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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he plans to meet with Danish officials next week after the The President administration doubled down on its intention to take over Greenland, the strategic Arctic island that is a self-governing territory of Denmark. Since the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald The President has revived his argument that the United States needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, had requested a meeting with Rubio, according t…

Less than 24 hours after the horrifying shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, merchandise related to the slain U.S. citizen is already proliferating on e-commerce shopping sites, including on Amazon and Etsy. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Wednesday, a woman was fatally shot by an ICE officer near a raid that federal officials were conducting. The woman was identified by authorities as Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen. As CNN reports, multiple videos taken by bystanders on the scene show ICE agents confronting the car that Good was driving, which was parked sideways o…

Gaming peripheral company Razer is betting that people want AI holograms. So much so that it introduce a perplexing new product at CES 2026 that early critics have dubbed a “friend in a bottle.” Project AVA, is a small glass cylinder that features a 5.5-inch animated desk buddy that can interact with you, coach you, or offer gaming advice on demand—all powered by xAI’s Grok. Project AVA uses a technology Razer calls “PC Vision Mode” that watches your screen, allowing its 3D animated inhabitant to offer real-time commentary on your gameplay, track your mood, or simply hang out. It attempts to sell the illusion of presence—a companion that isn’t just an app you close, b…

Gmail was always a gateway drug for the greater Google ecosystem. When it launched in 2004, Gmail stood out by offering then-wild amounts of storage for free. Despite few updates to its design in two decades, it now boasts 2.5 billion users and is the largest email service in the world. And—like so much of the tech industry—Google is betting that email will sell you on its next big bet: AI. Starting today, Gmail will begin rolling out three new AI services that will significantly impact the way use your inbox. Gmail’s new AI features Two of the services require a $20/mo subscription to its Gemini AI service, while the third will come to all users, free. (A…

Health tech gadgets displayed at the annual CES trade show make a lot of promises. A smart scale promoted a healthier lifestyle by scanning your feet to track your heart health, and an egg-shaped hormone tracker uses AI to help you figure out the best time to conceive. Tech and health experts, however, question the accuracy of products like these and warn of data privacy issues — especially as the federal government eases up on regulation. The Food and Drug Administration announced during the show in Las Vegas that it will relax regulations on “low-risk” general wellness products such as heart monitors and wheelchairs. It’s the latest step President Donald The President…

We live in a world of ambient hums, from air conditioners and distant traffic to the whir of our own thoughts. It’s no surprise many people reach for active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones to escape it all. Originally designed for planes and offices, ANC devices, including earbuds, have become a popular bedtime tool for chasing total quiet. But the brain doesn’t actually want silence to sleep, and forcing it can backfire. The best way to fall and stay asleep is to quiet the mind, not just what enters your ears. We call this creating “cognitive silence,” and ANC often gets in the way. Even during sleep, the brain keeps an ear out for danger. It’s an evolutionary surv…

Inside Girl Scouts’ headquarters in New York City and its two licensed bakeries, a team of trend forecasters, marketers, and food scientists spend years cooking up its next iconic cookie. Now, fans of the annual cookie sale are about to get a taste of what the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) team has been baking behind closed doors. The newest addition to the cookie lineup are Exploremores, a rocky road ice cream-inspired sandwich cookie with chocolate shortbread exteriors and chocolate, marshmallow, and toasted almond-flavored cream centers. For Girl Scout cookie enjoyers, a fresh cookie is always a welcome surprise. But, according to Wendy Lou, GSUSA’s chief rev…

Once the ball starts rolling in the Spanish league, the game is on for some 50 analysts who start looking for signs of online piracy. They scan websites, social media posts, IPTV platforms and streaming portals in search of illegal broadcasts of La Liga matches. The trained analysts identify the pirated content and take the steps needed to take them off air, including notifying Internet intermediaries like Cloudflare, the U.S.-based company whose content-delivery network is believed to manage nearly 20% of the Internet traffic worldwide. And that’s when the real fight begins for the Spanish league. La Liga, one of the most active European leagues fighting piracy and a…

It’s a dream come true for investors with heavy defense stock holdings. On Thursday, defense stocks surged after President The President called for a massive $1.5 trillion defense budget next year. The figure was floated in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. That would be an increase of roughly 50% over the 2026 budget of $901 billion. “I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the “Dream Military” that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will ke…

If you had a severe case of the Sunday Scaries last weekend, you are not alone. It’s a sentiment many have been sharing online. Ready or not, with it comes an influx of unread emails, meeting invites, and responsibilities—smugly pushed to the New Year in the last weeks of December—now coming back to haunt us all. Indeed, the first Monday of the year is the Monday-est Monday of all. “Oh god,” one TikTok user posted on Monday 6th. “Everyone is circling back.” “Worst aesthetic ever: Back to work in the first week of jan,” another wrote, riffing on TikTok’s “rare aesthetic” trend. Some have used the lyrics to The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable No…

American Airlines will begin offering free, high-speed Wi-Fi on flights beginning this month. The airline made the announcement this week in a press release, explaining that the service will extend to around two million flights in 2026. However, not all fliers will receive the perk. The new service will be sponsored by wireless provider AT&T. “Free high-speed Wi-Fi isn’t just a perk—it’s essential for today’s travelers,” said Heather Garboden, chief customer officer at American Airlines, in the release. The rollout won’t kick off all at once, the announcement explained, but instead will happen in phases. This month, the service will be available only on…

The dreaded performance review draws the ire of employees and managers alike. Workers fret that reviews fail to capture the full scope of their work, or that they are an unfair assessment of their performance. For managers, reviews can be a time-consuming nuisance and involve the challenging task of delivering tough feedback. But a new study from Cornell University finds that the structure of the performance review can have a huge impact on how workers feel about them. Over the last decade, a number of companies have revamped their performance reviews, seemingly to address the long-standing pain points. The likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have moved aw…

Fast-casual salad chain Salad and Go is closing more stores and exiting Texas and Oklahoma completely. The eatery will close a total of 32 stores, 25 in Texas and seven in Oklahoma, by January 11. The closures will impact around 600 employees. The company will also close its Dallas headquarters and relocate to Phoenix. Salad and Go operates as a drive-through and grab-and-go business, known for affordable salads, wraps, and other healthy menu items. The fast-casual chain was founded in 2013 in Gilbert, Arizona. Salad and Go began rapid expansion efforts in 2022. However, the salad chain has recently been reducing its retail footprint, closing 41 of its stores …

New York Attorney General Letitia James is demanding more information about Instacart’s recent, and highly controversial, price tests, and suggesting that the scheme—which saw customers charged notably different prices for the same products, when offered at the same stores—might have violated a new state law. Late last year, Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative released an investigation that found that a single item posted on Instacart could have as many as five different prices, and that costs for a single item could range from just seven cents to $2.56. The investigation found that while some prices changed, and some differed only marginally, for some …

If you visit the Hermès website in search of a scarf or a handbag, you’ll be greeted by a collection of whimsical sea creatures swimming across the screen. To navigate to the watch section, you’ll click on an image of a watch flanked by an eel. To locate shoes, you’ll click on a loafer with a pelican sitting inside it as if it were riding a boat. These sea horses and fish and eels and star fish are intriguing to the eye. While digitally-rendered images are hyper smooth, symmetrical, and flawless, these pictures bear all the imperfections of a hand-drawn illustration. We see the texture of the paper grain in the background, a slight irregularity in the lines, uneve…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On Wednesday, President Donald The President announced: “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.” Soon afterwards, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) tweeted that he’ll “introduce legislation in the Senate to codify this [ban] into law.” The general idea has some support on the other side of the aisle as well. Back February 2025, the Humans over Private Equity for Homeownership Act was introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and co-s…

When a gunman began firing inside an academic building on the Brown University campus, students didn’t wait for official alerts warning of trouble. They got information almost instantly, in bits and bursts — through phones vibrating in pockets, messages from strangers, rumors that felt urgent because they might keep someone alive. On Dec. 13 as the attack at the Ivy League institution played out during finals week, students took to Sidechat, an anonymous, campus-specific message board used widely at U.S. colleges, for fast-flowing information in real time. An Associated Press analysis of nearly 8,000 posts from the 36 hours after the shooting shows how social medi…

The crisp crinkle of fallen leaves beneath your feet. The swish and trickle of water moving through a stream. A breath of crisp, fresh air. Spending time in nature can be invigorating or produce feelings of peace and calm. But many professions allow little time or access to the outdoors during the workday. After a youth spent climbing trees and playing soccer, Anna Rose Smith found it difficult when her first job as a psychotherapist in Utah required working in a windowless office. So she spent her lunch breaks outside, walking to nearby fountains or gardens. She picked up flower petals or leaves from the ground and brought them back to her desk, where she wou…

In the age of rampant AI slop, seeing isn’t always believing. There’s more than one way, though, to make people doubt their own eyes. Many have long predicted and warned that AI deepfakes could profoundly distort public opinion. For example, although swiftly debunked, a fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging his troops to surrender in early 2022 seemed to be a harbinger of horrors to come—when AI would become indistinguishable from reality. But as events this week in Minneapolis and the White House demonstrate, no visual manipulation is necessary for forging reality from whole cloth. All it takes is a federal government united around its lea…

Jan. 26 marks the official start date of the 2026 tax filing season, when the IRS will begin accepting and processing 2025 tax returns. April 15 is the filing deadline. Tax experts, including the IRS’ independent watchdog, have warned that this year’s filing season could be hampered by the loss of tens of thousands of tax collection workers who left the agency through planned layoffs and buyouts spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The IRS will also be responsible for implementing major provisions of Republicans’ tax and spending package signed into law last summer. Several provisions in the law retroactively affect the 2025 tax year, likely…

While headlines about AI replacing workers dominated 2025, behavioral health is charting a different path. The industry thrives on human connection, measuring success in trust, healing, and human relationships, not throughput. That’s not to say AI isn’t rapidly reshaping the industry—it is. Its role here fundamentally differs because it supports clinicians rather than sidelines them. Over the next year, I predict we’ll see a paradox play out: Behavioral health will become increasingly AI-enabled, and simultaneously, more human than it’s been in decades. The reason is simple. Burnout and administrative burdens have been increasingly limiting what clinicians can do. Pro…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week to just above its 2025 low. The average long-term mortgage rate rose to 6.16%, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. That’s up slightly from 6.15% last week, when the average rate dropped to its lowest level since October 3, 2024. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.93%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, rose this week to 5.46% from 5.44% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.14%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond marke…

Starting today, Google is weaving its massive investment in AI into one product nearly everyone already uses—and for many people, the change won’t feel optional. Google announced Thursday that a suite of new features powered by Gemini 3 will begin appearing in Gmail, introducing automation designed to reduce inbox overload. The most consequential update is a new Gmail view called AI Inbox, which reshapes email around summaries, topics, and to-dos, rather than individual messages. What changes the moment this turns on For users, the shift isn’t about learning new tools—it’s about no longer having to manage email the same way. Instead of opening Gmail to a chrono…

Strategic planning is a big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time that employees invest in working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process. In the end, leadership gets a shiny report they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. Often, though, much less money and time is invested in implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around engaging in strategic plans. In many ways, this feels a lot like New Year’s resolutions.…

Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices, and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people. For many everyday scenarios—especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms—their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions. And this surge is not limited to quality. The v…