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Jewish business owners reveal Cornell student's antisemitic job interview rejection

Gabe and Aiden Einhorn, co-founders of VryfID, discuss a Cornell student's antisemitic rejection of an internship. The brothers share their shock and motivation to expose rising antisemitism.

Jun 15 • 10:25 AM EDT • Business • foxnews.com

KC sports stars share mentorship moments with BBBSKC Littles

BBBSKC “Littles” interviewed local sports leaders about their careers and lessons learned from coaches and mentors, including sportsmanship, teamwork and resilience.

Jun 15 • 10:18 AM EDT • Sports • kctv5.com

Tyra Banks is taking Netflix to court

The model accused Netflix of deceptively editing her interview footage for the documentary "Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model."

Jun 15 • 1:45 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Ronald Araujo interview: ‘I needed help with my mental health. That’s why I decided to step away.’

The 27-year-old defender took a leave of absence from Barcelona last year. Now he's set for his first World Cup appearance

Jun 15 • 12:20 AM EDT • Health • nytimes.com

Stephen A. Smith on political future: I only want ‘the big job’

Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith laid out his political ambitions in a Sunday interview, saying he would only seek the presidency if he were to ever run for public office. “I’m not i…

Jun 14 • 12:32 PM EDT • Politics • thehill.com

Rayman Legends Retold interview: developer on origins, engine, new content, Kung Foot's big return, and more

If you somehow missed the news, Rayman is back – at least with a remake. Ubisoft has returned with a brand new take on the series’ most recent mainline release, Rayman Legends. It’s actually been thirteen years since we originally saw Rayman Legends. Ubisoft has now returned to this one with a full graphical overhaul that’s now in 3D /...

Jun 14 • 12:50 AM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Jennifer Lopez admits she 'would've had sex' with entire star-studded 90s movie cast

Jennifer Lopez made a NSFW confession about the 1993 movie "True Romance" cast during a podcast interview with "Office Romance" co-star Brett Goldstein.

Jun 13 • 6:12 PM EDT • Entertainment • foxnews.com

Dybala on his future: “I haven’t decided yet.”

Paulo Dybala spoke to Algarabía Deportiva, and the central topic of the interview was his future. The Argentine striker, whose contract with Roma expires at the end of the month, preferred not to rev...

Jun 13 • 9:15 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Melinda French Gates has ‘visceral reaction’ recalling ‘abhorrent’ Epstein in new interview

Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates are again reckoning with the Microsoft co-founder’s past ties to Jeffrey Epstein, with Gates testifying this week to Congress about their past interactions and his ex-wife newly opening up about her “visceral reaction” to the late convicted sex offender.

Jun 13 • 8:37 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

In Retrospect: Poland, Russia, Europe

In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish). Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context: Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism? Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged. JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom? AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care. I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature. JC: Which force do you find more powerful today? AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction. JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia. AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk. Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge. JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian? AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution. These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause) JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it. AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone. JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”? AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began. JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled? AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia. JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market. AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska. JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically? AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders. JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes? AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that. Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister. JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence? AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new. In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt. JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power? AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances. That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland. JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible? AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled. For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this. But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them. JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss? AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland. JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway? AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along. Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end. In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow. Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform. JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency? AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose. The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens. It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism. JC: MAGA grew on the internet? AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last. JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles? AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different. Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state. It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation. JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read? AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate? I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world. Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number: My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside. Buy Autocracy Inc Buy Iron Curtain Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Jun 13 • 4:15 AM EDT • Politics • anneapplebaum.substack.com

Progressive Talarico knifes Biden's open border, tries moderating stance on key issues in Texas Senate race

Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico flip-flopped on border security, gun control, and transgender issues during a podcast interview this week.

Jun 12 • 3:15 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

'Meet the Press' host Kristen Welker reveals what Trump told her after he stormed out of interview

'Meet the Press' host Kristen Welker reveals what Donald Trump told her the morning after he stormed out of their interview taped in Wisconsin on Sunday.

Jun 12 • 2:28 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Iowa politics: Watch KCCI's full sit-down interview with GOP gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn

KCCI's Amanda Rooker sat down with Republican gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn following his primary win June 2. Watch the full interview.

Jun 12 • 12:34 PM EDT • Politics • kcci.com

Ana Navarro revealed what she'll ask JD Vance in VP's upcoming 'View' interview

'The View' cohost Ana Navarro revealed what she wants to ask Vice President JD Vance when the controversial politician visits the talk show next week: 'Several issues,' Navarro explained.

Jun 12 • 8:23 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Apple Says Siri AI Won't Suck Up To You

In an interview, Apple’s SVP of engineering explains how the new Siri wasn’t designed to be sycophantic.

Jun 12 • 7:06 AM EDT • Technology • engadget.com

Apple's Craig Federighi: Siri Won't Be Your AI Girlfriend

Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak sat down for an interview with Mostly Human after during WWDC, discussing the iOS 27 Siri changes, Apple's take on AI, new child safety protections, and more. Apple set out to deliver an AI utility, not an AI companion. When asked whether users could create an AI boyfriend or girlfriend with the new Siri, Federighi said absolutely not.

Jun 11 • 6:26 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

One of fall's coolest games has been delayed to October to avoid a September crush

Last Sunday, a trailer that aired during an online Xbox event showed Valor Mortis, an upcoming action game that re-imagines the age of Napoleonic wars as a conflict with the plague-ridden undead. It’s a first-person game that mixes Dark Souls-style combat with parkour—it’s from the developers of the acclaimed, fast-paced cyberpunk wall-running Ghostrunner games—and a setting like nothing else that’s out there. Valor Mortis’ trailer concluded with a release date: September 24. But by the time it aired, the teams behind the game knew that was no longer Valor Mortis’ release date. Days ago, they’d learned the hard way that September 24 would be untenable and that they’d have to change it. Today, they’ve announced a new one, October 13, after speaking to Game File about getting out of the bind they recently found themselves in. “When we picked September 24th, it looked like a very, very clear date,” Blake Rochkind, head of publisher Lyrical Games, told me during an impromptu interview on Monday in Los Angeles. “Very quickly it became not such a clear date.” Lyrical and development studio One More Level had a feeling the deate might need to change, Rochkind recalled. But they had to lock in September 24 “many, many weeks” ago. Really, though, who could know if that was the right call when they made it? “There were so many unknowns,” Rochkind said. “This was before Sony State of Play, before Xbox Showcase, before Nintendo Direct, before Summer Games Fest.” Then on Tuesday, June 2, during a PlayStation showcase held just five days before their planned release date reveal, things changed. “As soon as Control announced September 24th, we knew we were moving the date.” It wasn’t just the PlayStation showcase reveal of the release date for Remedy’s upcoming third-person thriller. There were others. And changing their own trailer this close to its airing, Rochkind would later tell me, wasn’t possible.

Jun 11 • 11:01 AM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

The Rock talks politics, says Trump should 'sit down' with Springsteen

In a new Esquire interview, Dwayne Johnson touched on politics and said President Donald Trump and Bruce Springsteen \

Jun 11 • 9:53 AM EDT • Politics • usatoday.com

WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region

At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APHSAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities – reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action.Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% – over half – of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation – driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion – fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative – supported by the Gates Foundation and the Institute of Philanthropy – seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” ____________________For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int

Jun 10 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • who.int

Billy Ray Cyrus recalls sepsis health scare − 'My worst nightmare'

Billy Ray Cyrus opened up about overcoming his recent struggles, including a near-fatal bout of sepsis, in a new interview with People magazine.

Jun 10 • 5:07 PM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

Gears of War: E-Day – Everything We Learned Behind Closed Doors at Xbox

IGN interviews The Coalition to find out more on Xbox console exclusive Gears of War: E-Day.

Jun 10 • 11:00 AM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Exclusive: Vance welcomes Pope Leo's input amid Trump's feud with pontiff

Vice President JD Vance took a conciliatory approach to the Vatican in a USA TODAY interview after Trump sparred with Pope Leo over Iran.

Jun 9 • 12:02 PM EDT • Politics • usatoday.com

Jon Stewart Mocks Trump for Storming Out of ‘Meet the Press’ Interview

'The hissy fit of an incredibly fragile man-baby.'

Jun 9 • 9:15 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Interventional radiology training programs should return to in-person interviews, association says

“Interventional Radiology training inherently involves specialty-specific characteristics that make in-person interviews particularly valuable,” the APDIR contends.

Jun 9 • 2:51 AM EDT • Business • radiologybusiness.com

Scott Pelley sits down with The New York Times for his first interview since being fired from ‘60 Minutes’

Jun 8 • 3:52 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Trump quits NBC interview after pushback to claims

Trump made unfounded assertions of election fraud and incorrectly said he had never promised peace

Jun 8 • 10:48 AM EDT • Politics • theweek.com

Fact check: Trump told NBC that he never promised not to start a new war. He did, repeatedly

President Donald Trump told a bunch of lies before he abruptly walked out of an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” One of them was about what he had promised Americans about war.

Jun 8 • 9:51 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

US Offers Expedited Business, Tourist Visa Services for $750 Fee

The State Department will offer expedited interview appointments to business and tourist travelers to the US for a $750 fee beginning next month.

Jun 8 • 9:33 AM EDT • Business • news.bloomberglaw.com

DeVos Students Deliver Business Insight Across Great Lakes Bay Region and Beyond

Another strong fieldwork partner was United Bay Community Credit Union, which Shea said stood out because of its clear mission, active community presence, and deep commitment to the members it serves. “As students interviewed members, visited branches and engaged with UBCCU’s leadership team, they saw firsthand why people choose the credit union for their financial […]

Jun 8 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • northwood.edu

Trump repeats claim that California election was rigged

President posts screenshot on Truth Social attacking Californian election, after walking out of NBC interview after refusing to substantiate his claims of election rigging

Jun 8 • 7:53 AM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com

Trump’s NBC interview ends abruptly

Jun 8 • 6:39 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Out-of-contract Devlin expresses 'love' of Hearts

Cammy Devlin has stated "I absolutely love Hearts" as the Australia midfielder continues to ponder whether to extend his stay at Tynecastle. The 28-year-old, who was a late substitute in his country's 1-1 draw with Switzerland in their final pre-World Cup friendly on Sunday, is out of contract after five years with the Scottish Premiership club. Amid reports that Devlin has offers from clubs in Major League Soccer, the Turkish Super Lig and English Championship, he described Hearts as "an amazing football club" in an interview with Football360.

Jun 8 • 3:52 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Startup Stage: Bliink targets Southeast Asia's SME business travel market

The startup is building an AI-powered corporate travel platform designed to bring managed travel services to small and medium-sized enterprises across Southeast Asia.

Jun 8 • 12:00 AM EDT • Business • phocuswire.com

Trump walks out on 'Meet the Press' interview after clash with NBC journalist: 'I've had enough'

President Donald Trump did not take kindly to NBC's Kristen Welker bringing up the results of the 2020 election and walked out, ending the interview early.

Jun 7 • 3:16 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Trump walks out of ‘Meet the Press’ interview when challenged over false claims

When pressed by host Kristen Welker, the president cited no evidence for claims about Jan. 6 and elections he said were “rigged.”

Jun 7 • 2:15 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Spyro: A Realm Beyond Interview - A New Design, Full Flight, Tom Kenny Returns and More

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is a brand-new adventure from Toys For Bob, taking flight Spring 2027.

Jun 7 • 1:58 PM EDT • Technology • news.xbox.com

Trump Says He Never Promised No New Wars, Defends Compensation Fund

In a lengthy interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president again vowed that gas prices would go down when the war in Iran ends.

Jun 7 • 11:13 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Jim Courier’s tennis life, from the French Open to becoming a voice of the sport

Thirty-five years ago, Jim Courier was a terrified 20-year-old in his first major final. It turned into the start of the rest of his life.

Jun 7 • 5:01 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 11 June 2026 – At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APSHAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities - reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action. Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% - over half - of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation - driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion - fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative - supported by the Gates Foundation and Institute of Philanthropy - seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int

Jun 7 • 1:23 AM EDT • Health • who.int

Jimmy Fallon suddenly drops out of Madonna premiere interview for 'Confessions II'

Jimmy Fallon dropped out of a Madonna interview at the last minute, with Anderson Cooper filling in at the 'Confessions II' short film premiere in New York City.

Jun 6 • 12:25 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

New study casts doubt on reliability of mental health diagnosis interviews

Diagnostic interviews seen as ‘gold standard’ vary in reliability from condition to condition, study says

Jun 6 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • theguardian.com

E-bike safety; lung cancer treatment and prevention; keeping CMA Festival attendees safe; plus other stories with Vanderbilt Health sources

WKRN News 2 interviewed Jeffrey Upperman, MD, FACS, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatric Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, about e-bike related injuries following the recent death of a Brentwood High student and a proposal to require safety training before students could ride a bike on a school campus in Williamson County. Fabien Maldonado, MD, MSc,Professor of Medicine and Thoracic Surgery, was on WTVF News Channel 5‘s live studio show, “Openline,” with host Ben Hall, to discuss lung cancer, treatment and prevention. WSMV’s “Today In Nashville” program hosted Vanderbilt LifeFlight paramedic/flight nurse practitioner Tony Smith to talk about safety for the CMA Festival. The New York Times reporter Carl Zimmer interviewed James Crowe, MD, Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Antibody Therapeutics, for a story about the race to find vaccines and treatments as Ebola spreads. The Vanderbilt Health News release about the pilot clinical trial conducted by Vanderbilt Health and Cumberland Pharmaceuticals Inc., that confirms the safety of ifetroban and supports the further development of the drug to prevent cancer metastasis, was picked up by Reuters, Stock Titan,and others. Women We Admire has named Lee Ann Liska, President and Chief Operating Officer, to its list of top women leaders of Nashville for 2026. Radiology Business, Aunt Minnie, Bioengineer, and Imaging Technology News covered the study from Consuelo Wilkins, MD, MSCI, the Mildred Thornton Stahlman Professor in Rural Health and professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, that found Black and Hispanic people, while known to be far more apt to have dementia, are significantly less apt than other racial and ethnic groups to show Alzheimer’s pathology on brain scans. STAT News interviewed Deva Sharma, MD, Transfusion Medicine & Hematology-Oncology, for a story about more patients requesting unvaccinated blood and what it means for the medical system at large. Yahoo! Health reporter Korin Miller interviewed Gitanjali Srivastava, MD, Director of Obesity Medicine, for a story about how semaglutide and tirzepatide compare. William Schaffner, MD, Professor of Preventive Medicine, was quoted by several news outlets about public health issues, including: NBC News (new COVID vaccinations); Medscape (pneumonia and sepsis); and CNN (protection from contagious viruses). Shelbyville Times-Gazette is repurposing Jessica Pasley’s July 2025 Vanderbilt Health News story on tick-borne illnesses as a front-page story.

Jun 5 • 10:54 AM EDT • Health • news.vumc.org

The Business School At The Intersection Of AI & China

P&Q's exclusive interview with HKUST Business School's new dean, a Belgian psychologist who has led schools on 3 continents.

Jun 5 • 8:04 AM EDT • Business • poetsandquants.com

Conflict over identity politics could lead to civil war in the long term, Kemi Badenoch says

In an interview for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, England's Identity Crisis, the Conservative leader warned of rising tensions as groups on the left and the right.

Jun 4 • 5:48 PM EDT • Politics • bbc.com

‘The next China is still China’: McKinsey’s Joe Ngai and Nick Leung on why global business can’t write off the Chinese economy

“You can’t find another China. There’s no other China out there now," Greater China chair Joe Ngai says.

Jun 4 • 5:00 PM EDT • Business • fortune.com

KC window washer cleans small business windows for free, helps owners go viral on social media

Davis Roethler, the owner of Window Wolf, has been approaching small businesses in the Kansas City area, offering to clean their windows for free and then interviewing the owners on camera.

Jun 4 • 4:37 PM EDT • Business • kshb.com

Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior

The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing.

Jun 4 • 4:04 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Todd Blanche was ‘in charge’ of Epstein matter, Bondi told lawmakers, according to new transcript

Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, was responsible for overseeing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, former Attorney General Pam Bondi said during a closed-door interview with lawmakers last month.

Jun 4 • 4:00 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Ferrari unveils supercar-informed laptop that "transcends traditional boundaries of PC design"

Car brand Ferrari and technology brand HP have collaborated to design a laptop informed by the aesthetics and engineering of supercars.

Jun 4 • 11:01 AM EDT • Technology • dezeen.com

James Comey Interview: 'Justice Can't Be a Political Force'

James Comey, the former FBI director recently indicted by Donald Trump's Justice Department, sits for an in-depth interview with Rolling Stone.

Jun 4 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • rollingstone.com

Why David Brooks Is (Mostly) Done With Politics

The controversial columnist wants to contemplate weightier issues.

Jun 4 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonian.com

‘How can we fill that gap?’ Mental wellness advocate wants to help young adults turning to AI for mental health advice

Jun 3 • 1:59 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Bob Costas: Mike Tirico ‘aced’ being the face of NBC Sports

Bob Costas was once the face of NBC Sports, but Mike Tirico has thrived in the role since receiving the baton. Costas recently joined SiriusXM NBA Radio host David Shepard for an interview discussing the NBA Finals, the NBA on NBC, and his own media career among other topics. With the reboot season of the…

Jun 3 • 1:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How to evaluate risk when TAVR patients require surgery later in life

Robert Hawkins, MD, discussed an updated risk calculator—and the latest data on SAVR after TAVR—for a new video interview with Cardiovascular Business.

Jun 3 • 12:05 PM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com

Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow tear up over “Friends” and“ The Comeback” connection: 'S---!'

The real-life friends reunited on June 3 for the season 24 premiere of the "Variety" interview series Actors on Actors.

Jun 3 • 10:43 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Trump suggests he hasn’t dropped the ‘anti-weaponization’ fund

President Donald Trump suggested that he has not dropped the administration’s “anti-weaponization” fund, saying in an interview released Wednesday that people “should be reimbursed.”

Jun 3 • 10:13 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv

Trump Says Vance and Rubio Teaming up for 2028 Run Would Be Unbeatable

June 3 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald ⁠Trump ⁠said in a podcast ⁠interview aired on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Secretary of State Rubio, teaming up ‌for a 2028 presidential run, ‌would be unbeatable. Both men are seen as contenders ⁠for ⁠the 2028 Republican nomination, and ...

Jun 3 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • usnews.com

The number of Americans living without health insurance remained stable at 8%—before ACA subsidies expired

The data on medical coverage rates comes from the 2025 National Health Interview Survey, with data being released by the CDC twice a year. Numbers from last year show that 28 million people have no health insurance.

Jun 3 • 7:13 AM EDT • Health • healthexec.com

How Nespresso Builds Sustainability Into Its Business Model | MIT Sloan Management Review

Nespresso North America’s CEO explains how responsible agricultural practices help ensure coffee quality.

Jun 2 • 10:02 AM EDT • Business • sloanreview.mit.edu

Watch CNBC's full interview with Monumental Sports & Entertainment CEO Ted Leonsis

Ted Leonsis, Monumental Sports & Entertainment founder, chairman and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the 2026 NBA Finals, his thoughts on prediction markets, impact of AI on sports, state of ticket prices, and more.

Jun 2 • 9:09 AM EDT • Entertainment • cnbc.com

Why interviewing Anthony Joshua made me uncomfortable

COMMENT: Six months after the ex-heavyweight champion survived a car crash that killed two of his friends, he spoke to Alex Pattle and others about how he is coping – whether he wanted to or not

Jun 2 • 7:12 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Yan Diomande interview: On the World Cup with Cote d'Ivoire, his gratitude to RB Leipzig and trials with Crystal Palace

Jun 2 • 6:00 AM EDT • Sports • skysports.com

Enrique Riquelme confirms Raúl González as his sporting director

Real Madrid legend Raúl González will be the club’s sporting director if Enrique Riquelme wins the upcoming elections, said the candidate during an interview with Cadena SER. He is the right individual to lead a sports project such as the one approaching at Real Madrid. That would be Mr. Raúl González Blanco. If I become […]

Jun 2 • 2:21 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Inside Valley Politics: Complete breakdown of runoff elections, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez interview

RIO GRANDE VALLEY, Texas (ValleyCentral) — The matchups are set for the November general election. On May 26, Valley voters went to the polls to settle the runoff contests after the March primaries…

Jun 1 • 1:21 PM EDT • Politics • valleycentral.com

Introducing Shorts on the BBC Sport app

From stunning goals and shocking interviews to unforgettable celebrations, some sporting moments are made to be watched, not just read about - and that's why BBC Sport are launching Shorts.

Jun 1 • 12:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Jill Biden Defends Backing 2nd Term for Joe Biden: ‘Had to Be His Decision’

The former first lady also gave an update on the health of the 83-year-old former president after his prostate cancer diagnosis.

Jun 1 • 8:21 AM EDT • Health • today.com

Inside Texas Politics | Full interview on the future of City Hall with Tre Black

May 31 • 11:08 PM EDT • Politics • wfaa.com

Ex-Jill Biden spokesperson on why he thinks former first lady’s recent CBS interview has damaged her credibility

May 31 • 6:30 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Inside Texas Politics | Full interview with Abraham George

May 31 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • wfaa.com

Milan Superstar Bids Farewell: “I’ve Given Everything”

Rafael Leao is on the verge of leaving Milan after seven years, with the Portuguese winger bidding farewell to San Siro in his latest interview. Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, Leao confirmed his am...

May 31 • 6:40 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Baffling. Frustrating. Frightening. What it’s like to be sued over medical debt in Connecticut

Four in 10 US adults have medical or dental debt. CT Mirror and KFF Health News interviewed nearly 40 patients who were sued by providers.

May 31 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • ctmirror.org

Campbell County Health to host on-the-spot interview career fair next Saturday

GILLETTE, Wyo. — Campbell County Health (CCH) recently announced that it will host an on-the-spot interview career fair on Saturday, June 6 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the main hospital lobby. A release from CCH says the event is open to anyone interested in exploring career opportunities at Campbell County Health. Attendees will […]

May 30 • 5:18 PM EDT • Health • county17.com

'Stop Doing Stupid Things': Steve Hilton on His Surprisingly Strong Bid for California Governor

In a TIME interview, Hilton says California voters are ready for a Republican reset. But can he work with a Democratic state legislature?

May 30 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • time.com

EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Mayoral candidates discuss vision for Tyler ahead of runoff election

Blake Holland interviews Tyler mayoral runoff candidates John Nix and Stuart Hene in the debut episode of East Texas Politics on East Texas Now.

May 29 • 8:01 PM EDT • Politics • kltv.com

EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Mayoral candidates discuss vision for Tyler ahead of runoff election

Blake Holland interviews Tyler mayoral runoff candidates John Nix and Stuart Hene in the debut episode of East Texas Politics on East Texas Now. Pine Tree ISD superintendent Steve Clugston also discusses his run as a conservative independent for Texas Senate District 1.

May 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Politics • kltv.com

Antonio Villaraigosa explains why he should be California's next governor

Antonio Villaraigosa sat down for an interview with California Politics 360 for a wide-ranging conversation on his run to be the state's next governor.

May 29 • 7:15 PM EDT • Politics • kcra.com

Eagle business students shine at mock interview event

Morehead State University takes pride in helping Eagles soar after graduation by ensuring they have knowledge in the classroom and opportunities for real-world experience and career preparation. MSU business students with the Elmer R. Smith College of Business & Technology were able to display their preparedness for one of the key steps in the hiring process as they participated in a Mock Interview Event with hiring managers from across the region this spring. Hosted by MSU's Center for Career Development & Experiential Education and hosted by Instructor of Business Communication and Management Dr. Christy L. Trent (Class of 2006), the event allowed 33 undergraduate business students to sharpen their interviewing skills in a high-pressure situation. For more information, contact the Center for Career Development & Experiential Education at careerservices@moreheadstate.edu or 606-783-2233.

May 29 • 2:13 PM EDT • Business • moreheadstate.edu

Bondi defends DOJ’s handling of Epstein probe in long-sought interview on Capitol Hill

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi offered a robust defense of the Justice Department’s handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files as she arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning for a long-sought interview with the GOP-led House Oversight Committee.

May 29 • 10:03 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Pam Bondi will face a closed-door questioning from House lawmakers over the Epstein files

The transcribed Bondi interview will give lawmakers a chance to dig for information on the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files and other related matters, including the prison sentence of Epstein's former girlfriend and confidant, Ghislaine Maxwell.

May 29 • 8:53 AM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Stan Kroenke Is the Secretive Billionaire Who’s Conquering the World’s Richest Sports Leagues

Arsenal and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke, ‘Silent Stan,’ explains in a rare interview why his teams can’t stop winning. And this weekend, his North London soccer team aims to conquer Europe in the Champions League final.

May 29 • 5:30 AM EDT • Sports • wsj.com

Hochul on state budget, Pope Leo's AI policy and Knicks fandom

Gov. Kathy Hochul sat down with NY1 for a wide-ranging interview.

May 28 • 7:00 PM EDT • Politics • ny1.com

Key things to know ahead of Pam Bondi’s interview with House committee about her handling of the Epstein files

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi is set to give a closed-door interview Friday over her handling of the federal government’s investigation into the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

May 28 • 6:31 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Rivian says AI makes debate over CarPlay ‘completely obsolete’

Rivian’s software chief sat for a new interview after launching the company’s AI assistant, and said AI makes the CarPlay debate “obsolete.”

May 28 • 11:02 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5mac.com

The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past Is an Expansion, Not DLC, CD Projekt Insists While Using IGN Interview With Idris Elba to Make the Point

In the wake of the announcement of The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past, CD Projekt staff have taken to social media to insist it should be considered an expansion, rather than DLC — even using an IGN interview with Cyberpunk star Idris Elba to hammer home the point.

May 28 • 7:46 AM EDT • Technology • ign.com

After Rich Colleges Raid Basketball Team, School Exits D1 Sports

(Bloomberg) -- Saint Francis University was out of its league, and Father Malachi Van Tassell knew it.Most Read from BloombergSingapore Hands Byju's Founder His First Ever Jail TermIran’s Khamenei Says No Going Back for Middle East Rocked by WarTwo More Oil Supertankers Exit Hormuz to Help Push Up FlowsEx-President Biden Sues to Stop DOJ Sharing Interview Tapes‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Studio Draws Tencent Music InvestmentBigger, richer universities were raiding its men’s basketball team, luring away

May 28 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • finance.yahoo.com

Joan Baez Urges Modern Pop Stars to Speak Up About Politics

Joan Baez said she wishes younger artists would speak up about politics during a new interview on Julia Louis-Dreyfus' podcast.

May 28 • 3:45 AM EDT • Politics • rollingstone.com

Andrea Pirlo interview: Legendary Italy midfielder on PSG and how football has changed | 'You need players who are fast'

Ahead of the Champions League final, legendary midfielder Andrea Pirlo speaks to Sky Sports about what makes Paris Saint-Germain and their playmaker Vitinha so good, why Arsenal can still win in Budapest, and how football has changed since he retired...

May 28 • 3:30 AM EDT • Sports • skysports.com