James' World 2

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Capital gains taxes are levied on profits from the sale of assets like stocks, mutual funds, and real estate. The rate at which these gains are taxed depends on your taxable income and how long you’ve held the asset. But keep in mind that capital gains tax rates are generally lower than the tax rates for ordinary income, like wages.

Let’s examine the 2025 rates for long-term capital gains (assets held for more than a year) and highlight the changes from last year’s rates. We will also review the new IRS threshold brackets for 2026.

Additionally, we will discuss short-term rates (ordinary income tax rates) and rates for specific capital gains tax situations, including those applicable to collectibles and the Net Investment Income Tax.

Long-term capital gains tax rates

Long-term capital gains tax rates apply to assets held for more than a year. These rates are structured to encourage long-term investment.

The rates are 0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your income level; essentially, the higher your income, the higher your rate. The income thresholds for long-term capital gains are adjusted annually for inflation.

If you compare the capital gains tax rates from 2024 and 2025 below, you can see the impact of inflation adjustments.

The 2025 capital gains tax thresholds increased by about 2.8% across various filing statuses from the prior year.

For instance, with single filers, the 0% rate now applies to incomes up to $48,350 in 2025, up from last year’s threshold of $47,025.

The 20% rate threshold for single filers rose substantially from $518,900 in 2024 to $583,400 for 2025.

For married couples filing jointly:

• The 0% rate threshold increased by 2.82%, from $94,050 last year to $96,700 for 2025.
• The 20% rate threshold rose from $588,750 to $600,050.

Head of household filers also experienced changes:

• The 0% rate threshold increased by about 2.78%, from $63,000 last year to $64,750 for 2025.
• The 20% rate threshold jumped from $551,350 to $566,700

These inflation adjustments are designed to prevent “bracket creep,” where taxpayers might be pushed into higher tax brackets due to inflation rather than actual increases in real income.

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Hmmmm… Gen Z, and Gen Alpha in the USA have been bamboozled!

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“If you’re worried about the potential for those indirect impacts, those only increase the longer the shutdown goes on,” Mr. Zdinak said.

Economists estimate that the shutdown will trim between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points off annual growth in economic output for each week it drags on. That amounts to between $7.6 billion and $15.2 billion a week based on hours that government employees aren’t working, according to Oxford Economics. The 2018 shutdown trimmed slightly less than 0.1 percentage points off annual growth per week, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That estimation does not capture the ways federal services support economic activity in other sectors, where the effect could be narrow but deep. Consider visa processing. Much of it is performed by contractors, who were told to stop work on Oct. 1. Unlike government employees, they will not be paid back when the shutdown ends.

Brandon Muniz owns a Maryland information technology provider, HeiTech Services, which relies on federal contracts. He has already lost business this year because of government cost-cutting, and over the past couple of weeks, he has had to cut hours for staff members who can’t evaluate applications for green cards and employment-based visas until the government reopens. Mr. Muniz has had to lay off 15 people this year and furlough another 25 because of the shutdown. He worries about getting them back if they find other jobs and keeping the business afloat in the meantime.

“All of our indirect costs for our headquarters team, the facilities, the vehicles that they have, we still have to pay for,” Mr. Muniz said. “Those are things we factor in when we write up a proposal for a contract, but it’s very difficult to factor in something like a shutdown.”

The individuals and businesses that HeiTech serves — like farmers, operators of seasonal attractions and seafood processors — are dealing with delayed visa applications.

Small companies that depend on one or two foreign workers with specific skills are in limbo, said Mark Neuberger, a lawyer with Foley & Lardner in Miami who helps clients with labor issues. “Even a short shutdown gums up the works for months, and they have to clean up the mess from when they were gone,” Mr. Neuberger said.

The federal government also guarantees a significant share of credit markets through agencies whose work has been significantly curtailed, including the Small Business Administration and the Department of Agriculture.

The pause in federal loan processing poses the largest obstacle for low-income borrowers who would qualify for a mortgage backed by the Agriculture Department’s program for rural areas. But even people with approvals for private mortgages in disaster-prone areas are getting tripped up because they have no access to the National Flood Insurance Program.

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The U.S. Capitol is seen from an empty meeting room in the Hart Senate Office Building during the federal government shutdown. Credit…Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

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The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for a versatile technology that can be used for an astonishing variety of purposes, from environmental remediation to drug delivery and energy storage.

Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, are molecular sponges that are already in clinical trials for use in cancer radiation treatment and are being sold as a way to contain carbon dioxide taken from cement and to fuel hydrogen production. They are also being explored as methods of pulling water out of air in arid places, cleaning up wastewater, and removing perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the environment, and for providing targeted drug delivery. The researchers behind MOFs—Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi—will share the Nobel Prize and divide the award of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about $1 million.

During a press briefing, Yaghi—a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been widely credited for expanding the use of MOFs—referenced other ways the frameworks could be used, including the sequestration of nerve gas. MOFs “opened new avenues of applications that other materials could not do,” he said.

MOFs are part chemistry, part materials science. They are made by linking metal ions with organic, or carbon-containing, molecules. The linked molecules form crystals, repeating and stacking to create a cage with a hole—or a pore in a sponge. The cages can be one-dimensional or multidimensional, and they can be formed from a host of metals and organic linkers to make structures with larger or smaller pores. The holes are generally uniform in size.

Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne dreamed up the first MOFs. He was inspired by the tetrahedral, or pyramidlike, shape that carbon atoms take to form diamonds. He mixed a form of copper with a nitrile, an organic compound with nitrogen bonded to carbon, and watched as it formed that repeating structure with small spaces in it. But early MOFs were not very stable.

The pores are key to the power of MOFs, says Ling Zang, a material scientist at the University of Utah, who is using these frameworks to sequester PFAS from water. The porous of nature of MOFs means relatively small amounts can adsorb huge quantities of its intended target. They can be small, less than a nanometer, he says, but also several nanometers in size. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry noted the surprisingly large capacity of MOFs, with one member comparing it to the character Hermione Granger’s beaded bag, which could hold much more than its size would suggest, in the Harry Potter series.

The size of the pore is important for removing PFAS because some chemicals in this group have only two carbons in their chains, and others have eight or 10. Zang is building a MOF that fluoresces when it’s full, telling the user when it should be changed out like an indicator light on a home water filter.

Kitagawa, a researcher at Kyoto University, furthered MOF developments with the scientists in his laboratory, creating structures that were flexible and finding that gases could flow in and out of MOFs. Yaghi and his collaborators helped make MOFs more stable, tinkering with many combinations of metal ions and organic linkers.

Wenbin Lin of the University of Chicago is the scientist whose team created RiMO-301, a MOF with medical applications that is now in clinical trials as a way to make radiation treatment for some cancers more effective. RiMO-301 is injected into tumors before low-dose radiation therapy. Lin says that in interim results of his team’s phase 1 trial, 42 percent of people who otherwise would not have responded to radiation therapy responded to RiMO-301.

Like many in the field, Theresa Reineke knew the time was coming for MOFs to earn this high honor in science. She was one of Yaghi’s first graduate students and works on organic drug delivery systems at the University of Minnesota. There was a lot of doubt in the early days of MOFs, she says. Yaghi and other scientists had to prove that this new material could do the job better, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively than what was already out there.

In many ways, they have done so, says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede of Rice University, a protein chemist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and one of the members of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

“Sometimes it depends on the competition that particular year,” she says. But with MOFs, “it’s really that all these applications were building up.” The technology, and often Yaghi, have been on Nobel prediction lists for years. “It was ready,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “It became the right time.”

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French President Emmanuel Macron said that “everything is being done” to catch the suspects.

“The theft committed at the Louvre is an attack on a heritage we cherish because it is part of our history,” Macron said on X, “ We will recover the works, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice.”

A detailed list of the stolen items released by the culture ministry revealed a single earring from the sapphire parure of Queen Marie-Amélie and Queen Hortense, an emerald necklace and pair of emerald earrings from the parure of Empress Marie-Louise, the “reliquary brooch,” and the tiara and large corsage bow brooch of Empress Eugénie were stolen in the heist.

An attempt to set fire to the truck used to carry out the raid was foiled by a Louvre security officer, forcing the burglar to flee, according to the culture ministry’s statement.

An investigation for “aggravated theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy to commit a felony,” has been opened by Paris police under the authority of Paris public prosecutor’s office.

‘Get out, evacuate’

The robbery took only seven minutes, with the suspects fleeing on motorcycles, Nuñez told France Inter.

“Clearly, a team had been scouting the location. It was obviously a very experienced team that acted very, very quickly,” the interior minister said.

“I am confident that we will very quickly find the perpetrators and, above all, recover the stolen goods,” he added.

Video from the scene showed French police examining an abandoned furniture elevator positioned next to a corner of the Louvre, with its ladder leading up to a broken window off a balcony.

According to Le Parisien’s reporting, the police have found “two angle grinders, a blowtorch, gasoline, gloves, a walkie-talkie, a blanket, and a crown” at the scene of the robbery. A yellow vest used by the perpetrators to disguise themselves as workmen was found a bit further away, lost during their escape, the newspaper said.

A tour guide told CNN how he had heard what sounded like “stomping” on the window as he led tourists through the Apollo Room, before hearing shouts from security guards to evacuate.

“I was just trying to figure out what’s happening when I saw the museum staff going to that noise. Then they did a turn around, like real quick, and they started running and saying ‘get out, get out, get out, get out, evacuate!’” Ryan el Mandari said.

He tried to keep his group of visitors calm as they left the building, he said, adding that they heard the sounds but “had no clue that it was a robbery.”

Robbery planned ‘meticulously’

The French interior ministry said the incident took place at 9:30 a.m. local time and that members of the public had been evacuated without incident.

Minister of Culture Rachida Dati said the robbery had taken place as the museum opened. “No injuries were reported. I am on site alongside museum staff and the police. Investigations are ongoing,” Dati said in a post on X.

Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International, said that if the thieves are just looking to get cash out as quickly as possible, they might melt down the precious metals or recut the stones with no regard for the piece’s integrity.

“We need to break up these gangs and find another approach, or we’re going to lose things that we are never going to see again,” Marinello told CNN.

The museum, which houses world-famous artworks including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, said it would remain closed on Sunday due to “exceptional reasons.” The interior ministry later said the closure was a security measure to preserve evidence for the investigation. The mayor of Paris Center, Ariel Weil, told reporters that the thieves had “planned this meticulously, obviously” and that he could not recall the Louvre being the target of a robbery in more than a century. “I’m thinking, of course, of the Mona Lisa sting in 1911, but I can’t think of any more recent robbery,” he said.

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After more than 15 months of relentless Israeli air and ground assaults on Gaza, many of the tiny Palestinian enclave’s 2 million residents are homeless and scrambling to obtain basic necessities. If last week’s ceasefire holds, experts caution that rebuilding the devastated territory will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

The three-phase ceasefire deal places the reconstruction of Gaza as the final phase, following a permanent end to the war. Dima Toukan, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, says it’s important to acknowledge that this last phase could be a long way off — or never happen at all.

“The path forward beyond the first phase of the agreement is fraught with challenges and remains unclear,” she says.

The United Nations estimates that $50 billion will be required to rebuild Gaza, which occupies an area about the size of Philadelphia on the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt. Even the rosiest of estimates project it would take a decade. But other predictions are much more dire. A U.N. report issued in September estimates $18.5 billion worth of damage was done to Gaza’s infrastructure from the war’s start through the end of January 2024, and that once a ceasefire is reached, “a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022.”

Here are five questions about the enormous reconstruction challenges faced by Gaza.

What is the scope of the destruction?

“At least a million people won’t have homes to return to,” says Shelly Culbertson, a senior researcher at the think tank RAND. Most utilities, such as electricity, sewage, water, and communications, are not working in Gaza, and the vast majority of hospitals and schools have been destroyed.

Somdeep Sen, an associate professor of international development at Roskilde University in Denmark, says, “What we have witnessed is not just the material destruction of Gaza but also the destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life in the enclave.”n October, a year after the war began, the U.N. said Gaza’s human development index, a statistical measure that summarizes a country’s average human development, was expected to drop to a level not seen since 1955, “erasing over 69 years of progress” there.

Who will pay?

The biggest issue may be the most fundamental one: Where will the money come from? For obvious reasons, Israel is an unlikely source. Meanwhile, neither Egypt nor Jordan has the resources or political will to add much, Sen says.

Instead, wealthy Gulf states such as Qatar may have to step in, he says. Even so, “without a large cohort of donors committed to the long-term recovery of Gaza, reaching [the $50 billion] mark will be difficult,” he says.

Even without offering funding, Israel does have an important role to play, Sen says. “How Israel chooses to implement and interpret the ceasefire agreement and subsequently the nature/extent of its military control over the Gaza Strip will determine how much and how quickly the enclave can recover.”

As for funding, Culbertson, who has done extensive work on the West Bank and Gaza, says the U.S. and European Union are also likely to provide funds.

One key issue is whether Israel continues its “dual use” import restrictions for Gaza on items it deems could be used either for legitimate civilian purposes or to make weapons, Culbertson says. “The list … is fairly wide. It includes many materials necessary for reconstruction, like concrete, timber, rebar.”

What will be the biggest challenges?

Simply clearing debris will be a monumental task. Not only are there massive amounts of rubble to contend with, but it will have to be carefully handled for such things as unexploded ordnance, says Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jarzombek has studied how cities such as Dresden, Germany — which was gutted by Allied bombing in 1945 — were able to recover after World War II.

War-era buildings were mostly made of brick and wood, he says. “When those were bombed, they left big piles of that stuff,” Jarzombek explains. As a result, postwar Dresden witnessed “brigades of women who would have wheelbarrows and go to the brick piles and then dump them in particular places.”

Not so in Gaza, where buildings are made out of steel and concrete, he says. “In other words, you can’t get just local civilians [to] … take the stuff apart. You need special equipment: You need bulldozers. You need cranes,” Jarzombek says.

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For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners have checked patients’ tongues as part of a full examination, carefully scrutinizing their color, shape, and coating in an attempt to detect illness. TCM considers a tongue’s color especially telling, and now some researchers, encouraged by recent studies pointing toward a measurable association with health factors, are working to adapt this ancient diagnostic approach to today’s AI-based technology.

TCM remains a controversial topic in the global scientific community. The World Health Organization officially added TCM diagnoses to the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the global standard for health-information classification, in 2022. But most high-profile studies have treated the topic warily. “Despite the expanding TCM usage and the recognition of its therapeutic benefits worldwide, the lack of robust evidence from the EBM [evidence-based medicine] perspective is hindering acceptance of TCM by the Western medicine community and its integration into mainstream healthcare,” wrote the authors of a 2015 review article on TCM’s prospects. Still, pockets of strong academic interest persist.

In TCM, tongue color “is closely linked to the condition of the blood and qi [a Chinese term often translated into English as ‘vital energy’], making it a primary indicator for TCM practitioners in assessing a patient’s overall health,” says Dong Xu, whose research at the University of Missouri focuses on computational biology and bioinformatics and who co-authored a 2022 study on analyzing digital tongue images. But tongue examination can be highly subjective: it relies entirely on an individual practitioner’s color perception and analysis.

Frank Scannapieco, a periodontist, microbiologist, and oral biologist at the University at Buffalo, says that in Western medicine, no standardized clinical system is routinely used to monitor tongue features, although defined lesions on the tongue can serve as indicators for certain cancers, and some studies have linked tongue appearance to particular diseases such as breast cancer and psoriasis. Elizabeth Alpert, a dental health expert at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, adds that tongue examination is often part of a routine screening for oral cancer by dentists and hygienists, but its accuracy depends on providers’ education and experience in clinical settings.

Massive developments in computing technology are causing some TCM-inspired medical researchers to take a new look at the tongue, however. The authors of a 2024 study in Technologies used machine-learning models to classify tongue colors and predict several associated conditions—including diabetes, asthma, COVID, and anemia—with a testing accuracy of 96.6 percent.A major challenge in previous tongue-imaging studies has been perception bias caused by varying light conditions, says the recent study’s co-author, Javaan Chahl, a roboticist and joint chair of sensor systems at the University of South Australia. “There have been studies where people tried to [diagnose via tongue color] without a controlled lighting environment, but the color is very subjective,” Chahl says.

To address this issue, Chahl and his team developed a standardized lighting system within a kiosk setup. Patients placed their heads in a box illuminated by LED lights, which emitted a stable and controllable wavelength of light, and exposed their tongues.

Chahl and his colleagues collected 5,260 images—both real tongue photographs found on the Internet and additional color-gradient images. They used them to train machine-learning models to recognize seven specific colors (red, yellow, green, blue, gray, white, and pink) at different saturation levels and in different light conditions.

The researchers confirmed that a healthy tongue usually appears pink with a thin white film; they found that a whiter-looking tongue may indicate a lack of iron in the blood. Diabetes patients often have a bluish-yellow tongue coating. A purple tongue with a thick, fatty layer could indicate certain cancers. COVID intensity (in people already diagnosed) can also influence overall tongue color, they found, with faint pink seen in mild cases, crimson in moderate infections and deep red in serious cases.

Next, they applied the most accurate of six tested machine-learning models to 60 tongue images, all taken using the team’s standardized kiosk setup at two hospitals in Iraq in 2022 and 2023. They then compared the experimental diagnoses with the patients’ medical records. “The system correctly identified 58 out of 60 images,” says study co-author Ali Al-Naji, now a medical engineering professor at the Middle Technical University in Iraq.

Al-Naji is now working on narrowing the focus for diagnosis to the tongue’s center and tip. His group is also using a new tongue dataset of 750 Internet images to examine tongue shape and oral conditions such as ulcers and cracks with the deep-learning algorithm YOLO. Eventually, Chahl would like to analyze more than just the tongue—perhaps the whole face.

Tongue color may possibly serve as a helpful biological marker of a person’s health state, but Xu cautions that it cannot stand on its own when it comes to making accurate clinical decisions. “The most fundamental limitation of current tongue-imaging systems is that tongue analysis represents only one component of a complete TCM diagnosis,” he says. And because image labeling is not widely standardized for this type of experiment, he adds, it’s harder to reproduce research findings.

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Eve Lu

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I’ve been reviewing smart smart glasses for years, and while many have shown promise, none have truly delivered detailed visual information in a way that feels natural and untethered. Some, like the Rokid Glasses, come close—but they’re consistently held back by technical shortcomings, clunky controls, and a lack of refinement. The new Meta Ray-Ban Display could be the pair to change that. I had the chance to try them out at a demo event in New York, and I came away genuinely impressed. There’s still more testing to do before I can say if they’re worth $799 (especially with the month-plus waitlist just to book a demo), but based on this first hands-on experience, the potential is clear.

Display: A Full-Color AR View

The Meta Ray-Ban Display’s waveguide display is the best of its type I’ve seen yet, for several reasons. To clarify exactly what that means, I should first explain waveguide display technology.

Displays in smart glasses can be separated into two categories: prism and waveguide. Both use tiny projectors to send an image to your eyes, but they differ in terms of how the image actually reaches your eyes. Prism displays use angled lenses, located behind the front lenses, to redirect projected light toward the eyes, much like a prism. These lenses are bulky, and while you can see through them, they can dim and obscure your view even when the display is turned off. The advantage is that they can show high-resolution, full-color images with a wide field of view. 

Waveguide displays use a single lens with special patterns etched into it. They’re far lighter than prism displays and completely transparent when not in use, but the trade-off is that they have significantly lower resolutions and fields of view. They’re also usually monochrome: Other waveguide-equipped models I’ve tested, including the Even Realities G1, Vuzix Z100, and Rokid Glasses, all have green-only displays.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display solves at least one of those problems. It features a full-color waveguide display, and considering the challenges of the technology, it’s truly stunning. When I tried on the glasses, colors looked surprisingly vibrant, and the picture was quite bright in a reasonably well-lit room. Even though the resolution is only 600 by 600 and the field of view is a tiny 20 degrees, to my eye, menus, text, pictures, videos, and even maps were large and sharp enough to read easily. 

I say eye singular, because the display is only built into the right lens. This could be awkward for users with a dominant left eye, but I didn’t have any difficulty reading it. Moreover, I could easily see everything in front of me, both around the projected image and through the other, clear lens. I couldn’t take them outside to see if the display is still visible against a sunny day, a challenge of waveguide displays.

I’ve used prism smart glasses with bigger, sharper, and more colorful displays before; I’m writing this with an XReal One Pro connected to my laptop right now. However, prism displays are bulky and make the glasses difficult to see through. Even if my laptop wasn’t tethered by a cable to the One Pro glasses, I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing them while walking around. The Meta Ray-Ban Display is a different beast, and while it wouldn’t be my first choice for remote work or movie watching, I can definitely see myself using it on the go.

The waveguide in the right lens is nearly invisible, which might not seem important unless you’ve tried competing smart glasses. The waveguides on every other pair I’ve used have appeared to outside observers as distinct rectangles with weird, colorful reflections. The actual details of what the displays show couldn’t be seen, but they’ve still been invariably distracting to anyone I talked to while wearing them. On the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I didn’t see a hint of the waveguide from the outside. At least, I couldn’t see it in the lighting of the specific room where I had the demo. It might still be visible under different lighting conditions, but from my early testing, it’s the least outwardly recognizable waveguide I’ve seen so far.

Controls: You Use Your Fingers

 

The Meta Neural Band enables gesture controls (Credit: Will Greenwald)

More than the color display, the biggest draw of the Meta Ray-Ban Display is its controller. It uses what Meta calls a Neural Band, a wristband that uses electromyography (EMG) to track hand gestures. Instead of sensors directly on your hand or a camera array constantly watching it like on the Apple Vision Pro, the Neural Band measures tiny movements on your arm to determine what your hand is doing.

In my short demo, the Neural Band controls worked better than I expected. Gestures are simple: Curve your fingers inward and swipe your thumb up, down, left, and right on the side of your index finger to move the cursor in different directions, pinch with thumb and index finger to click, pinch with thumb and middle finger to go back, double-pinch with thumb and middle finger to sleep and wake the display, and double-tap your thumb against the side of your index finger to bring up the AI assistant. There’s also a contextual gesture where you hold your thumb and index finger together and rotate them, as if turning a knob, which can adjust the volume or zoom in and out, depending on the situation. 

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(Credit: Will Greenwald)

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Race is a concept that categorizes people based on the color of their skin or other physical features. Unfortunately, race is often used to justify mistreatment or to suggest that one group is better than another. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that everyone is an equal child of God regardless of race, ethnicity, background, skin color, or nationality. The Book of Mormon teaches that “all are alike unto God.”

God loves all His children. We are equal in His eyes, and He recognizes our divine potential to progress and become like Him. He wants each of us to return to live with Him and receive eternal life. Our differences bring beautiful variety to our lives. While we may judge one another based on outward appearance, “the Lord looketh on the heart.”

Racism has been a challenge throughout history across many cultures. Latter-day Saints are not immune from the tendency toward racist attitudes and actions. President Russell M. Nelson taught: “The Creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God’s children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent!”

What do we know about the origins of the priesthood and temple restriction?

Historical records show that a few Black men were ordained to priesthood offices during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. At least one Black man, Elijah Able, participated in the washing and anointing ceremony in the Kirtland Temple. In 1847, Brigham Young spoke approvingly of the priesthood service of Q. Walker Lewis, a Black elder living in Massachusetts.

Five years later, in 1852, in the Utah territorial legislature, Brigham Young announced that Black men of African descent could not be ordained to the priesthood. The restriction also meant that men and women of Black African descent could not participate in the endowment and sealing ordinances in the temple. However, Brigham Young also stated that Black Saints would eventually “have the privilege of all [that other Saints] have the privilege [of] and more.”

Brigham Young’s explanation for the restriction drew on then-common ideas that identified Black people as descendants of the biblical figures Cain and Ham. The Church has since disavowed this justification for the restriction, as well as later justifications that suggested it originated in the pre-earth life.

There is no documented revelation related to the origin of the priesthood and temple restriction. Church Presidents after Brigham Young maintained the restriction, in spite of increasing social pressure, because they felt they needed a revelation from God to end it.

Church leaders today counsel against speculating about the origins of the restriction. For example, President Dallin H. Oaks has taught: “To concern ourselves with what has not been revealed or with past explanations by those who were operating with limited understanding can only result in speculation and frustration. … Let us all look forward in the unity of our faith and trust in the Lord’s promise that ‘he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female’ (2 Nephi 26:33).”

How did the priesthood and temple restriction end?

President Brigham Young and subsequent Church Presidents taught that the priesthood and temple restriction would one day end. Several affirmed that lifting the restriction would require a revelation from God.

During the period when the restriction was in place, Black men and women received witnesses of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, joined the Church, and served faithfully.

After praying for guidance, Church leaders in the 20th century made changes to the way the restriction was implemented, opening the way for larger numbers of Latter-day Saints to be ordained and participate in temple ordinances. Presidents George Albert Smith and David O. McKay authorized the ordination of previously restricted ethnic groups in the Philippines and Fiji. And President McKay discontinued an earlier policy requiring prospective priesthood holders in racially mixed South Africa to trace their lineage out of Africa.

Several individuals close to President McKay reported that he prayed to know the Lord’s will regarding the restriction, but did not receive the direction to lift it at that time.

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Anthony, an older man from California, told ABC7 Los Angeles last October that he had been scammed out of $25,000 by means of a voice generated by artificial intelligence. Anthony, who declined to give his last name, got a call from his son, as he believed, who told him that he’d gotten into a car accident and hit a pregnant woman who was hospitalized. Soon after Anthony hung up, another person called claiming to be his son’s lawyer. This caller said that $9,200 was needed immediately for bail or else Anthony’s son would be jailed for a month and a half.

AI has brought to a boil a problem that has been simmering for several decades. Older adults report financial exploitation to be the most frequent form of abuse they experience, with estimated annual losses as high as $28 billion in the U.S. alone. As the fastest-growing and wealthiest segment of the population, currently controlling 65 percent of the U.S.’s total wealth and $13 trillion in home equity wealth, older adults are increasingly likely to be targeted by scammers. Their vulnerability to scams stems from the many and diverse challenges of aging. These include declines in cognition, alterations in life circumstances (such as the death of a spouse), and difficulty keeping up with the constantly changing technological landscape.

Scammers use sophisticated tactics that prey on the vulnerabilities of older adults, inciting panic and inducing isolation so that individuals make decisions alone and quickly. Anthony, for instance, rushed to the bank and withdrew the money demanded and gave it to someone who came to his home. Then he received another phone call from a person posturing as a second lawyer. The accident victim had passed away, the caller said, which meant Anthony’s son’s predicament had worsened, and the amount needed for bail had gone up—$15,800 was now required. Shaken, Anthony paid again. It was only after this second payment that his daughter suggested to him that he might have been scammed.

No matter the amount of money lost, being scammed can damage mental and physical health, erode self-confidence, and diminish one’s quality of life. It can even contribute to premature death, as found by Jason Burnett of the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and colleagues. Fortunately, however, many people are able to detect a scam and walk away. How do they do that, and can their methods be used by others?

We decided to find answers to these questions. In 2016, we began conducting town hall meetings, self-report surveys, focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews with nearly 300 residents of a large retirement community in Florida about their experiences with financial exploitation. Most everyone we talked to said that they had moved to the retirement community because they believed that they would not have to worry about crime—they would be living behind security gates, and all their neighbors would be older people.

In fact, however, they were being targeted by scammers more often since they had moved to the retirement community, which provided a concentration of wealthy and vulnerable adults. Almost immediately after moving into their new homes, many received phone calls, e-mails, and knocks on the door offering fraudulent services for home and auto repair, prizes and sweepstakes, and financial planning. They quickly had to learn to be vigilant.

Their main strategies to avoid being scammed: maintaining a skeptical mindset and keeping well informed about fraud and the diverse tactics used by scammers, e

specially during stressful times when they were consumed with other factors, such as a serious illness. “I keep up to date about fraud or scams,” Richard, then age 64, told us in an interview during our research. “I read all articles on scams. You really have to educate yourself.” (We changed the names of those we interviewed for privacy.) Protection against scams comes from continual education that helps older people develop and sustain their skepticism while also increasing their confidence in their ability to make smart, informed decisions.

Scams Old And New

AI has introduced novel ways for fraudsters to trick older adults through replicated or altered voices, videos, photographs and documents. Recent and novel scams that affect older adults include calls, texts, or e-mails that come as urgent messages from someone pretending to be a government official or law enforcement officer, requiring payment for what they claim is missed jury duty, unpaid highway tolls, or parking and traffic tickets. Failure to send money immediately, individuals are told, will result in their arrest or deportation.

At the same time, some long-standing scams continue to occur—but more frequently and with greater sophistication, making them more difficult to avoid. Lottery and sweepstakes scams remain common. Offenders, typically impersonating well-known celebrities or organizations, contact a person out of the blue and tell them that they have won a prize. To claim winnings, the scammers stress, individuals must send the money right away—sometimes thousands of dollars—to cover “taxes,” “shipping,” or “processing fees.” Even though no prize will ever arrive, scammers continue to contact their victims to convince them that more money must be sent.

Many variations on this theme exist. For example, the FBI first began receiving reports of the “grandparent scam” in 2008. This kind of fraud, resembling that experienced by Anthony, exploits a person’s emotions, inciting fear and anxiety, by impersonating a grandchild or other family member in distress. Offenders often demand that money be provided quickly and through gift cards or wire transfers, which don’t require identification to collect. Sometimes scammers have even sent couriers to their targets’ homes to collect money.

These scams have been around for decades, but persist as significant threats to older adults. They regularly top lists provided by law enforcement and advocacy groups of the most common scams targeting older adults. (The lists also often include government impersonation, tech suppor,t and financial services scams.) Not least, older adults are also increasingly targeted for scams involving medical procedures, insurance, auto and home repair, and sales.

Ralph, a highly decorated war veteran from Florida, and his wife received a phone call selling unlimited cruise vacations for one year from a seemingly reputable company. After paying $2,000 from their limited fixed income and savings, the couple never received confirmation of their purchase or information about how to redeem their vacations. Months passed, and Ralph, then age 90, sought help from the police. Eventually, a law enforcement official met with Ralph to tell him the case had to be closed without a resolution. As tears ran down his face, Ralph told the official, “It’s not about the money. I just feel so stupid.” This sense of helplessness, embarrassment, and utter misery is what so many scam victims report feeling.

Older adults can also be scammed by romantic partners, friends or family members. Tragically, nearly 50 percent of scams involve the people who are closest to older adults; these cases seldom get reported to law enforcement. Another common tactic: offenders scan obituary columns in local newspapers to befriend a widow or widower at a time when they are vulnerable. John, then age 67, told us that someone from local funeral homes “reminds women to never put an obituary [in the newspaper] because you are a target, and the minute that that goes in there, some crook is reading that to see if they can make a connection with you—‘Oh, your late husband was an Air Force pilot; I was a pilot, too’—and they use that to eventually get at their money.”

Why do people fall for these types of scams? The people with whom we talked reported that at the time of victimization—and regardless of whether the scam was routine or new—their judgement became so clouded that they lost their ability to be skeptical. They made spur-of-the moment decisions that were uncharacteristic of those they would have made in preceding months or years. Certain factors compound this problem.

Research suggests that older adults struggle more to anticipate financial losses, have higher levels of trust for strangers, and have a lower ability to detect deceptions compared with younger adults. These differences, both cognitive and psychological, may reflect age-related changes to the brain. Older adults also face an increasing frequency of setbacks to their physical and emotional health, which can reduce their self-confidence and hinder their skepticism. “I was in the hospital, depressed, and couldn’t hear that well anymore. When a [financial] planner called, I just wasn’t in the right place,” Anne, then age 78, said to us. “I should have known better. I did know better, but … I was just so depressed.” Peter Lichtenberg, a researcher at Wayne State University, and colleagues reported in 2016 that symptoms of depression were associated with an increased risk of fraud among older adults.

Social isolation also constitutes a significant factor. The loss of loved ones that comes with aging can shrink social networks and add to people’s vulnerability. “I have nobody. I don’t have anybody,” Harold, then age 75, told us. “My brother passed away. My sister is lingering in a nursing home…, and that’s it…. Losing support systems is terrifying, especially for us older folks.” In 2018, Marti DeLiemaof the University of Minnesota observed that the lack of a trustworthy network of friends or family best distinguished the older adults who had been defrauded from those who had not.

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Top proxy advisor Institutional Shareholder Services is recommending that Tesla investors vote against a pay plan for CEO Elon Musk that would grant him nearly $1 trillion more in stock.

The “mega performance equity award” to Musk, designed to retain the CEO long-term, “has an astronomical grant value conditioned upon far-reaching performance targets that, if achieved, would create enormous value for shareholders,” ISS wrote on Friday.

Tesla’s 2025 annual shareholder meeting and proxy vote is scheduled for Nov. 5. The company is scheduled to report third-quarter results on Wednesday.

ISS said that while some shareholders may support the pay plan, “there are unmitigated concerns surrounding the special award’s magnitude and design.”

Musk’s plan, if approved, would be the largest ever awarded to a public company CEO. It could net Musk up to an additional 12% stake in Tesla, should the company hit a market cap of $8.5 trillion and achieve other goals.

Tesla disagreed with the ISS recommendations.

In a post on X, which is owned by Musk, the automaker accused ISS of missing “fundamental points of investing and governance,” and complained that the advisors had previously “recommended against compensation that shareholders have voted on twice before (and that Elon has already earned), as well as the 2025 CEO Performance Award (where Elon receives nothing unless shareholders win big).”

The company urged shareholders to vote with the board’s recommendations on all proposals on the 2025 proxy.

ISS previously advised investors to reject a “ratification” of Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package, which was worth an estimated $56 billion at the time.

The Delaware Court of Chancery ruled early last year that the 2018 pay plan had been improperly granted by the Tesla board and must be rescinded. The ruling said Tesla hid crucial details from shareholders that they were entitled to before voting, and that Musk had controlled the board.

Musk has appealed that court’s decision to the Delaware State Supreme Court, with opening arguments in the appeal heard by a panel of judges this week.

Representatives for ISS declined to comment beyond the report.

ISS, along with Glass Lewis and smaller peers, can influence how shareholders decide to cast their votes at annual elections. Musk accused ISS and Glass Lewis in 2023 of effectively controlling the stock market because of their influence with passive or index funds in some matters. He also baselessly compared ISS to a terrorist organization.

Musk will be able to vote his own shares in the vote concerning his future pay. He holds at least 13.5% of Tesla’s voting power, according to the most recent available disclosures on his stake. Those holdings alone could be enough to secure approval for the nearly $1 trillion pay package.

In September, Musk added to his ownership of Tesla stock buying another $1 billion worth of shares.

Among other ISS recommendations, the firm also suggested that shareholders should vote against giving Tesla’s board authorization to invest in xAI, the AI company that Musk started in March 2023 but only disclosed publicly in July that year. Tesla has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of its Megapack battery energy storage systems to xAI.

ISS also recommended against voting to reinstate Tesla board member Ira Ehrenpreis, a longstanding and close friend of Musk.

In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws to limit shareholders’ ability to sue for a breach of fiduciary duties so that only a shareholder that owns at least 3% of the company’s stock can bring what’s called a “derivative” action. Ehrenpreis presided over Tesla’s governance committee at the time that change was made without a shareholder vote.

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