James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in:

[click link below picture for interview, sond on]

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete interview [approx 1:53:00] (sound on, click play):

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

President Trump boarded Air Force One on July 8 as a ruse.

On the final day of the NATO summit in Turkey, Mr. Trump walked up the stairway to the plane that was supposed to carry him on the first leg of his journey home. He briefly waved to the cameras and disappeared inside one of the iconic, baby blue 747s that have served as Air Force One for decades. Then he secretly exited the aircraft, hidden inside a catering container.

Mr. Trump was next taken to a military jet for a clandestine flight out of Turkey. The 747, filled with journalists, White House officials, aides and others, took off despite what was deemed a credible threat from Iran against Air Force One.

It was an extraordinary subterfuge, aimed at protecting an American president who has been in Iran’s cross hairs for years.

The latest threat had emerged as Mr. Trump began his final day in Turkey. According to two officials with knowledge of the threat, U.S. intelligence picked up multiple streams of information overnight: that the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying, including which floor, and that someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile.

U.S. officials immediately began concocting a plan. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was integral to assessing the threat and deciding how to respond. General Caine is no stranger to subterfuge: His last job was Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., and he helped devise the diversion tactics during Operation Midnight Hammer, when U.S. forces struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025.

Not everyone who rode on the plane without Mr. Trump was in the dark. Secretary of State Marco Rubio knew about the threat and flew on the old plane after helping to plan the operation to spirit the president out of Turkey, according to two U.S. officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Other senior officials who traveled on the plane without the president included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; as well as several other White House staff, according to a senior U.S. official. It was not clear whether they all knew about the threat.

The elaborate deception — which was first reported by The Washington Post, and which ended without any harm coming to either Air Force One or the military jet carrying Mr. Trump — raised questions about the security trade-offs in protecting the commander in chief.

Whether or not the passengers on the plane that Mr. Trump left behind knew about the threat, they were exposed to risks that the Secret Service deemed too great for the president to face.

On Tuesday evening, in his first public comments about the secret evacuation, Mr. Trump said the decision was not his.

“It’s really just up to Secret Service,” he told reporters after returning from Ohio. “I just follow what they like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane for safety.”

Here’s how this all came about.

Trump tells reporters he will fly on the old Air Force One

Before leaving the summit, Mr. Trump posted on social media that, for “old time’s sake,” he would fly out on the old Air Force One instead of the luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on.

He later told reporters that he was sending the donated plane to Europe to “two or three of the big bases” to show it off to the military there.

.

Simon Ducroquet/The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

I don’t need to spew a bunch of statistics to convince you that people don’t smoke like they used to. Because while it’s true that the unhealthy habit saw a steady decline once the public became widely aware of the dangers of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, it’s also true that we had a definitive vibe shift. I was born in ‘92, so I’m just old enough to remember the days of smoking sections in restaurants, and now it shocks my sensibilities to see someone lighting up in an outdoor dining area. Which is how it should be, because smoking is really bad for you. It can cause numerous cancers, potentially fatal lung disease, and heart failure, to name just the real heavy hitters. It’s also associated with increased risk of autoimmune disease, type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction—and the list goes on and on.

But while the data we have on smoking in the U.S. still shows the low rates one would expect for an activity that we know is really, really bad for us, the vibes have shifted again. Many have noticed that young folks on social media are glamorizing cigarettes, and some experts suspect that public health data just hasn’t caught up to show a new smoking surge.

Here to tell us more is Adam Kovac, a breaking news reporter here at Scientific American. Adam, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

Adam Kovac: Uh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Feltman: I do wanna make sure we define for our listeners what Gen Z actually is, lest we, you know, repeat the sins of our forebears and just use that to mean “young person” for the next 15 years. Who are Gen Z? Who are they? [Laughs.]

Kovac: Well, as a millennial, I definitely feel that pain. So Gen Z is technically anybody born between the years 1997 and 2012. So it’s not kids anymore. These are people who are entering the workforce; they’re older teenagers; they’re young adults. So that’s who Gen Z actually is.

Feltman: So tell me about the genesis of the article. You know, what are people saying about Gen Z and cigarettes?

Kovac: So the genesis of this article is a little bit weird for Scientific American, where we do so much stuff that’s based off of data and having, you know, really concrete, provable things in front of us. This is really more of a vibe. There’s just, like, a sense in the air that’s …

Feltman: What’s more Gen Z than there just being a vibe, you know?

Kovac: Exactly, exactly. It’s a vibe shift, I think is the term, although I think I might’ve just dated myself there. It’s something that is, like cigarette smoke, up in the air.

There’s just a sense that a lot of Gen Z celebrities are being photographed smoking. If you walk outside of bars, you know, you’ll see a huddle of young adults all kind of lighting up. It’s something that, like, I feel like I would’ve seen when I was younger and then disappeared for a long time, and it—now it’s making this big comeback.

Feltman: Hmm. So what does the data on smoking actually say, you know, once you started poking at it?

Kovac: When I actually started looking at the data, smoking has been on a really steady decline for about half a century now. You know, ever since they started putting warning labels on cigarette packages and really getting the word out about all the negative health effects that cigarettes can have—the lung cancer, the emphysema, the asthma—it really reduced. Like, so it used to be about 50 percent of American adults were smokers, and that number has just been steadily declining for decades. And in most recent surveys, it’s somewhere around 10 percent of Americans are smokers now. So it’s really at historic lows.

Feltman: Do we know anything about Gen Z specifically? You know, are they also, you know, showing those low, steady decline smoking rates in the data?

Kovac: So actually, it shows that the decline is even steeper with them. Depending on the survey that you look at only around 5 percent of Gen Z say that they’ve smoked a cigarette in the last 30 days. So it’s really, really low numbers when you look at the data.

Feltman: So my understanding is that the story isn’t “the vibe seems to be that Gen Z is smoking, but it turns out they’re not.” The experts you talked to were not reassured by that data. Can you tell us a little bit about why?

Kovac: So this kind of data usually comes in at a bit of a lag. So a lot of them are very alarmed by what they’re seeing, particularly because, you know, you can kind of quantify a vibe a little bit. There’s a lot of data showing that images of smoking in popular culture are on the rise. It used to be for several years, you know, if you saw somebody smoking in a movie or a TV show, that was the exception, not the rule.

You know, as somebody who watches The Bear and who loved Oppenheimer, you know, there’s a lot of smoking in a lot of popular culture right now. So they’re really alarmed by that. And Gen Z doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of movies or a lot of TV. They get a lot of their media consumption through TikTok, through Twitch and through Instagram, and there’s actually a lot of accounts on there that are kind of oriented toward that. I found one on Instagram that’s called Cigfluencers that has 100,000 followers, and it’s just pictures of celebrities and young, attractive people looking really cool holding cigarettes.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article (sound on to listen):

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead. 

More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.

“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”

La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.

The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE. 

By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.” 

.

Left: Chaofeng Ge. Right: Parady La with his daughter, Jazmine La.Courtesy of Yanfeng Ge; Courtesy of Jazmine La

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

President Trump may want to let go of the Middle East. But it won’t let go of him.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said his new strategy was to be “low-keying it” in Iran, a suggestion that he wants to pressure the country into making a favorable deal without taking major military action. But a stark reminder of the limits of U.S. power in the region came from Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday he was “ruling out” Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The two Middle East conflicts have underscored Mr. Trump’s eagerness to declare success and his inability to impose his will on them, despite the enormous military firepower that he has been able to deploy.

Mr. Trump is “clearly trying to find a pathway as the midterms approach to downgrade all of this,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Instead, Mr. Katulis went on, “reality is slapping him in the face.”

Mr. Trump faces depleted weapons stockpiles, an Iranian regime determined to impose pain on the United States, an Israeli prime minister battling for re-election and American voters reeling from high prices induced by the Iran war. The November midterms keep ticking closer, steadily raising the political costs of the turmoil to Mr. Trump and Republicans.

Mr. Trump laid out his low-key approach to Iran in a brief interview with the news website Axios on Sunday. Rather than make new military threats, he said that “we are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

“Now, can they make trouble? Yeah, they can make trouble,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday, acknowledging Iran’s ability to keep harassing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “But they’re broke.”

In describing the Iranian regime as suffering from economic pressure, Mr. Trump evoked his own predicament. The average price of a gallon of gasoline remained above $4 this week, more than $1 above the price when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. Polls show even Republicans growing disenchanted with the Iran war, and Mr. Trump’s political movement has fractured over his decision to launch military action.

“I don’t think the president has very good options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The pressure points for the Iranians are, while real, more endurable and bearable than those that are impacting the U.S. economy and the strategic calculus of the administration.”

In Gaza, Mr. Trump trumpeted a “historic breakthrough” on July 30, a multiphase deal under which the militant group Hamas would eventually disarm and Israel withdraw from the Palestinian enclave. Writing on his Truth Social website, in all capitals, he hailed an “amazing development” that “everybody said could never be achieved.”

.

President Trump boarding Air Force One in New Jersey on Sunday. Over the weekend, he said his strategy is to be “low-keying” it in Iran. Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

This week the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that artificial intelligence agents—models connected to tools and designed to act across many steps all on their own—utilizing frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic undertook unsanctioned actions on the open Internet while trying to complete a cybersecurity challenge.

Most of the behavior came from an agent powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5; an agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol took a couple such actions of its own. The report said the agents’ activity showed “signs of novel, potentially deceptive behaviours” and reached a severity that the institute had not anticipated. AISI declined interview requests from Scientific American, and the U.K. government, which oversees the institute, did not make its staff available to comment for this story.

In the case of Mythos 5, the agent researched the people maintaining a real open-source software project, created fake online identities and tried to pressure one of them into approving malicious code. When challenged, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered returning under a new identity.

AISI declared a security incident after general monitoring detected unusual network traffic. The human maintainer targeted by the agent rejected the code, and the institute found no evidence that anyone was harmed. But the report called the Mythos sequence the clearest example that the institute had seen of an AI agent using sustained, potentially deceptive behavior against a real person without being specifically instructed to do so.

Across 122 runs involving seven models, AISI identified 19 actions in 10 runs that fell outside the intended scope of the test. Of these actions, 17 came from runs of Mythos 5, and two came from a single run of GPT-5.6 Sol. Other actions included contacting real people with malicious files, planting hidden instructions intended to manipulate AI coding systems, and leaving behind accounts and materials that subsequent agents could reuse.

The agents did not break out of AISI’s sandboxes. The institute had deliberately enabled Internet access and disabled the developers’ cybersafety filters to test the systems’ maximum capabilities; some prompts were also misconfigured. But in some runs, the AI agents went beyond their instructions even when the task could be completed as intended. And AISI di

The AISI report joins a run of recent incidents that point to a control problem. AI agents’ ability to pursue goals is outpacing the systems that are meant to supervise them. They need no independent agenda to cause damage. With a broad enough goal and real-world access, an agent can find and exploit ambiguities in the rules.

The behavior has roots in an older machine-learning problem, says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Systems have long found unexpected shortcuts—or “reward hacks”—that technically achieve the goal they were given while violating what their designers intended. Here, agents were built to find software exploits and placed in flawed or deliberately permissive environments. And then they did what they were asked.

“You ask an AI system to hack, and it hacks,” Mitchell says. Describing that as an AI “going rogue” risks obscuring the human decisions that made the incident possible. For Mitchell, the more immediate danger comes from people deliberately equipping capable agents with the tools and access to cause harm.

Marius Hobbhahn, CEO and co-founder of Apollo Research, which studies what it calls the “science of scheming,” sees another problem within the same incidents: agents repeatedly chose routes their operators had not authorized when those routes appeared useful.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________