More explosions hit southern Iran

 Additional explosions thundered across several areas in southern Iran, including the major port city of Bandar Abbas, shortly after initial blasts shook the area. The United States confirmed the operation, stating it has begun a "powerful" wave of strikes.

Columns of smoke were seen rising near the Bandar Abbas port, as per unconfirmed footage shared on social media. In addition, Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz and Sirik came under renewed shelling.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/More-explosions-hit-southern-Iran/66650608

Blasts shake southern Iran

 Multiple explosions shook Sirik, in the Hormozgan province in southern Iran, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to media reports.

Blasts were also reported in the city of Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island, as well as other sites, as per still unconfirmed reports.

In the meantime, tensions between Iran and the United States have been on the rise again, after Washington reimposed sanctions on Iran's oil exports, and after Iranian forces struck several ships in the Hormuz Strait.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Blasts-shake-southern-Iran/66650471

Workers who don't use AI more likely to be laid off: Gallup

 American workers who never use artificial intelligence (AI) may be more likely to be laid off than those who use AI more regularly, according to new data.

Gallup research found that 62% of workers who have been laid off were non-users of AI who used it once per year or less often. By contrast, only 50% of currently employed workers were non-users of AI, with 22% described as infrequent AI users who utilize it a few times per month or year. Among laid-off workers, 16% were infrequent AI users.

Currently, employed workers were also more likely to report using AI on a daily basis or a few times per week, with 28% of current workers reporting that compared with 22% of laid-off workers in their prior role.

"This pattern holds even after accounting for age, education, type of industry and the length of time since being laid off, suggesting that workers who are AI non-users appear to have been more vulnerable in the job market," Gallup said.

One particularly vulnerable group was tech workers who reported using AI on a monthly basis or less frequently, as they were three times more likely (18%) to have been laid off than tech workers who used AI at least monthly (6%).

Gallup added that workers in the tech sector were already facing elevated layoff exposure in comparison to other industries, which contributed to there being a stronger pattern between the level of AI use and layoffs than in other sectors.

The survey also found that American workers are continuing to report that their employers are downsizing their workforces, and they don't see artificial intelligence (AI) or automation as driving the cuts.

Gallup found that the share of U.S. employees who reported layoffs at their company was about 21% in the first quarter of 2026, as it held relatively steady after the share of such reports nearly tripled from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2025.

Workers who experienced layoffs were asked by Gallup to describe the primary reason they were laid off and very few – just 1% of respondents – mentioned reasons related to AI and automation.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that AI or automation didn't contribute to employers' decisions to move forward with layoffs, as respondents cited other reasons like organizational restructuring and downsizing (15%), or the elimination of a role (3%).

That could suggest that AI is factoring into business leaders' consideration of their workforce structure and decisions to hire or downsize, even if it wasn't articulated to the laid off workers as the reason they lost their job.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/ai-adoption-job-security

NYT Sat On The Rape Allegations Against Platner Last Month

 Graham Platner's Senate campaign is imploding after Politico published a detailed account on Monday from Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Democrat from Maine, who accuses the progressive darling of rape. Donors are heading for the exits, Democrats are withdrawing endorsements, and calling for Platner to drop out.

But there's another scandal hiding in plain sight, and it involves the New York Times, which published an exposé last month featuring three women who dated Platner, who had each accused him of domestic abuse.

Racicot also appeared in the New York Times' story on Platner last month. The paper interviewed her and spoke with another anonymous woman as well. Yet when the Times published its June report, it omitted the sexual assault allegations from Racicot and the anonymous Democratic woman who had dated Platner. Instead, the story centered on another accuser, Lyndsey Fifield, a Republican operative whose partisan resume became a central focus of the article.

"After the story went up, I began to ask them... wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham's by far)?" Fifield asked after the story was published.

According to Fifield, reporters contacted her in early April and pressured her past her initial refusal. They told her there were other women and they needed to "band together." They also promised to protect her. She eventually relented. "I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists," she wrote on X, turning down other outlets and sitting quiet through weeks of delays.

Then she handed them everything a reporter could want: five friends who could corroborate her story, former roommates who watched Platner stalk her row house from five doors away, screenshots, landlord emails documenting the lease she broke to escape him, and time-stamped diary entries. Reporters called just the two friends who could confirm the relationship timeline rather than the abuse, and told her they saw no need to contact the ex-fiance she confided in during pre-marital counseling since the diary covered it.

The published story claimed nobody could corroborate her account. "Why does it say 'nobody could corroborate' when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?" Fifield asked. Friends had confirmed to the Times that she disclosed the abuse years before Platner announced a run for anything. That corroboration never made print.

Three women who had never met, Fifield, Racicot, and the third anonymous accuser, described the same cycle of intimate partner violence, coercive control, and love-bombing. The Times had all of it but gave readers mostly a deep dive on the Republican woman's employment record instead. "It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along," Fifield wrote. "The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life."

Politico's Adam Wren appeared on MSNOW's "Morning Joe" to walk Mika Brzezinski through the vetting of Racicot's story. Brzezinski noted the absence of any police report and asked, "Given the very high standards Politico has before they write something like this and publish it, what aspects of this story brought it to the level of publishable?" Wren explained how Racicot "had confided into a number of people, including her therapist, in almost real time." The corroboration consisted of "email exchanges between she and her therapist" and conversations with people she confided in during the months that followed.

When Brzezinski pressed Wren on what tied Platner to the act itself, he cited an Instagram message Racicot sent the next day, as well as messages to others afterward. Therapist emails and secondhand descriptions of unrecovered messages cleared Politico's bar, but eyewitness roommates, screenshots, landlord emails, timestamped diaries, and friends confirming contemporaneous disclosures fell short at the New York Times, which lied to America by claiming nobody could corroborate Fifield's story, and completely omitting Racicot's claims of sexual assault.

Platner's campaign will likely die in the coming days, but the New York Times' credibility went first.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyt-sat-rape-allegations-against-platner-last-month

Activists Push California To Recognize 'Black English' In Preschool Classrooms

 Via American Greatness,

Progressive California education activists are urging the state to recognize “black English” in preschool classrooms, claiming the approach would strengthen literacy development and affirm the language spoken by many black children.

Black Californians United for Early Care & Education (BlackECE), a nonprofit advocacy organization, is promoting what it describes as an effort to challenge “harmful language hierarchies and affirm black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in black history, culture, and community.”

The group also seeks to “address how language bias shows up in early learning spaces–and how it can be dismantled.”

Ashley Williams, a co-founder of BlackECE, said the initiative is intended to ensure children feel their voices are respected regardless of how they speak.

“I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it one way or the other,” Williams told PBS.

Williams also reflected on her own experiences, saying speaking black English came with embarrassment because of its slang and grammatical differences.

She said she often felt pressure to “talk white” instead of speaking in the way that felt most natural to her.

BlackECE has developed a 10-point policy agenda focused on black children, families and educators, including proposals related to reparations and early childhood education.

The organization’s campaign follows California’s 2020 plan encouraging early dual-language learning and support for bilingual children. BlackECE argues that black English should also be recognized as part of those efforts.

“We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include black children who may be African-American English speakers,” Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project, said.

According to research cited from the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of American children and 44 percent of California children ages 5 to 17 are bilingual. The information also states that 89 percent of African Americans speak only English at home.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/activists-push-california-recognize-black-english-preschool-classrooms

RBC Capital, BofA up Agios targets after FDA Priority Review acceptance of mitapivat for sickle cell

 

RBC Capital and BofA raise Agios targets after FDA Priority Review acceptance of mitapivat for sickle cell disease

• RBC Capital raised its Agios price target to $32 and BofA to $46 after mitapivat Priority Review acceptance
• FDA accepted mitapivat sNDA for sickle cell disease and granted Priority Review, with PDUFA target date November 1, 2026

https://finviz.com/stock?t=AGIO&p=d

SkinHealth Systems wins FDA clearance for SkinStylus wrinkle treatment

 

SkinHealth Systems wins FDA clearance for SkinStylus microneedling device to treat periorbital wrinkles in adults

• FDA clearance covers improving appearance of periorbital wrinkles in adults across all Fitzpatrick skin types.

https://finviz.com/stock?t=SKIN&p=d