Fox News AI Newsletter: Tech leaders' message to Biden

Women's basketball players at Columbia Bible College released a letter condemning an opposing program with a trans athlete for defamatory comments.

Over the past week, fires have ravaged greater Los Angeles, killing at least 10 people, destroying more than 10,000 buildings, scorching more than 35,000 acres, and forcing the evacuation of at least 180,000 residents. The dry Santa Ana winds continue to blow, threatening to spread the destruction further. As I write this, a backpack stuffed with mementos, documents, and a water bottle sits next to the front door of my West Los Angeles apartment.Commentators wasted no time trying to find a villain. Was it Mayor Karen Bass, who had left the city for Ghana before the fires began? Doubtful. What about budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department? In fact, its budget recently grew by $50 million. Was it a 2022 donation of firefighter boots and helmets to Ukraine? Water is in short supply, not uniforms.The real story of the wildfires isn’t about malice or incompetence. It’s about well-intentioned policies with unintended consequences.Take insurance—a trillion-dollar industry built to identify risks, particularly from disasters such as wildfires. Insurance companies communicate this risk to homeowners through higher premiums, providing them with useful information and incentives. People may think twice about moving to a fire-prone area if they see the danger reflected in a fee.[Read: The unfightable fire]But in 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, arbitrarily reducing rates by 20 percent and subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. Nobody likes high premiums, of course. But the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state’s most dangerous areas. And they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire-resistant roofs and siding materials.Decades of worsening climate risk alongside suppressed premiums have prompted many insurers to drop coverage altogether. Just last summer, State Farm dropped 1,600 home-insurance plans in Pacific Palisades. Earlier this week, most of the neighborhood was burning.Many Californians in high-risk areas have been forced to depend on the California FAIR Plan—a public insurer of last resort. In 2023, the plan covered an estimated $284 billion in home value. In 2024, that exposure increased by 61 percent. Within the next few years, California taxpayers could be on the hook for more than a trillion dollars. The state insurance commissioner is scrambling to bring insurers back. But it may be too little, too late.Artificially low premiums have also spurred new housing production in fire-prone regions on the edges of cities like Los Angeles. From 1990 to 2020, California built nearly 1.5 million homes in the wildlife-urban interface, putting millions of residents in the path of wildfires. Policy didn’t just pull Californians into dangerous areas. It also pushed them out of safer ones. Over the past 70 years, zoning has made housing expensive and difficult to build in cities, which are generally more resilient to climate change than any other part of the state.The classic urban neighborhood in America—carefully maintained park, interconnected street grid, masonry-clad shops and apartments—is perhaps the most wildfire-resistant pattern of growth. By contrast, the modern American suburb—think stick-frame homes along cul-de-sacs that bump up against unmaintained natural lands—may be the least. Several of L.A.’s hardest-hit neighborhoods resemble this model.Infill townhouses, apartments, and shops could help keep Californians out of harm’s way, but they are illegal to build in most California neighborhoods. And even where new infill housing is allowed, it is often subject to lengthy environmental reviews, which NIMBYs easily weaponize. And if you want to build anywhere near the coast—the only part of greater Los Angeles not currently under a red-flag warning—prepare for months of added delays.[Read: When the flames come for you]In fairness, the state has made some progress. In 2008, California lawmakers passed S.B. 375, which directs planning agencies to reform land-use and transportation policy in order to facilitate housing production in long-settled areas. But this remains purely advisory—yet another plan on a shelf, in a state with too many plans and too little implementation.In recent years, Los Angeles has also taken steps to fix itself. Thanks in part to state lawmakers and a rising local YIMBY movement, building homes in existing neighborhoods has been somewhat streamlined. But reform isn’t going to get any easier. Our city started the week with a housing shortage in the hundreds of thousands. Now it’s ending the week with thousands of homes destroyed, and thousands of newly homeless families.Once the fires are out, California will need to build, fast. This disaster can teach it how, if policy makers will listen.

It began with millions of people across the U.S. shivering amid blizzard conditions, then catastrophe in California with the L.A. fires.

A new English course at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts takes a look at Taylor Swift's lyrics and compares them with poetry that's hundreds of years old.

A Politico columnist criticized President Biden for his Medal of Freedom recipients, which included liberal figures like Hillary Clinton and Georg Soros.

In the Spanish city of Barcelona, thousands of protestors took to the streets last year angry at the impact of millions of tourists on the lives of people who live there. But as the city also battles rising temperatures, Barcelona's mayor has turned those tourist numbers to the city's advantage in the fight against global warming.

Firefighters have taken the rare but not unusual move of scooping up ocean water to help battle the flames as wildfires rage across Southern California.

Gothamites weren't buying it.

Wilderado was formed in 2015, when frontman Max Rainer and guitarist Taylor Wimpee met at Baylor University. In the decade since, the band has recorded two albums and five EPs, and toured the world. This fall, they released "Talker," their second full-length studio collection, to rave reviews. Now, from their latest album "Talker," here is Wilderado with "Higher Than Most."

Wilderado was formed in 2015, when frontman Max Rainer and guitarist Taylor Wimpee met at Baylor University. In the decade since, the band has recorded two albums and five EPs, and toured the world. This fall, they released "Talker," their second full-length studio collection, to rave reviews. Now, from their latest album "Talker," here is Wilderado with "Talker."

Justin Kuritzkes is the screenwriter for "Queer" and "Challengers," two wildly different films that share plots featuring intense emotional journeys. Both films have garnered awards buzz and are Oscar hopefuls. Kuritzkes opened up to Dana Jacobson about what it's like seeing his work on the big screen after years as a playwright and author.

Wilderado was formed in 2015, when frontman Max Rainer and guitarist Taylor Wimpee met at Baylor University. In the decade since, the band has recorded two albums and five EPs, and toured the world. This fall, they released "Talker," their second full-length studio collection, to rave reviews. Now, from their latest album "Talker," here is Wilderado with "Favors."

Chef, cookbook author and restaurateur Michael Lomonaco has spent his almost 40-year career in the kitchens of top tier restaurants, including ones he developed himself. He's an old friend of "CBS Saturday Morning," and this week, Dana Jacobson and Michelle Miller joined him at his New York eatery Porterhouse to see what he's been up to lately.

Concern rises after positive cases found in wild birds and poultry in Delaware’s Kent County and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez may be tying the knot in Italy.

As commuters opt for public transit to avoid paying the $9 congestion zone toll, straphangers griped their trains were packed beyond compare last week.

There has been a reprieve from the strongest winds in southern California, but winds are expected to pick up later into tonight, raising the fire danger.

Matthew Livelsberger’s dramatic death at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas has spotlighted the Pentagon’s efforts to screen for and treat invisible injuries.

In 1967, Robby Krieger, the guitarist for legendary L.A. band The Doors, wrote the hit single "Light My Fire" in the living room of his parents' Pacific Palisades home.

The psycho who allegedly knifed a USPS worker to death over a line dispute at a Harlem deli earlier this month was caught on video brawling with a pair of men this summer.

Sam Moore, who was one half of the 1960s duo Sam & Dave and best known for his hit "Soul Man," has died. He was 89.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Some of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks will appear before the Senate next week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the tough questions that Democrats are promising.Meanwhile, as Senate confirmations loom, Trump has taken to criticizing U.S. allies including Canada, Panama, and Greenland. These comments may, in part, be an element of the president-elect’s strategy, Tom Nichols explained last night. “We’re talking about things that are never going to happen: We’re not going to war with Denmark over Greenland; we’re not going to seize the Panama Canal,” he said. “This whole strange foreign-policy fandango has kind of obliterated a lot of other discussions.”Ahead of his inauguration, Trump has also made many promises about how the government will work once he takes office for his second term. But, as panelists discussed, whether he will be able to deliver, and how his supporters and political opponents could react if he can’t produce his pledged results, remains to be seen.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS News Hour; Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Vivian Salama, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.Watch the full episode here.

Nearly 1,000 incarcerated firefighters are working to quell the blazes in Southern California, as part of a long-standing program.

After analyzing the devices, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded​ that both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash.

Police believe the maniac who fatally stabbed a 14-year-old boy is the same man who randomly slashed an innocent bystander in a Bronx subway station last weekend.

Altadena and north Pasadena has seen a new generation start new businesses and revive old ones.

Surgeon general's new warning about the connection between alcohol and cancer is time for us to better understand the threat. Sixty percent of Americans knew nothing about the danger.

Longtime journalist Fuzz Hogan was the first CNN staffer to take the stand in the high-stakes defamation case against the network brought by Zachary Young.

Prosecutors are seeking at 15-year sentence for disgraced former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who was convicted in a bribery case after a nine-week-long trial.

The nation’s universities, particularly so-called elite ones, are in crisis. Speakers are shouted down, professors are afraid of students, students can’t discuss certain topics, and nobody trusts the gowned “experts.” And that’s before Hamas’ attack on Israel revealed these bastions of progressive enlightenment to be the heart of antisemitism in America. Why is this happening?...

Neglect and mismanagement are at the roots of this disaster.

The debate over immigration in America has taken a strange turn recently. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer and a prolific spreader of dehumanizing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, finds himself defending an immigrant-visa program against his fellow right-wingers. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country, has taken to harshly criticizing the same program for undermining American workers. Odder still, the richest man on the planet and the senator who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist actually agree on what should be done to reform the program.The policy in question is the H-1B program, which allocates about 85,000 temporary visas every year to foreign workers who hold at least a bachelor’s degree and have expertise in a “specialty occupation,” such as engineering or information technology. The program is relatively small, but the debate around it could have deep implications for both major political parties. For Republicans, it is a harbinger of a looming intra-MAGA war over skilled immigration that might intensify when Trump enters office. For Democrats, it represents a key front in the fight over whether the party should turn in a nativist direction to repair its toxic brand on immigration. In both cases, the struggle is a preview of just how unpredictable the country’s immigration politics could be over the next four years.The debate began just before Christmas, when Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born former Twitter executive and a vocal supporter of skilled immigration, to be a senior AI-policy adviser in his incoming administration. Laura Loomer, the openly xenophobic MAGA influencer, criticized the decision on X and attacked Krishnan for his views on immigration. Other right-wing figures piled on. This prompted members of the tech right wing, most notably Musk, to defend both Krishnan and high-skilled immigration more broadly. The dispute quickly turned to the merits of the H-1B visa program, as the nativist right argued that the program was designed to replace American workers with foreign labor and the tech right countered that it is necessary to fill a shortage of highly skilled workers and help the U.S. compete with its rivals. “The ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking,” Musk posted on X. “There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation.” (The back-and-forth also featured less high-minded arguments. “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India,” Loomer posted on X. Indians make up more than 70 percent of H-1B holders.)[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]Eventually, Donald Trump weighed in on the side of Musk, claiming he’d always been supportive of the H-1B program. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told the New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” (In fact, Trump campaigned against H-1B at points in 2016, and he might have been mistakenly referring to his use of the H-2B visa program for lower-skilled immigrants who work on his properties.) Trump’s intervention caused the controversy to quiet down temporarily. Then an unexpected interlocutor entered the fray.“Billionaires like Elon Musk claim it is crucial to our economy,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the H-1B program. “They are dead wrong.” The Vermont senator went on to accuse H-1Bs of allowing wealthy corporations to enrich themselves by importing cheap labor (or, in Sanders’s phrasing, “indentured servants”) at the expense of native-born workers.Both Sanders and Musk turn out to have a point. Sanders is correct that the H-1B program has major flaws that are often exploited by corporations at the expense of workers. A 2021 analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, for instance, found that at least a quarter of H-1B visas are allocated to outsourcing firms, which use the program to import foreign workers, train them up while paying below-market wages, and ultimately return them to their home countries, where they can do the same work at a fraction of the cost. In one infamous case, tech workers at Disney were forced to train their replacements, H-1B visa holders who were subcontracted by an Indian firm, before being laid off.However, Musk is correct in the sense that most careful experimental studies on the program find that, overall, it has neutral or positive effects on the employment prospects and wages of native-born workers. Companies that receive H-1B visas tend to grow faster than companies that don’t—likely because many of them really are hiring foreign workers whose skills they need—and thus often end up employing more native workers overall. Employers receiving H-1B visas also tend to develop new products and technologies at higher rates, which helps create new jobs.Despite their sharply different takes on the merits of the H-1B program, Musk and Sanders endorse the same set of reforms to it: a combination of raising the salary floor for H-1B visa holders and raising the cost to companies for maintaining an H-1B visa, which together would make it more expensive for a company to hire foreign workers over domestic ones.But the fact that Musk and Sanders agree on solutions means very little about the prospects for reform, because the real conflict here is within the parties, not between them. This is especially true on the right, where the fight is over how the second Trump administration should approach skilled immigration. Trump was elected by a coalition that included Silicon Valley technologists, who tend to believe in immigration for skilled workers, and hard-core nativists, who believe that all immigration, at least from most non-European countries, is bad. Both sides will hold considerable power in the incoming administration; the tech right is represented most prominently by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy while the nativist right is represented by Stephen Miller, a longtime opponent of even skilled immigration. Miller shaped much of immigration policy during Trump’s first term, including multiple efforts to limit the H-1B program, and has been tapped for an even larger role in his second.[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]It’s impossible to know which faction will ultimately triumph in the second Trump administration. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has pointed out, although Trump has rhetorically endorsed Musk’s position on H-1Bs, he tends to defer to Miller on the substance of immigration policy. The current, mostly online spat over H-1B visas is likely a preview of a larger coming showdown between Miller and Musk. (Complicating matters further, Trump recently appointed Miller’s wife to staff the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Musk and Ramaswamy.)The left is engaged in a factional fight of its own. The Democratic Party’s approach to immigration is widely understood to have hurt its standing with working-class voters, including many Latinos. But a new politics of immigration has yet to emerge to take its place. Sanders’s criticism of the H-1B program suggests one direction the party could take: a return to old-school economic populism that portrays certain forms of immigration as a scheme perpetuated by corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of the American worker. Sanders embraced this position during his 2016 presidential campaign, at one point calling open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” that would “make everybody in America poorer.”Back then, Sanders’s immigration skepticism was met by widespread criticism from the left. Not this time. In fact, some of Sanders’s fellow Democrats have levied their own criticisms of the H-1B program. But the Sanders approach suffers from a glaring flaw: A large body of research shows that even low-skill immigration does not make native-born American workers worse off; high-skilled immigration almost certainly makes them better off. Claiming otherwise might be an effective way for Democratic politicians to win over immigration-skeptical voters. But in the long run, they might find out that false narratives about immigrants, once unleashed, are hard to control.

Two new studies suggest once again the importance of getting a good night's sleep for good health over a lifetime, as scientists pursue new understandings of restorative deep sleep.

ESPN's coverage of the Cotton Bowl included the airing of a prayer on the field before the game after a week of controversy for not airing the national anthem.

Anthony Liguori Jr. is known to the faithful as "Deacon Elvis" at Corpus Christi Church in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.

The devastating California wildfires moved into a fifth consecutive day on Saturday, with the number of people officially confirmed dead climbing to 11, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner said Friday.

A new book details comedian Josh Gad's rise to stardom.

Problems with fire hydrants raise questions about how prepared L.A. was for this week's wildfires.

Director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice claims to tell the tale of how Donald Trump became Donald Trump, and the result is a dull slog. The post ‘The Apprentice’ Review: Hating Trump Has Never Been So Tedious and Dull appeared first on Breitbart.

When President-elect Donald Trump takes office in nine days, it will be as the first president with a felony conviction on his record. A Manhattan judge formally sentenced him on Friday for falsifying business records. He could have received up to four years in prison, but the judge imposed an unconditional discharge, without jail time, fines or other penalties.

Greenland's leader Múte Egede said he was prepared to enter into negotiations with President-elect Trump on Friday about the future of the mineral-rich arctic territory

The charismatic figure known as Coach Mac died Friday night “after a courageous journey with dementia,” according to a family statement. His family announced in 2016 that he had been diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's.

The days when the Walt Disney Company churned out instant classics beloved by successive generations appear to be squarely behind it. The post Poll: Only 16 Percent of Americans Say Disney Content Is Better Than It Was in the Past appeared first on Breitbart.

He successfully appealed the sandwich firing in 2019, and briefly returned to the force before being fired again.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are being called by host of the podcast "Barely Filtered," Aurora Culpo, to resign amid raging California wildfires.

As New Orleans seeks to recover from the deadly, Islamic State-inspired truck attack, law enforcement and community leaders are confronting an existential question as old as the city's famed entertainment district: Can Bourbon Street be protected in a ...

It's an uncertain time in the electric vehicle market, but Hyundai Motors is preparing to release a highly anticipated new electric SUV. The company's global CEO opened up about the new vehicle and what 2025 might mean for the EV market.

Moscow's counterattack has left Ukrainian forces outstretched and demoralized, killing and wounding thousands and retaking more than 40% of the 380 square miles of Kursk Ukraine had seized.