is getting a boost from big tax refund checks this spring, arising from Trump’s tax cut legislation last year; the refunds allow consumers to spend more freely, giving companies an incentive to add workers in response to rising sales.

The job market is showing intermittent signs of recovery after a bleak 2025. Employers last year created just 9,700 jobs a month, fewest outside a recession year since 2002. High interest rates and uncertainty over Trump’s economic policies held back hiring.

There’s been progress this year, but it’s been uneven — two strong months of job growth (160,000 new jobs in January and 178,000 in March) and one bad one (employers cut 133,000 jobs in February).

U.S. hiring, though, has been dominated by one industry: Healthcare companies, catering to an aging American population, have added 360,000 jobs over the past year; other employers have combined to cut 120,000 over the 12 months that ended in March.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at the KPMG accounting and consulting firm, warns that the healthcare hiring boom may not last.

The Republican Congress last year allowed subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to expire. Trump’s tax bill slashed Medicaid spending for the poor, and his administration has imposed a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas. “Rural and poor urban hospitals rely most on H-1B doctors and nurses to fill open positions,” Swonk wrote in a commentary Monday. “They cannot afford the new $100,000 fee for visas. Many rural hospitals have already closed.”

Going forward, Oxford’s Martin wrote in a commentary Wednesday, “the question is whether the war will reverse (hiring) momentum. Heightened uncertainty impacts the labor market with a lag, and the fiscal stimulus from higher refunds will eventually wane, particularly as gas prices remain elevated.”