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North America’s largest commuter rail system is facing a potential shutdown as a deadline nears to reach a deal with unionized workers to avert a strike. The Long Island Rail Road that serves New York City’s eastern suburbs has been negotiating for months on a new contract with labor officials representing locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers. A strike was temporarily averted in September when President Donald The President’s administration agreed to help. Those efforts ended without a deal, giving both sides 60 days — ending 12:01 a.m. Saturday — to again try to resolve their differences before the union was legally allowed to go on strike or the agency could lock out workers. Five labor unions representing about half the train system’s 7,000-person workforce warned this week that Saturday’s deadline was approaching. The LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in North America, carrying about 250,000 customers each weekday. LIRR workers last went on strike in 1994, for about two days. Workers nearly walked out in 2014 before then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached a deal with unions. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the LIRR and other area transit systems, has said it will provide free but limited shuttle buses during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The agency says the shuttles will depart from designated LIRR train stations to subway stops in the New York City borough of Queens. Gov. Kathy Hochul has urged LIRR riders to work from home, if possible, as the free shuttles are meant for essential workers and those who cannot telecommute. The Democrat, months earlier, slammed the LIRR unions for “greedy asks” that threaten to “destabilize the local economy.” But there have been signs of progress in negotiations this week. Months ago, the MTA had proposed to the unions a 9.5% wage increase over three years, in line with what the system’s other unionized workers have already agreed to. The unions, however, held out for another yearly salary increase of 6.5%, for a total raise of 16% over four years. But following Wednesday’s closed door meetings, Gary Dellaverson, the MTA’s chief negotiator, said the agency offered the unions what it said would effectively amount to a 4.5% raise in the fourth year of the contract. That offer, he said, was in line with what federal officials had recommended and would come in the form of lump sum payments rather than wage increases, as the union sought. “The difference between those two positions is not unbridgeable,” Dellaverson said in a news conference. “It is describable simply in terms of money. There are no longer any complexities involved with the parties.” Kevin Sexton, a spokesperson for the unions, acknowledged Wednesday that there was “positive movement” toward a settlement but dismissed the notion that a deal was close as “far-fetched.” “We would like to reach an agreement that reflects the rising cost of living,” he said. “Anything short of that amounts to a cut in real wages.” Spokespersons for MTA didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Thursday, but the union said the two sides were expected to continue talks later that night and reconvene Friday if there was still no deal. Susanne Alberto, a personal trainer from Long Island, said she’s already made plans with her Manhattan clients to hold virtual sessions in the event of a shutdown. She said the union likely has the upper hand, even if she believes raises should be based on job responsibilities and not made across the board. “The MTA is going to cave, and they know that,” Alberto said. “Why don’t they just do it now instead of waiting until virtually millions of people get inconvenienced?” Rob Udle, an electrician who takes the LIRR at least five days a week, said he’ll likely use his vacation days rather than navigate the “nightmare” of commuting into Manhattan if the rail service shuts down. A union member, he sympathized with the unions’ affordability concerns, but said he didn’t agree with their strongarm tactics. “I get it, the cost of living is going up and stuff like that,” Udle said while waiting at Penn Station for a train home. “But they shouldn’t hold everybody hostage to do it. There’s a better way. You’re affecting a lot of other people.” Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo —Philip Marcelo, Associated Press View the full article

Bill Gross has a long history of betting on technological shifts and watching those bets pay off. But the latest proposition from one of Silicon Valley’s most storied founders and investors depends on forces far beyond the Bay Area. With ProRata, Gross is betting he can build a market in which publishers and creators can see how their work informs AI-generated outputs and get paid accordingly. He doesn’t expect AI companies to participate out of goodwill. In fact, Gross has already launched a spinoff, Gist, which allows ProRata partners to generate additional revenue from ProRata’s indexing of their work. Instead, he believes outside pressures will eventually leave AI operators with little choice. In a conversation with Fast Company, Gross discusses how he thinks that shift could happen, and why he believes some of the biggest names in AI are losing the plot. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Where did the inspiration come for ProRata? The inspiration came when The New York Times sued OpenAI a few years ago. I thought, wow, I really do think that the AI companies are stealing stuff from everybody. I think that lawsuits are one way to solve it, but I think a better way to solve it would be a business model that’s fair to everybody. And I thought, just like Spotify shares revenue with artists, just like YouTube shares revenue with artists, why don’t the AI companies share revenue with artists? If I can solve the problem of unscrambling the egg, figuring out where the answer came from, then I could use that as the attribution breakdown for sharing 50% of the revenues, just like Spotify shares revenues with the artists. So, I worked for a few months on coming up with a method to do that, and I was successful. So, then I patented that, and then I said, now, let me go see if I can get publishers to join. So we have now signed 1,500 publications in the last two years. Now I need to convince the big AI companies to share their revenues 50/50 and use my attribution method, and that is probably going to take two things to happen. One, they need to lose their lawsuits. Two, they need to get profitable, so they actually have revenues to share. To be clear: No AI operators are actually paying money through ProRata? Not yet. It’s a long game. There’s a few reasons why they’ll have to. One, I think they’re going to lose their lawsuits, but two, even if they don’t lose their lawsuits, it’s the right thing to do. But three, if they don’t have current information, their answer quality will go down. If one company does it—I think Microsoft is leaning in to be the first company to do something like this—that will put pressure on all of them to do it. So I think we need one domino to fall. The court cases have been interesting because so far there isn’t a whole lot of consistency. In the Anthropic case, the judge said it’s okay for an AI to get smarter by reading published work. The New York Times was able to show that there were large excerpts of their work literally in the answer. I think the right way to pay is based on output. That you can crawl stuff to train your model, but if you use the content in the output, that’s different. Some ProRata clients like the Atlantic already have deals with OpenAI. What do you add? Those deals were all input for crawling content to train the model. Our proposal is that you should also get paid on the output. I urge all of our publications to get money both ways. [Editor’s Note: The Atlantic’s arrangement with OpenAI does cover output.] The site says you serve publishers and creators; how small can the publisher and creator get? We’ll go to anybody. We have some people who are just vloggers. When this model is correctly affixed, I think smaller publishers are helped more in an AI era. Because you win in the AI answer based on the quality or uniqueness of your content, not by the size of your brand. It’s actually a fair method of giving the long tail proper compensation. About your attribution; have you gotten pushback from AI operators that you’re seeing something that isn’t there? We haven’t got any pushback on that. What we do have is the support from the publishers that the attribution is close enough to being correct that they would sign off on it. In other words, think about this like a Nielsen rating. Yes, it isn’t perfect. But all the advertisers accept it and they accept the fact that it’s a statistical sample. Let’s now pivot to your your spin-off out of ProRata, Gist. While the lawsuits are progressing, and while we’re waiting for the AI companies to get profitable, we want to help publishers be successful in any way we can. So, since we have already crawled their content for the purpose of attribution, we understand a lot about what readers are reading so we can make a number of systems for them to help them monetize their content better. People are trained to ask questions now, so if you show related questions on a website, click-through rate is very, very high. Like, between 3% and 5%, and therefore we can monetize those very well. Gist’s site-specific search is interesting to me because I keep finding that some of the worst performing search UXs around are on news sites where I’ve worked—where I have to switch to Google to find what I know I wrote. The site searches are notoriously bad. I think most publishers just haven’t invested in it to make it good. And, of course, Google invests billions of dollars to make it good. Our AI site search is better than Google because we haven’t just done keyword search. We’re actually understanding the context and the knowledge graph of each article. Basically, here’s the thing that large language models do so great: LLMs actually have a fake, but deeper understanding of the story. They don’t actually understand the story, but they have a fake understanding of it through statistics of words. Because they have such a fake deep understanding of the story, they can predict what questions you might have in your mind next. When you show that people click on it, that gives you another chance at another page view of that visitor way better than if they just left and went to Google and typed in that question. So, giving a website the power to hold on to the user a little bit longer is something we feel very proud of, and is really working. In what ways does ProRata use AI itself? We use it for everything, even the GEO [generative engine optimization] product which we just launched. It was about 13 people for four months; it would have been 30 people for four years if we were doing it the old-fashioned way. Everybody’s using Claude Code, everybody’s using agentic tools. Well, we had a patent come back recently, they rejected maybe 13 out of 15 of the claims. It’s very, very hard to decipher the patent’s office rebuttal, as well as which patents they’re referring to that they think have prior art. I took the patent officer’s rejection, gave it to ChatGPT and said help me come up with a better explanation of why I think these claims are really valid. I gave that back to the patent office a month ago. On Friday, I got the notice back from the patent office and all the claims were approved. They only got approved on their merit, but it would have been very, very hard for me to dig through every one of the other patents they refer to and explain why my thing was different in a convincing way. From the word “fake” you used, it sounds like you are not a believer in artificial general intelligence. Are we in an AI bubble? I definitely think that AGI is possible, probably in a longer time frame than people believe, but I still think we have something which is incredibly useful. It’s not AGI, but it’s wildly powerful, because, though it doesn’t have the depth of human thinking, it has a huge breadth. It has read so many things that it has what I keep calling it a fake understanding of things—but a useful fake understanding of things. I think that valuations are not that high relative to the revenues because the revenue growth is incredible, but I feel the valuations are very high relative to the current profits because they’re losing money. However, the cost per token is going down every day. The value per token is still going up every day. As soon as people start paying the fair price for the value they’re getting—for example, to do that patent, which was very valuable to me, I paid $20 a month. That’s too little. I would pay $100 a month. I don’t think we’re in a bubble in that sense, say, compared to I lived through the dot-com bubble at similarly high valuations, but almost no revenues and almost no path to profitability because they had no revenues. So I think that OpenAI does have a path to profitability. Do you see that as the case for AI companies in general? Anthropic is going after enterprise, who can afford to pay more, is not doing consumer things like Sora and others, which are expensive and don’t bring in much revenue. And Anthropic is smartly, much to some users’ dismay, throttling people back when they’re using it too much to make sure that they get closer to profitability. I think Anthropic is going to get profitable sooner than almost all the other companies. I think that OpenAI is finally getting religion about dropping some of the things that are way too expensive and religion in terms of, well, I have 900 million consumers, I better start charging them advertising. Then I think that Meta is on a fool’s errand right now. I don’t know if you read the recent thing this weekend about every single thing that Mark Zuckerberg has done since Facebook has failed or been bought. He bought Instagram; great success. He went all in on metaverse; I think he’s lost like $80 billion. I think he will lose a lot of money on AI too, because he’s not in first place, and he’s not even third place. The Chinese are doing way better than than he is. But it doesn’t matter. He’s got a money mint from Facebook and Instagram to cover it. Since we mentioned one very rich guy with a self-created public-image problem, we have to talk about xAI. Yeah, well, I think that the general direction of Elon’s bets are good. I just think Elon has a habit of exaggerating the timeline of things like data centers in space, reaching Mars, full self driving, all that. He exaggerates those by about 10 years so that he can raise the money to work on them, and that is a tactic. But he’s promising things that he can’t deliver in the time frame that makes sense. I have to close with this: What is your 10-year-out forecast for AI? Does it upend society? I do think that AI is going to upend society, and I would like to do anything I can to try and have the upending be more uniform and more lifting everybody. I’m worried that it will not be. I’m worried that the rich get richer, and it doesn’t flow down to other people. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The LG UltraGear 39GX90SA-W has dropped to $749.99 on Amazon from its original $1,599.99 price, and according to price trackers, this is the lowest it has been so far. It’s a 39-inch ultrawide panel that feels huge in person, especially with its 800R curve wrap that pulls you into games in a way smaller ultrawides usually don’t. Racing games, open-world titles, and anything cinematic look especially good here because the OLED panel gives dark scenes real depth and color without the washed-out look many LCD gaming monitors still struggle with. The 240Hz refresh rate also helps games feel smooth with minimal motion blur, whether you are playing competitive shooters or something slower-paced. LG UltraGear 39GX90SA-W Smart Gaming Monitor $749.99 at Amazon $1,599.99 Save $850.00 Get Deal Get Deal $749.99 at Amazon $1,599.99 Save $850.00 The UltraGear 39GX90SA-W comes with LG’s full webOS smart TV software built directly into the monitor, basically turning this into a smart TV disguised as a gaming monitor. You can open Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or GeForce Now without connecting a PC or console—and while that sounds gimmicky at first, it actually makes a lot of sense for people who spend long hours at their desk and want one screen for work, gaming, and streaming. The USB-C connection also helps with that setup because it supports 65W charging, meaning laptop users can connect and charge with a single cable. There are plenty of ports, including HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort, Ethernet, USB-A, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi 6; you are not going to run out of ways to connect devices to it. That said, its 3440 x 1440 resolution spread across 39 inches is not as crisp as a 4K panel, so text can look softer if you spend all day reading documents or editing spreadsheets. The built-in speakers also feel weak for a monitor this large. They work for casual YouTube videos or background streaming, but they lack volume and depth for gaming or movies. Even so, if you want a giant OLED display that can handle gaming, movies, work, and streaming apps all in one place, this deal makes the 39GX90SA-W far more tempting than it was at launch. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $229.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $319.99 (List Price $349.00) Shark AV2501AE AI XL Hepa- Safe Self-Emptying Base Robot Vacuum — $299.99 (List Price $649.99) Dell 15 DC15250 (Intel Core i7 13th Gen, 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, Touch Display) — $599.99 (List Price $839.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated the public on ongoing Salmonella outbreaks linked to backyard poultry. Unfortunately, the outbreaks have continued to spread and have now infected nearly 200 individuals in 31 states, with children making up an alarming number of cases. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? As Fast Company previously reported, the CDC in April warned the public about a concerning Salmonella outbreak that had then spread to 13 states. The outbreak was alarming because those infected with Salmonella were found to have strains of the bacterium resistant to fosfomycin, a drug commonly used to treat the infection. Additionally, strains of the bacterium linked to the outbreak were found to be resistant to other commonly used antibiotics, too. At the time, the CDC said the outbreak—believed to be caused by contact with outdoor poultry, such as ducks and chickens—had sickened 34 people, with 13 requiring hospitalization. The agency also cautioned that the number of people infected was likely higher than the official figures suggested. This was because not everyone who becomes infected with Salmonella seeks care. The CDC has now published a new update on its investigation, which it now says includes three Salmonella outbreaks. The results show cases have spread significantly. How many people have been infected? According to a May 14 update from the CDC, cases linked to the drug-resistant Salmonella outbreaks have climbed significantly since the agency’s last update just weeks earlier. “The largest outbreak has an unusually high number of people reporting contact with ducks,” the CDC said in its update. In its previous update, the CDC said 34 people had been sickened, and 13 had required hospitalization. Now those figures have soared. As of yesterday’s update, the CDC has now confirmed that 184 individuals have been infected with Salmonella linked to the outbreaks. The number of hospitalizations has also climbed too. Previously, 13 people had required hospitalization. Now the total number is 53—an increase of 40 people. And unfortunately, the outbreaks have now claimed a fatality. The CDC says that one person from Washington state is confirmed to have died. Just as alarming is the report that 25% of those infected in the outbreaks are children under 5 years old. Children under the age of 5 are particularly vulnerable to Salmonella infections because of their still-developing immune systems. Where are the outbreaks happening? According to the CDC’s update, cases linked to the drug-resistant Salmonella outbreaks have now been confirmed in 31 states. That’s a jump of 18 states since the CDC’s last update. Previously, the outbreaks were mainly limited to the Midwest and the Northwest, but now cases have spread to Texas and states along the Pacific coast. Kentucky currently has the highest number of confirmed cases, at 22. Michigan is not far behind, at 21 confirmed cases. Washington, which has confirmed 9 cases so far, is the only state with a fatality. Here are the states where cases have been confirmed, along with their number of cases as of the CDC’s May 14 update: California: 1 Colorado: 3 Florida: 3 Georgia: 4 Idaho: 10 Illinois: 7 Indiana: 10 Iowa: 1 Kentucky: 22 Maine: 10 Maryland: 6 Massachusetts: 2 Michigan: 21 Minnesota: 3 Mississippi: 2 Missouri: 1 Montana: 2 Nevada: 1 New Hampshire: 1 New York: 1 North Carolina: 1 Ohio: 15 Oregon: 3 Pennsylvania: 2 Tennessee: 4 Texas: 3 Utah: 5 Vermont: 5 Washington: 9 West Virginia: 9 Wisconsin: 17 The CDC has also included a map of the cases. What are the symptoms of Salmonella? The CDC says those infected with Salmonella can show the following common symptoms: Watery diarrhea that might have blood or mucus Stomach cramps that can be severe The agency says that Salmonella infections may also cause additional symptoms, including: Headache Loss of appetite Nausea Vomiting Symptoms can last anywhere from 4-7 days, and generally appear within 6 hours to 6 days after infection. What can I do to stay safe? In its May 14 update, the CDC says that those who come into contact with backyard poultry or are around their grounds or supplies should be careful to: Wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds Don’t wear the shoes you wear in the birds’ environment inside your own house Don’t let the birds or the supplies you use in their care inside your house Don’t let children younger than 5 touch the birds or interact with the area the birds are in While Salmonella infections can be contracted by anyone, children younger than 5, people with weakened immune systems, and people aged 65 or older are more likely to experience severe illness. View the full article

Google adds AI assistant traffic to GA4, FAQ rich results are gone, Ahrefs tests schema, and Condé Nast plans around near-zero search forecasts. The post GA4 Tracks AI Assistant Traffic, FAQ Results Gone – SEO Pulse appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. At $199.96 for the four-camera kit, down from $349.99, the Eufy Security EufyCam C35 bundle is currently at its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. Eufy’s biggest advantage remains local storage—the included HomeBase Mini stores footage locally with 8GB of built-in storage, and both the hub and cameras support microSD cards if you need more room. You can still pay for cloud storage if you want (starting at $3.99/mo for a single camera or $13.99/mo for 10 devices), but unlike many competing systems, you are not forced into it just to access recordings. That alone makes this setup appealing for anyone tired of stacking subscriptions on top of hardware purchases. Eufy Security EufyCam C35 4-Cam Kit Wireless security indoor/outdoor camera $199.96 at Amazon $349.99 Save $150.03 Get Deal Get Deal $199.96 at Amazon $349.99 Save $150.03 Setup is largely painless. You install the Eufy app, scan a few QR codes, and the HomeBase Mini handles the rest of the pairing process for all four cameras—you don’t have to re-enter wifi credentials for every device, which saves time when mounting multiple cameras around the house. The cameras themselves cover most of the features people expect from a modern wireless security system—they run on batteries, support two-way audio, and have IP67 weather resistance for outdoor use, notes this CNET review. Eufy also includes color night vision, motion alerts, activity zones, and built-in deterrents like lights and sirens. You can tweak motion sensitivity, limit recording lengths to preserve battery life, and filter alerts using AI detection via the companion app. That said, the EufyCam C35 records at 1080p, which now feels modest compared to the growing number of 2K and 4K security cameras available on the market. While the footage is usable and clear enough to identify activity around a yard, garage, or living room, finer details can look soft or grainy, especially at night, and faces and objects become less defined at longer distances. None of this makes the system unusable, but buyers expecting razor-sharp footage may want to spend more on a higher-resolution system like the EufyCam S4. Still, for under $200, this kit gives you four weatherproof cameras, local storage, solid battery life, and a polished app experience without locking core features behind a subscription. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $229.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $319.99 (List Price $349.00) Shark AV2501AE AI XL Hepa- Safe Self-Emptying Base Robot Vacuum — $299.99 (List Price $649.99) Dell 15 DC15250 (Intel Core i7 13th Gen, 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, Touch Display) — $599.99 (List Price $839.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

This week in search I covered, yep, heated Google search ranking volatility kicking in the middle of this week. Google updated its spam policies to say it also applies to Google's AI responses in Search. Google Discover...View the full article

Over the past few decades, “functional” fitness has been seen as everything from a niche practice, to a trend, to a joke. The styles of training that call themselves “functional” vary as well, from bodyweight exercises to Hyrox training. So what is functional fitness really? Functional fitness is more a buzzword than a style of trainingIf you ask somebody who coaches functional fitness, they’ll probably tell you that it’s about doing exercises that will help you in everyday life. Maybe that means doing farmer’s walks with heavy dumbbells so that you’ll be strong enough to carry all the groceries in one trip. Maybe it’s doing hundreds of air squats so you can bend down to pick up your kids. Maybe it’s balancing on a Bosu so you’ll be less likely to slip and fall on an icy sidewalk. Historian Conor Heffernan traces the roots of functional fitness to exercises that were prescribed for general health rather than specifically for strength or sports. Sometimes these would use unusual apparatus like pulleys and weighted balls or, today, battle ropes or suspension trainers. Today’s trainers often define functional fitness in opposition to what they think “regular” fitness is. For some, regular training means a lot of single-joint exercises like bicep curls, so they’ll program compound movements that involve the whole body. For others, regular training means you’re using heavy weights, so they consider functional training to be workouts that use light weights or only bodyweight. And for still others, regular training means doing sets and resting in between them, while functional training keeps you moving the whole time. In other words, “functional” can mean any type of exercise that your trainer prefers. Sometimes "functional fitness" is like a code wordJust when it looked like the functional fitness craze was dying down, it seems more and more gyms and trainers are picking the term back up. But this time, I think something specific is going on: “Functional” is code for “CrossFit-type exercise, but not the CrossFit brand.” CrossFit is a mix of barbell training, gymnastics and calisthenics moves, and cardio. Workouts may involve skill practice, strength training, and most famously timed “WODs” (workouts of the day) that require cardio fitness to power through. But the name CrossFit is trademarked, and it’s tied to a specific company, and that company has some unpleasant things in its history. What do you do if you like the style of workout but you don’t want to do CrossFit CrossFit? You call it something else. So when people do similar exercises as what you'd see in a CrossFit class, sometimes that gets called functional, whether it's being done for a real-life purpose or not. For example, Hyrox classes prepare you for a race, which isn't really functional; but you'll be doing wall balls and lunges and pushing a sled, which you could argue are functional exercises No exercise is non-functionalThe idea of training to be better at everyday life is not a bad one. We all need strength and mobility to exist as a human being without complaining about our knees and our backs all the time, and that goes double as we age. But do you need a specific type of exercise to do that? Not really. Plain old boring barbell squats might not be “functional” in some people’s eyes, but they still build a ton of leg strength to help you pick up your kids. Anything that improves some aspect of your fitness is going to be helpful to you in everyday life. If you want to take a lesson from the world of functional fitness, let it be that you’re not limited to any stereotype of fitness. Balance training can be fun and helpful; so can grip training, and core training, and interval cardio training, and all kinds of things you might not normally think to do in the gym. Learning new skills is an exercise for your brain, as well as your body, and it’s a worthwhile one, too—even if you’ll never find a “functional” use for something like handstand pushups. View the full article

Google's John Mueller said, "The indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites." This means that Google needs to be more careful about who and what they accept through the Google indexing API.View the full article

The University of Chicago has announced a new initiative to provide financial support for students to attend the college for free. Starting in fall 2027, UChicago will offer free tuition for undergraduate students from families with an annual income less than $250,000. The private institution will also provide free tuition, fees, housing, and dining to students from families making less than $125,000. “At a time when many families are uncertain about what the cost of college means for them, we created this initiative to radically expand and simplify our support for students,” said James G. Nondorf, the school’s dean of admissions and financial aid, in a statement. “This initiative will increase predictability and allow students and their families to focus on what’s important: their love of learning, and preparation for meaningful and rewarding lives after graduation. Undergraduate tuition is $71,325 across the board for on-campus, commuter, and off-campus students. With food, housing, fees, and course materials included, it brings the estimated total of attendance to $98,301 for on-campus students. UChicago’s undergraduate students currently receive more than $225 million in annual financial aid, a figure that is expected to increase through this new initiative. This new aid structure supports students by building on the university’s commitment to provide those admitted with their financial needs fully met. UChicago says its core belief is that costs should not prevent a student from joining its academic community, the school shared in a news release. “By deepening our commitment to affordability, we are helping to ensure that the brightest minds can join us,” university president Paul Alivisatos said in a statement. Financial support arrives as cost of college increases UChicago’s free tuition initiative comes at a time when tuition costs for private institutions are rising. For the 2025-26 academic year, the average tuition and fees for full-time undergraduate students attending a private nonprofit four-year increased by $1,750 from the previous academic year, the College Board reports. Other private nonprofit colleges have similar financial support efforts as UChicago, including Northwestern University, which offers free tuition to most students from families making less than $150,000, and Yale University, which will offer free tuition to students from families making less than $200,000 for the 2026-27 academic year. Overall, it is true that the price of attending college has increased dramatically over the past decades—a fact recognized by private academic institutions through their financial aid initiatives. During the 2022-23 academic year, the average tuition and fees for a private four-year college was at its lowest since the 2015-16 academic year, at $43,940 (in 2025 dollars). That average cost now is $45,000 for the 2025-26 academic year. On the other hand, the tuition price for public colleges has declined since the 2022-23 academic year. In fact, tuition for full-time in-state students at a public four-year institution has continually declined from a peak in 2012 at $4,450 (in 2025 dollars) to an estimated $2,300 in the 2025-26 academic year. While we see private nonprofit tuition gradually rise, there are still affordable options to receive a college education at a public four-year and two-year institution. View the full article

Transactions relating to companies including Nvidia, Palantir, Paramount and Boeing listed in disclosuresView the full article

Google is testing showing a new icon in the autocomplete search suggestions, as you type your search. The icon has a magnifying glass with the Gemini logo on it. It suggests a longer query, a prompt, and when you click it, it takes you to Google Search but with the AI Overview response expanded and fully open.View the full article

Google updated the leading paragraph in the search spam policies to clarify that the policies apply to the Google Search AI responses, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode (or whatever else is AI-generated). Google said, "the Google Search spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Google Search."View the full article

The chair of the Federal Communications Commission on making the agency more ‘aggressive’, his fight with Disney — and playing golf with the presidentView the full article

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. When the software engineer and entrepreneur Deon Nicholas was CEO of Forethought, a customer service automation platform, he had an executive assistant to manage the minutiae of his workday. Not surprisingly, he appreciated the help. “That was something that I found was critical, something that actually helped me as a leader,” he explains. Few of us who aren’t in the executive suite have the luxury of calling on another person to wrangle our schedule, triage email, and otherwise keep the chaos of our professional and personal lives under control. As Nicholas contemplated the frenzy of excitement over AI agents, it occurred to him: Maybe AI was capable of democratizing the kind of assistance he’d found so valuable. “Having an AI executive assistant is actually the kind of thing that can bridge that gap for people to see what’s possible in agentic AI, and possibly impact billions and billions of people,” he says, listing “journalists, realtors, creators, artists, and athletes” among the possible users for such a product. Working with Volodymyr Lyubinets, his fellow cofounder at Forethought—which was acquired by Zendesk in March—he founded a company called Espa Labs to build it. Their startup’s offering, also called Espa, launched last week, starting at $25 a month or $240 a year, with a free one-week trial. Now, there’s nothing radical about the notion of using AI to automate everyday tasks and calling the results an “assistant.” Countless other products have done that, from Siri to OpenClaw. But having used Nicholas’s brainchild for a week, I’ve found it to be fresh, intriguing, and, most important, useful—and yes, it feels a little like having a trusty human helper on call. The first thing that surprised me about this app is that it isn’t an app. Once I’d connected Espa to Gmail and Google Calendar and answered a few questions about how I planned to use it, all of my interactions were via messaging—the iPhone’s iMessage in my case, though it also supports WhatsApp, Slack, and plain old text messages. That’s consistent with Nicholas’s goal of simulating the experience of communicating with a human assistant. But it also goes a long way toward addressing some of the frustrations of AI productivity in other forms. After all, in an app such as Gmail, AI feels glacial; by the time it’s complied with your requests, you may have lost interest. Integrations that let you access your email and other personal data inside chatbots don’t help much, in part because work stuff gets jumbled in with unrelated matters. Claude Cowork is neat, but when I tried using it to rig up something vaguely comparable to Espa, it was tougher than expected, and I still don’t have it working. With Espa, all of my conversations are in one place, in an iMessage thread. When it takes the service a minute or two to handle requests, it doesn’t feel unnatural, any more than when a human friend or colleague doesn’t respond instantly. The asynchronous nature of messaging is a feature, not a bug: I can ask Espa something, then bop off to a different app until a notification tells me it’s replied. What I did with Espa started out simple. I told it to send me a summary of my schedule each morning, along with updates on emails that looked like they might require action. It quickly saved my bacon by noticing an important calendar invite that I’d forgotten to accept. Encouraged by its attentiveness, I soon entrusted it with more complex jobs, such as weeding out duplicate appointments. In every instance it got what I was asking for and handled it with aplomb. Privacy and safety are understandable concerns when you entrust AI with your personal data. Espa isn’t as risky as tools such as Claude Cowork and OpenClaw, which run on your local computer, know how to operate a web browser on their own, and might have more access to your files and accounts than you realize. Espa, by contrast, is purely a cloud-based service and connected only to my Google account with my express permission. Its settings clearly list what it knows about you, and the actions it’s been programmed to perform on your behalf. I’m too much of a wuss to run OpenClaw, and appreciated Espa’s more locked-down nature. But for a service that’s unlikely to careen out of control, it’s more open-ended than you might expect. For example, it gamely complied with my request that it monitor my inbox for airline receipts, turn them into calendar items, and cc: my wife so she knows about travel plans. It responds well to feedback, such as when I told it to check with me before turning random emailed event solicitations into calendar items. Up until then, its eagerness to please had led to it adding a few before I’d confirmed I had any interest in them. Espa’s tendency to charge ahead is also reflected in its approach to email assistance. Along with assessing the gist of incoming messages and applying labels such as “Needs action” and “Needs reply,” it selectively drafts responses for my approval. If someone writes requesting a meeting, for instance, it might consult my calendar and dash off a brief message suggesting a few potential time slots, attempting to mimic my writing style. Ultimately, I didn’t send any of Espa’s proposed messages. No algorithm is well-equipped to contend with my particular inbox: The lot of a technology journalist is that pitches from PR people overwhelm everything else, and whether I’ll bite on one has little to do with how busy my schedule looks. Even if Espa were better able to channel my likely reaction, my gut tells me that emails meriting a response deserve one written by me. I did flirt with affixing a disclaimer to its messages, which it began adding at my request—“Note: This message was drafted by my AI assistant.” My reservations about sending AI-generated email might explain why I find Espa impressive but a trifle pricey. Additional features are “coming soon,” including the ability to give it access to Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Sheets; Docs and Sheets will be reserved for even pricier Pro-tier accounts. The more such integrations the service adds, the meatier its assistance will get. (People with paid Granola accounts can already have it tap into their notes.) Even as a first draft, Espa is too rich with possibilities to fully assess during its seven-day free trial period. After a week, you’d still be developing a working relationship with any human assistant, and the same is true for this digital one. I plan to spring for another month of service and figure out additional ways to throw my daily drudgery Espa’s way. If we truly mind-meld, its cost—which Nicholas points out is less than some people pay for Netflix—might start to feel downright reasonable. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly technology newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company If an obscure 1980s paradox is any guide, AI may be about to hit a huge tipping point Is AI finally finding its economic groove? Read More → Meta AI is coming to Threads, and some users aren’t thrilled Threads is testing a feature that lets users summon Meta AI into posts and replies for real-time context, though many users say they never asked for it. Read More → Can this Silicon Valley startup make autonomous fleets profitable? Aseon Labs wants to help AV fleets scale with automated service pods that charge, clean, and inspect cars without sending them back to faraway depots. Read More → Gantri just reinvented the wireless light. Now you can, too The lighting company is launching a series of new wireless lamps, and giving everyone else the chance to design their own via a new platform. Read More → The Demi Moore-AI debate is missing the point The backlash to the actress’s Cannes comments reveals how conversations about artificial intelligence keep collapsing into shallow pro- and anti-AI tribalism. Read More → The Internet Archive at 30: Can the web’s memory bank withstand the AI era? Three decades after Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive to preserve humanity’s digital record, the nonprofit behind the Wayback Machine is confronting AI scraping fears, antagonistic publishers, and rising storage costs that threaten the future of the open web. Read More → View the full article

Income tax is a vital aspect of your financial environment, affecting both individuals and businesses. It’s important to understand that income tax comes in various forms, including individual and business taxes, in addition to state and local variations. Each type has unique rules, rates, and potential deductions that can influence your financial decisions. Knowing how these factors work can help you make informed choices about your finances, but there’s much more to uncover about the specifics and implications of income tax. Key Takeaways Income tax is a government-imposed tax on individual and business earnings, funding essential government services and programs. The federal income tax system is progressive, with rates ranging from 10% to 37% based on income levels. Taxable income includes wages, salaries, business earnings, and capital gains, while adjustments and deductions determine Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). Individuals can choose between standard deductions or itemized deductions, which reduce taxable income and ultimately lower tax liability. Business income tax applies to corporate profits, while state and local taxes vary, with some states having no personal income tax. What Is Income Tax? Income tax is a fundamental financial obligation that individuals and businesses must meet, acting as a crucial source of funding for government services and programs. To define income tax, it’s a government-imposed tax on the income earned by individuals and businesses. In the U.S., the federal income tax system is progressive, meaning higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, with rates currently ranging from 10% to 37% for 2023 and 2024. Individual income tax applies to various income forms, including wages, salaries, commissions, and investment earnings. Business income tax targets profits made by IRS and self-employed individuals. Taxpayers can take advantage of exemptions and deductions to lower their taxable income, which may lead to potential savings on their overall tax obligations. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) oversees the collection of income taxes, enforcing tax laws and managing reportable taxable income. Key Takeaways When considering the nuances of income tax, it’s vital to grasp its progressive nature and how it impacts various taxpayers. Federal income taxation means higher earners face rates between 10% and 37%, based on income level and filing status. Comprehending the taxable income definition is fundamental, as this figure determines how much tax you owe after deductions are applied. Individual income tax applies to wages, salaries, and other income, whereas business income tax targets corporations and self-employed individuals. Tax deductions, like mortgage interest or medical expenses, lower your adjusted gross income (AGI), thereby reducing your overall tax liability. In addition, capital gains tax affects profits from investments, distinguishing between long-term and short-term gains. Finally, keep in mind that property taxes, based on real estate value, play a significant role in funding local public services. By grasping these core concepts, you can navigate your tax responsibilities more effectively. Understanding How Income Taxes Are Collected Comprehending how income taxes are collected involves recognizing the role of the IRS in managing tax laws and ensuring compliance. You’ll find that various income sources, like wages and investments, contribute to your taxable income, and your tax obligations can be influenced by deductions and credits. It’s essential to stay informed about these processes to accurately report your income and fulfill your tax responsibilities. IRS Collection Process The IRS collection process is fundamental for guaranteeing that federal income taxes are paid accurately and on time. This agency collects taxes from individuals and businesses who pay federal income tax based on various income sources like wages, salaries, and investments. For employees, the IRS manages withholding taxes directly from paychecks, whereas self-employed individuals must report and pay their taxes independently. Comprehending how tax works is critical for compliance, as the IRS employs audits and penalties to enforce tax laws. The funds collected support essential government programs, including Social Security and national defense. By following the IRS guidelines, you can avoid issues and ascertain that your tax obligations are met correctly and punctually. Taxable Income Sources Several different sources contribute to taxable income, which is crucial for determining how much you owe in federal income taxes. Taxable income meaning encompasses wages, salaries, commissions, and business earnings, along with investment profits. When you ask what’s considered taxable income, keep in mind that it includes individual income, capital gains from asset sales, and business income for self-employed individuals. The IRS collects income taxes on these various sources, calculating your taxable income by summing them up and adjusting for any deductions or exemptions, leading to your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). In the U.S., individual income tax rates are progressive, so higher earners face increased percentages, whereas some states, like Texas and Florida, impose no state income tax at all. Deductions and Credits Impact When maneuvering through the intricacies of income taxes, it’s vital to understand how deductions and credits can greatly impact your overall tax liability. Deductions reduce your adjusted gross income (AGI), which lowers your taxable income, potentially saving you money. You can choose between itemizing deductions—like medical expenses and mortgage interest—or taking the standard deduction, which is $13,850 for single filers in 2023. Tax credits, in contrast, directly reduce the amount you owe, with refundable credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) possibly giving you a refund if they exceed your liability. Knowing the differences between deductions and tax credits is important for effective tax planning and maximizing your savings based on your income level. The Evolution of Income Tax in the U.S The evolution of income tax in the U.S. reflects significant historical milestones that have shaped the tax system you know today. Initially imposed in 1862 to fund the Civil War, income tax saw a temporary repeal, but it was reinstated in 1913 with the Revenue Act, introducing the progressive tax system we still use. As tax rates have adjusted over the years, ranging from 1% to 37%, this system has aimed to balance economic needs and social equity, impacting millions of taxpayers. Historical Tax Milestones Although many may not realize it, the evolution of income tax in the United States reflects significant historical and economic changes. The federal income tax history began with the first tax enacted in 1862 to fund the Civil War but was repealed in 1872. It wasn’t until the Revenue Act of 1913 that income tax returned, introducing Form 1040 and a progressive tax system. Since then, tax rates have shifted dramatically, with current rates for 2023 and 2024 ranging from 10% to 37%. The 1960s likewise saw the introduction of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to guarantee high-income earners pay a minimum tax. Year Event Impact 1862 First income tax enacted Funded Civil War 1872 Repeal of the income tax Tax abolished 1913 Revenue Act reintroduces income tax Introduced Form 1040 1960s Alternative Minimum Tax introduced Guaranteed minimum tax for wealthy Progressive Tax System Building on the historical context of income tax in the U.S., the progressive tax system has become a fundamental aspect of how taxes are levied today. Under this system, individuals pay higher tax rates as their income increases, with federal income tax rates ranging from 10% to 37% for the tax years 2023 and 2024. Initially introduced in 1862 to fund the Civil War, income tax evolved considerably, especially with the Revenue Act of 1913, which established the use of Form 1040 for reporting income. The progressive income tax structure reflects the principle of ability-to-pay, ensuring that higher earners contribute a larger percentage. Furthermore, various exemptions, deductions, and credits have shaped this system, offering potential tax savings for individuals. Exploring Different Types of Income Tax Comprehending the various types of income tax is crucial for traversing the financial terrain, as each category impacts individuals and businesses differently. Grasping the income tax definition helps you navigate your obligations, whether you’re a wage earner or a business owner. Here’s a breakdown of key types: Individual income tax: Levied on wages and salaries, featuring a progressive tax system from 10% to 37%. Business income tax: Applied to corporate profits and self-employed income after deducting expenses. State and local taxes: Vary greatly; some states, like Texas and Florida, have no income tax at all. Capital gains tax: Imposed on profits from investments, with long-term gains taxed at lower rates based on your income bracket. Grasping these types aids in comprehending how federal taxes apply to your specific situation and minimizes your overall tax liability. Individual Income Tax When it pertains to individual income tax, comprehension of how your tax is calculated is crucial. You’ll need to take into account your filing status, which can considerably impact your tax rate and eligibility for deductions and exemptions. Tax Calculation Methods Comprehension of how to calculate your individual income tax can greatly influence your financial planning. To start, you need to define taxable income, which is derived from your total income after applying necessary deductions to your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). Here’s how it’s typically calculated: Determine total income, including wages, salaries, and dividends. Adjust your income to find your AGI. Apply deductions (standard or itemized) to arrive at your taxable income. Use the progressive tax rates (10% to 37% for 2023 and 2024) to calculate your tax liability. Deductions and Exemptions Grasping the deductions and exemptions available to you is vital for minimizing your tax liability. Deductions lower your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) to determine your taxable income formula. You can choose between itemizing deductions or taking the standard deduction, which is $13,850 for single filers and $27,700 for married couples filing jointly in 2023. Itemized deductions may include mortgage interest, state taxes, charitable contributions, and medical expenses, but only if they exceed the standard deduction threshold. Even though tax exemptions were previously available to reduce taxable income by a fixed amount for yourself and dependents, they’ve been suspended until 2026. Comprehending these options is fundamental to optimize your tax planning and reduce your overall tax liability effectively. Filing Status Impact Comprehending your filing status is a key component of your tax strategy, impacting not just your tax rates but likewise the deductions and credits available to you. Your filing status determines your taxable income and the standard deduction you can claim. Here are some important points to take into account: Five filing statuses exist: Single, Married Filing Jointly, Married Filing Separately, Head of Household, and Qualifying Widow(er). Standard deduction for 2023 is $13,850 for Single and $27,700 for Married Filing Jointly. Tax brackets vary; for instance, the 12% bracket for Single filers spans $11,001 to $44,725. Head of Household offers a higher standard deduction and lower rates compared to Single filers, enhancing your tax benefits. Business Income Tax Comprehending business income tax is essential for anyone involved in managing or owning a corporation. This tax, known as corporate income tax, is levied on the profits of C corporations, calculated after deducting allowable business expenses. Currently, the federal corporate income tax rate in the U.S. stands at 21%, a reduction enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Unlike C corporations, pass-through entities such as S corporations and partnerships report income on their owners’ personal tax returns, thereby avoiding double taxation. Furthermore, the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) imposes a 15% minimum tax on corporations with average annual financial statement income exceeding $1 billion, ensuring that larger corporations contribute a baseline level of tax. To minimize tax liability, businesses can take advantage of various deductions, including operating expenses and depreciation, thereby lowering their taxable income effectively. State and Local Income Tax Have you ever wondered how state and local income taxes impact your overall tax burden? These taxes are additional levies that individual states and municipalities impose, and they can greatly affect your finances. Most states charge a state income tax, whereas some, like Florida and Texas, don’t impose any at all. Here are some key points to take into account: State income tax rates can range from about 1% to over 13%. Local income taxes typically apply to both residents and non-residents working in the area, with rates between 0.5% and 4%. Some states offer credits for taxes paid to other jurisdictions to avoid double taxation. Revenues from state and local income taxes fund vital services like education, public safety, and infrastructure. Understanding these taxes is important, as they play a major role in your overall tax obligations and the services you rely on daily. What Percent of Income Is Taxed? How much of your income actually gets taxed? Comprehending what federal taxation is vital for grasping how much you’ll pay. In the U.S., federal income tax rates for 2023 and 2024 range from 10% to 37%, depending on your income level and filing status. Higher earners face higher rates because of the progressive tax system, meaning your income is taxed at increasing rates as it rises through various brackets. For instance, a single filer with a taxable income of $50,000 pays a lower effective rate than someone earning $200,000, although both owe federal tax. Furthermore, payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare, total 15.3% of wages, shared between employers and employees. Regarding investments, capital gains taxes can vary from 0% to 20%, depending on how long you’ve held the asset. To determine your taxable income, simply subtract deductions from your total income. How Can I Calculate Income Tax? Wondering how to calculate your income tax? Start by determining your total income, which includes wages, salaries, and any other taxable earnings. Here’s a simple process to follow: Adjust your total income with above-the-line deductions to find your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). Subtract either the standard deduction or your itemized deductions from your AGI to figure your taxable income. Apply the federal marginal tax rates, ranging from 10% to 37%, to your taxable income to calculate your gross tax liability. Account for tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, to determine what’s income tax paid or your potential refund. Which States Have No Income Tax? Are you curious about which states in the U.S. don’t impose an income tax? As of 2023, nine states fit this description: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Although these states don’t levy a personal income tax on wages and salaries, New Hampshire and Tennessee do tax interest and dividends. To understand how to find taxable income, you need to know what amount of income is taxable, as these states often rely on sales and property taxes to fund public services. The absence of personal income tax can attract new residents and businesses, encouraging economic growth and job creation. Nevertheless, be aware that this lack of tax revenue can lead to higher sales tax rates in these areas. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the Three Main Types of Income Taxes? The three main types of income taxes you’ll encounter are individual income tax, corporate income tax, and payroll tax. Individual income tax is based on earnings and varies by income level, whereas corporate income tax applies to company profits. Payroll tax, conversely, funds Social Security and Medicare, affecting all wage earners. Each tax type plays an essential role in government revenue and impacts financial decisions for individuals and businesses alike. What Are the 7 Types of Taxes With Examples? There are seven main types of taxes you might encounter: Individual Income Tax, which taxes your earnings; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nOdI0UlEYo Corporate Income Tax on business profits; Payroll Taxes for Social Security and Medicare; Property Taxes based on real estate value; Sales Taxes on purchases; Excise Taxes on specific goods like alcohol; and Capital Gains Taxes on profits from asset sales. Each type serves a unique purpose in funding government services and infrastructure. How Much Do You Pay in Federal Taxes if You Make $100,000 a Year? If you earn $100,000 in 2023, you’ll likely owe around $16,712 in federal income taxes before applying deductions and credits. Your effective tax rate is roughly 17%. The tax system is progressive; you’ll pay 10% on the first $11,000, 12% on the next $33,725, 22% on income up to $95,375, and 24% on the remaining amount. Deductions like the standard deduction could lower your taxable income, affecting your final tax liability. What Are the 4 Types of Income? The four types of income you should know are earned income, unearned income, capital gains, and passive income. Earned income includes wages and salaries from work. Unearned income comes from investments like interest and dividends. Capital gains arise when you sell assets for a profit, whereas passive income is generated from ventures where you’re not actively involved, such as rental properties. Each type has different tax implications that can affect your overall financial situation. Conclusion In conclusion, grasping income tax is vital for proper financial planning. By familiarizing yourself with the different types of income tax—individual, business, and state/local—you can make informed decisions. Remember, tax rates and rules vary greatly by jurisdiction, so knowing how to calculate your tax liability and exploring states with no income tax can additionally be beneficial. Staying informed about these aspects helps you navigate the intricacies of income tax more effectively and guarantees compliance with regulations. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Understanding Income Tax and Its Types" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Google Ads is testing a new "Create video" beta feature that has the Gemini logo next to it. So this feature uses Gemini, Google's AI, to create the video for you for your Demand Gen campaigns.View the full article

Market concentration means the majority of equities have room to riseView the full article

Airports around the world tend to fall somewhere between the beautifully designed and artfully efficient (think Changi, in Singapore) and the messy and chaotic (sorry, Newark Liberty). But a newly redesigned airport in Noto, Japan, a seaside town 300 miles northwest of Tokyo, offers another option with its whimsically themed Pokémon attraction. From July 7 of this year through September 2029, the hub will be known as the “Noto Satoyama Pokémon With You Airport.” The interiors will be adorned with murals, illustrations, and sculptural installations of the media franchise’s adorable and beloved characters. The hope is that the playful redesign will boost tourism to the region. Pokémon urbanism to the rescue. The redesign is a partnership with Pokémon With You Foundation, an organization formed in 2011 in the wake of a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan—the largest in the country’s history. Since then the organization has supported disaster preparation and recovery efforts throughout Japan. Located in the country’s Hōsu District in the Ishikawa Prefecture, Noto, Japan, experienced a devastating earthquake in 2024. The 7.6 magnitude quake caused extensive damage in the tourism-dependent region and closed the local airport. While some activity has returned, the region is still recovering. Projects like the branded airport aim to assist with recovery efforts. The Noto redesign involves placing Pokémon characters pretty much anywhere there’s a blank surface. A staircase features a mural of the natural scenery of the region filled with the creatures. A two-story atrium becomes a menagerie where fans of the franchise can try to spot their favorite characters. Pokémon decorations will appear on entrances and exits, the boarding bridges connecting the airport with the planes, and even information signs. The Pokémon With You Foundation also redrew the airport’s logo, depicting a smiling, waving Pikachu riding on top of a cartoon airplane. And for those wishing to take home a memory of their Pokémon-themed visit, original and exclusive merch will be available for purchase throughout the airport, including a range of T-shirts, keychains, luggage tags, and totes. While the Noto airport will be the first in the world to carry the Pokémon name, it’s not the only attempt to use the media franchise to draw visitors to the region. Take a recent project in Wakura Onsen, a resort town on the Noto Peninsula. There, a Pokémon-themed hot spring footbath that opened earlier this year boasts Pokémon statues and artwork. While the airport’s official opening is several weeks away, it’s clear from online commentary that people are already thrilled by the project’s creativity. “Japan turning a quiet regional airport into Pokémon central for three years. Noto’s already got that Pikachu statue; this’ll pull in fans and boost the local economy big time,” a user posted on X. Another posted, “Japan looked at the rest of the world building AI data centers and said ‘that’s cute, we’re building a Pikachu airport.’ Honestly this is the most important infrastructure project of 2026 and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.” View the full article

One of the most iconic features in Washington, D.C., is facing a major change. Last month, President Donald The President announced plans to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue.” At 2,030 feet long and 170 feet wide, the iconic pool has historically featured an achromatic basin, allowing for the water to serve as a mirror to its surroundings. The president’s proposal will alter the look and meaning of the historic monument. In response, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit focused on preserving landscape heritage, is suing the The President administration. In the lawsuit announced on May 11, the foundation claims the “application of blue paint to the basin of [the] Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is being done in violation of federal law.” The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, as well as other structures on the National Mall, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which gives them specific legal protections. Any proposed change, including modifying the pool basin’s color, is subject to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which mandates consulting with stakeholders and the public before proceeding. “These are the legal ways to avoid, minimize, and mitigate any adverse effects,” Charles A. Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, tells Fast Company. “The government is not doing that.” With the lawsuit, filed against the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, the organization seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to stop the work, which is already underway. To be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, a space must fit specific criteria, including nonphysical attributes like feeling and cultural association. Birnbaum says changing the reflecting pool’s color impacts the qualities that helped it land on the list in the first place. The Washington Post “The reality is that to change the color [and] to change the reflectivity changes the materiality, it changes the craftsmanship, and it certainly alters the feeling,” Birnbaum says. In a separate statement Birnbaum added, “A blue-tinted basin is more appropriate to a resort or theme park.” This is not The President’s first Section 106 violation. Similar controversy exists around proposed changes to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which he wants to repaint, and the construction of a massive state ballroom, for which the East Wing of the White House was already demolished. The President also had the White House Rose Garden paved over and is forging ahead with vanity projects like the Triumphal Arch. The legal action is just one of many taken by the Cultural Landscape Foundation and other organizations seeking accountability and due process for changes to the built environment. Birnbaum contends that the landscape foundation is proceeding “because [the] law should be followed.” View the full article

Google is now showing directly hotel booking links directly inside the AI-generated responses within AI Mode. This can lead to sending hotels direct traffic in the AI response, which seems like a win to me. View the full article

In this era of AI-powered rapid change, what defines innovation at the world’s most cutting-edge companies? Fast Company’s executive editor, Amy Farley, and editorial director, Jill Bernstein, two architects of the annual Most Innovative Companies list, take you inside the ideas and approaches that earned MIC recognition for 2026. In this interactive session, they break down the trends behind this year’s most forward-thinking organizations and share practical strategies that leaders at all levels can apply right now. Whether you’re refining your roadmap or scanning the horizon for what’s next, you’ll gain actionable insights and valuable new perspectives. View the full article

Labour set to approve Greater Manchester mayor standing in MakerfieldView the full article

Most teams respond to communication problems by adding more meetings. Another weekly check-in to keep everyone aligned. Another “quick sync” because the email thread got messy. Another call because half the team left the last one with different interpretations of what had just been decided. The meeting load grows. The communication problem stays. That is because what looks like a communication problem is usually something deeper. It shows up as surprises that should not have been surprises. As decisions relitigated by people who were never comfortable with the outcome. As confusion about who owns what. As uncertainty that everyone feels and nobody names. In other words, the issue is not that teams are failing to talk. It is that they lack shared habits for how information moves, how decisions get made, and what people say when the picture is still incomplete. Here are five ways to fix team communication without filling the calendar even further. 1. Share your work before it’s finished Most communication breakdowns are really visibility breakdowns. Teams often share work too late. Updates move in one direction, and by the time anyone sees what is happening, the key choices are already locked in. That is when people start asking for extra meetings, not because they love meetings, but because they are trying to get access to the thinking after the fact. A better move is to make the work visible while it is still in progress. Instead of briefing people on decisions already made, create visibility into drafts, open questions, and early thinking while there is still time to shape the outcome. I worked with a team that moved project documents into a shared digital space. Status-check conversations dropped. Junior team members started getting substantive feedback earlier, when there was still time to act on it. What changed was not the amount of communication. It was the timing of it. Key takeaway: Aim for frequent, in-progress updates over fewer grand reveals. 2. Give the back channel conversation somewhere to go If the honest conversation only happens after the meeting, your team has a communication problem. Most teams run two conversations in parallel: the official one in the room, and the honest one in side texts, hallway conversations, and one-on-one cleanup afterward. That is where people say what they actually think, test whether others are seeing the same problem, and try to repair what the meeting failed to address. It is also where teams lose enormous amounts of time. The answer is not to add another meeting (or rather a bunch of side meetings). It is to replace superficial discussion with a structured moment for the real conversation. A simple debrief can do that. Ask three questions: What’s working? Where are we getting stuck? What should we do differently next time? The point is not to relive the meeting. It is to say, in one shared setting, what would otherwise get spread across five private conversations. My own team uses retrospectives after difficult client moments, structural changes, and any stretch where the back channel starts getting louder than the official channel. Patterns that would have been whispered in one-on-ones get named in the room instead. And when that happens, the cleanup communication starts to shrink. You spend less time processing the meeting after the meeting because the real issue has already been discussed. Key takeaway: Do not add a debrief on top of a shallow meeting. Replace the shallow meeting with a conversation that can actually hold what the team needs to say. 3. Say what you know, what you don’t, and what you’re doing next Silence is rarely neutral on a team. It is usually interpreted as avoidance. Leaders often wait for certainty before they communicate. The result is not calm. It is rumor, anxiety, and a flood of side conversations trying to fill the vacuum. The better approach is candid communication: say what you know, what you do not yet know, and what happens next. That gives people orientation without pretending certainty that does not exist. I have seen leaders withhold difficult information because they thought they were protecting their teams. Usually they were just eroding credibility. When the news finally landed, people did not feel protected. They felt blindsided. Key takeaway: Teams do not need false confidence. They need honest orientation. 4. Get clear about decision rights A surprising amount of team communication is really decision confusion in disguise. When nobody knows who gets to decide, teams start compensating with volume. More people get invited to weigh in. More meetings get scheduled to “align.” More follow-up messages get sent to explain, soften, or reopen what should have been a straightforward call. The team tells itself this is good communication. Often it is just unclear decision-making generating extra noise. A better move is to get explicit about three roles: who decides, who advises, and who simply needs visibility once the call is made. Those are all forms of inclusion, but they are not the same thing. When teams blur them together, they create false consensus-seeking: long discussions designed less to improve the decision than to make sure nobody feels left out of it. I have seen teams dramatically reduce communication drag once they clarified decision rights. The right people weighed in earlier. Fewer people had to be in every meeting. And decisions stopped ricocheting through Slack, email, and one-on-one follow-ups because everyone understood the process from the start. Key takeaway: Better communication does not mean involving everyone in every decision. It means being clear about who decides, who advises, and who needs to be kept informed. 5. Build a reliable rhythm When everything feels urgent, teams start communicating in emergencies. Every new issue gets its own meeting. Every escalation becomes a fire drill. Calendars fill up not because the team has a rhythm, but because it has none. A reliable cadence breaks that pattern. When a team has a structured weekly rhythm, there is less need to scramble. People know when priorities will get set, when real work will move, and when emerging issues will have a place to land. I worked with a senior leader who resisted this immediately. Her calendar was already overloaded. “I don’t need more meetings,” she told us. “Why can’t we just talk about what I need when I need it?” But once her team settled into a rhythm, with one meeting to lock priorities and other sessions reserved for actual work, something shifted. She started dropping ideas into a team channel at all hours, trusting they would be picked up in the next structured moment. The cadence had not added more meetings. It had reduced them. Key takeaway: A steady rhythm reduces reactive communication because people know when work will move. Better team communication rarely comes from talking more. It comes from building cleaner agreements about how work becomes visible, how decisions move, and how uncertainty gets named. Teams that build those habits stop solving the same problems on repeat and reclaim the time they were spending in meetings. View the full article

Bitwarden, the maker of a popular free password manager and other security solutions, is quietly making changes. In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms. CFO Stephen Morrison also left Bitwarden in April, replaced by former InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Both Crandell and Morrison joined the company in 2019. Kyle Spearrin, who started Bitwarden as a fun hobby project in 2015, remains the company’s CTO. Meanwhile, Bitwarden has made some subtle tweaks to its website. The page for its personal password manager no longer includes the phrase “Always free.” Previously this appeared under the “Pick a plan” section partway down the page, but that section no longer mentions the free plan, though it remains available elsewhere on the page. Bitwarden made this change in mid-April, according to the Internet Archive. Bitwarden has also stopped listing “Inclusion” and “Transparency” as tentpole values on its careers page. The company has long defined its values with the acronym “GRIT,” which used to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.” After May 4, it changed the acronym to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.” The phrase “inclusive environment” still appears under a description of Gratitude, while “transparency” is mentioned under the Trust heading. They’re just no longer the focus. These changes arrive not long after Bitwarden doubled the price of its Premium password manager plan, from $10 to $20. When the company revealed these changes in February, it tucked them into a lengthier blog post about feature updates and opted not to immediately notify customers. Bitwarden is instead disclosing the price hikes in the reminder emails it sends 15 days ahead of each renewal. Bitwarden’s blog does not mention the leadership changes or new company values, and the company has not issued any news releases about them. The company has not yet responded to a request for comment. Who’s running Bitwarden now? On his LinkedIn page, Sullivan, Bitwarden’s new CEO, describes himself as having “robust experience in all facets of mergers and acquisitions, including direct experience with leading PE firms Hg, Vista Equity Partners, and TA Associates.” Indeed, Sullivan oversaw major infusions of private equity money into the previous two companies he led. Those included a $1 billion acquisition of cloud platform Acquia by Vista Equity Partners in 2019 and a $1 billion investment by Hg into financial reporting software maker Insightsoftware in 2021. Though he was active in posting news from Insightsoftware on his LinkedIn page, Sullivan hasn’t yet commented on his new job at LinkedIn. A message to Crandell, Bitwarden’s former CEO, has gone unanswered. Full circle In a 2024 interview with Fast Company, Spearrin, Bitwarden’s founder, said he started working on the password manager as a hobby. He wanted to learn about developing mobile apps and browser extensions, and was concerned that LogMeIn’s acquisition of LastPass, his preferred password manager, would lead to unwanted changes. (LogMeIn had previously killed off a free version of its remote desktop software.) When LogMeIn went on to impose new restrictions on the free version of LastPass—exactly as Spearrin and other users had feared—it led to a growth spurt for Bitwarden. Spearrin attributed many of Bitwarden’s subsequent spikes to further issues at LastPass, including a major security breach in 2022. As of two years ago, Bitwarden had 8.5 million users. “I can name a lot of episodes where, if you look at Bitwarden’s user growth on a line chart, you can probably pinpoint several of those episodes as being peaks,” Spearrin said. These days, Bitwarden’s personal password manager faces tougher competition, as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all built increasingly robust free password managers into their web browsers and operating systems. They’re also pushing to get rid of passwords altogether and put themselves in charge of password-less logins. While Bitwarden sells a Premium version to individuals, it has also relied on the free version to funnel customers toward its enterprise plans. The company has expanded into other security products as well, including a secrets manager for software developers. Despite those broader ambitions, Crandell said Bitwarden’s commitment to a robust free tier was ironclad. “That’s a firm commitment from the company,” he said in a 2024 interview. “Fully featured, free forever.” Hopefully, the latest changes at Bitwarden don’t reflect a change of heart. View the full article