Swiss banking giant UBS has introduced a requirement for junior investment bankers joining the company to show proficiency in artificial intelligence (AI), the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter and the company.
According to the sources, the lender expects prospective graduates and interns joining the company's global banking and markets divisions in 2027 to show during recruitment interviews that they can use AI to "improve outcomes and efficiency."
"We continuously review our recruitment criteria to ensure they reflect the skills we need," UBS said in a statement. "As AI is fundamentally reshaping our financial services, AI capabilities and experiences have become an important aspect of future professional success and are as such relevant recruiting criteria," it added, stressing that AI literacy "complements, rather than replaces, the academic, analytical and interpersonal skills" it expects from prospective hires.
China's new rules governing companies that produce and distribute content for social media took effect on Sept. 1, potentially exposing both independent content creators and the accounts they manage to penalties for violations.
The regulations require companies providing services such as content planning, production, distribution, marketing, promotion, and talent management to register as service providers.
Critics and independent content creators told The Epoch Times that the rules could broaden the communist regime's control over online content, particularly information about sensitive social issues such as unemployment, unpaid wages, unfinished housing projects, and protests.
They spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Under the new rules, companies already registered to provide such services have 30 days from the regulations' effective date to amend their business registrations.
Companies involved in online performance management, publishing, audiovisual services, or internet news services must also obtain the relevant licenses.
The rules require covered companies to appoint a person responsible for content management and establish a management team, as well as procedures governing employees and emergency responses.
When signing contracts with online creators, companies must verify their identities and clearly define their management responsibilities.
Platforms can also impose measures on both the companies and the content creators they have contracted with when alleged violations of laws, regulations, platform rules, or contractual agreements occur.
Those measures can include restricting account functions, suspending monetization, or shutting down accounts.
Risks to Online Creators
For people working in China as independent content creators, the new requirements have raised concerns about both income and uncertainty over what content is permissible.
A content creator in Shenyang, China, told The Epoch Times that the rules could directly affect the livelihoods of people who depend on online traffic for income.
"Many people doing livestreams don't know what they can say and what they can't say. Once the traffic gets high, the risks come with it," she said.
The content creator explained that she has seen other creators have their accounts blocked after their livestreams began attracting substantial audiences.
She also questioned how regime authorities and platforms would determine what constitutes prohibited content.
"What does it mean to incite emotions, and what does it mean to make false propaganda? Who decides? There is no clear standard," she said.
The regulations are formally framed as a system for managing businesses involved in the distribution and operation of online content.
However, critics say the requirements could extend beyond large multi-channel networks (MCNs), and apply to smaller operations that may not previously have considered themselves part of the industry.
A Chinese online commentator told The Epoch Times that the rules could encompass small studios, account-management teams, and small livestreaming accounts.
"In the past, many small studios simply helped people obtain advertising, edit videos, and do promotions. They didn't consider themselves MCNs," the commentator said.
"This time, the regulations are very broad. As long as you participate in producing content for online accounts, or help distribute it, you could be required to register and file records, and you would have to assume them as a condition for operating."
In his view, the system shifts part of the regime's censorship responsibilities onto platforms and content-operations companies. Rather than directly intervening in every piece of content, the regime can require companies and platforms to police the accounts under their control.
Concerns Over Reporting on Social Issues
The potential impact could be particularly significant for creators who cover social and economic problems in China.
An independent content creator in Harbin, China, who focuses on analyzing social issues and asked to be identified only by his surname Li, told The Epoch Times that he regularly follows issues including gig employment, difficulties facing restaurants and other businesses, unfinished housing projects, and problems withdrawing money from banks.
Such topics, he said, could potentially be interpreted by platforms as negative information or as an attempt to exploit social issues for attention.
"If influencers continuously follow these things, the network regulators may think you are hyping up a social incident, seeking attention, and making money from traffic," Li said.
"I can only speculate this way. The regime has not clearly stated the standards."
Although Li primarily analyzes information from the perspective of a reader, rather than reporting firsthand on every incident, he said he remains concerned about the restrictions.
"Some content is not false; it's just different from what the official releases say," he said. "Creators are afraid of losing their accounts or income, so they may simply give up publishing. This is self-censorship."
Li said the result could be that social events increasingly have only the version of events permitted by regime authorities.
Once creators face the possibility of having their accounts closed, losing their ability to earn money, or effectively losing their livelihoods, he said, they may choose not to publish information even when they believe it to be accurate.
The regulations impose penalties for violations under existing laws and regulations. Where no specific penalty is provided, the regime can issue warnings and impose fines ranging from 10,000 yuan ($1,490) to 200,000 yuan ($29,800).
For creators and critics, however, the greater concern may be the effect of the rules before any formal penalty is imposed.
If platforms and companies are held responsible for the content produced by the accounts they manage, they have an incentive to remove material that could attract regulatory scrutiny.
That could leave creators increasingly reluctant to report on sensitive social issues, not necessarily because the information is false, but because the potential loss of an account, audience, or income may make publishing it too risky.
Yemen’s government forces said they carried out retaliatory attacks on an Iran-backed Houthi camp in al-Jawf province, Al Jazeera reported, citing a military spokesman.
Col. Majeed Al-Nuzayli said the forces used “advanced capabilities recently introduced into service” in the attack on Al-Labnat camp.
“We destroyed the Houthi militia’s capabilities and elements in the Al-Labnat Camp,” Al-Nuzayli said, according to the report.
He said the operation came in response to what he described as continued “escalation and violations” by the Iran-backed Houthis.
David Healy and colleagues review several sources of data which suggest an association in a small number of cases between antidepressant treatment and aggression and violence.
Summary
Recent regulatory warnings about adverse behavioural effects of antidepressants in susceptible individuals have raised the profile of these issues with clinicians, patients, and the public. We review available clinical trial data on paroxetine and sertraline and pharmacovigilance studies of paroxetine and fluoxetine, and outline a series of medico-legal cases involving antidepressants and violence.
Both clinical trial and pharmacovigilance data point to possible links between these drugs and violent behaviours. The legal cases outlined returned a variety of verdicts that may in part have stemmed from different judicial processes. Many jurisdictions appear not to have considered the possibility that a prescription drug may induce violence.
The association of antidepressant treatment with aggression and violence reported here calls for more clinical trial and epidemiological data to be made available and for good clinical descriptions of the adverse outcomes of treatment. Legal systems are likely to continue to be faced with cases of violence associated with the use of psychotropic drugs, and it may fall to the courts to demand access to currently unavailable data. The problem is international and calls for an international response.
The United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced it has destroyed a multi-vessel floating fueling station in the Eastern Pacific used by the Ecuadorian crime organization Los Choneros.
"Individuals removed from the main vessel have been transferred to Ecuadorian authorities. Once the main vessel was cleared and the crew disembarked, U.S. forces sank it and the attached support vessels," SOUTHCOM said on X.
Los Choneros, which are often linked to drug trafficking, have been designated as a terrorist group in the US.
The radical left’s recent efforts to twist and downgrade 9/11 disgust me to the core — and it’s not because I was some type of hero in that tragedy: I was just a journalist then as I am now.
I’m outraged because I personally witnessed true heroism on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days that followed: New Yorkers who survived and banded together to rebuild this city. Indeed, one might ask, did these heroes do too good of a job? Consider how many in this city now indulge their luxury to forget, or even shamelessly try to paper over what happened.
As we approach 9/11’s 25th anniversary, it’s hard to believe how much of the debate around this historically tragic event has changed. We have a US Senate candidate in Michigan who recently campaigned with an influencer who once said “America deserved 9/11.” Our mayor — a 34-year-old former rapper who studied anti-American “Africana Studies” — can’t bring himself to denounce the terrorist rallying cry “globalize the intifada.”
Instead, Zohran Mamdani, like much of the left, prefers to lament the war on terror and “Islamophobia.” Never mind that the latter, in reality, has lately been dwarfed by the rampant antisemitism that he likes to minimize.
Unspeakable crime
And then there’s the unspeakable crime that killed nearly 3,000 who were just showing up to their jobs that morning — janitors, secretaries, bond traders — a cross-section of the city and its moms, dads, daughters and sons. Never forget they perished alongside heroic first responders, who tried to save them.
Mamdani fans either have short memories or no memories of 9/11 at all because they weren’t yet born. The city has also changed. The mayor’s base of progressive Gen Z’ers — many of them transplants from around the country and indoctrinated by leftist college professors — have ventured into ethnic enclaves that once housed New York’s “gorgeous mosaic” of diversity that went back generations.
Even fresh immigrants who have since changed the city — in many cases for the better — lack both roots and remembrance of 9/11. Consider the bereaved families of cops or firefighters who lost their lives charging up dozens of flights of stairs inside the Twin Towers. I knew them as well as people who succumbed to cancer a few years later because of the toxicity that enveloped downtown Manhattan in the days that followed.
I covered the spectacle as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, often on the ground and up close. I was a few blocks north of Ground Zero when I heard the first plane crash into the North Tower. I saw people running for their lives through streets that had been calm just minutes earlier; I ducked into a local gym and watched both buildings fall on TV, much to my horror.
Life for me was never the same for lots of reasons. My old man, a union ironworker, had spent years putting ton after ton of steel into those towers and its lobby month after month, year after year, when I was a kid growing up. In doing so, he developed maladies of his own that would kill him years before 9/11. In just a few minutes, everything that he had worked on and many of the people inside were gone.
For the better part of the next year, I reported on the tragedy and the city’s recovery, including that of Wall Street. The stock exchanges and brokerages had ground to a halt, something the terrorists sought as a potential death blow to the US economy.
Stock trading resumed
It wasn’t a death blow, of course. I saw Dick Grasso, then head of the New York Stock Exchange, move mountains to repair the wiring that allowed trading to resume in less than a week. Wall Street bosses put cutthroat competition aside to get the markets running again. Rudy Giuliani proved why he was a great mayor. He led rebuilding efforts, then handed the reins to Mike Bloomberg, who ensured the city continued to recover and thrive.
The Saturday after 9/11, I went to Ground Zero and watched first responders, construction workers, cops, firefighters, working-class New Yorkers digging through the rubble in a desperate search for survivors. I still recall the stench from the burning debris and the dead that filled the air.
My brother was a doctor at Bellevue Hospital at the time. He and his team expected a deluge of wounded. When the bodies didn’t show up, he donned a pair of work boots, jeans and a sweatshirt and headed downtown. He was part of the “bucket brigade,” sifting through the wreckage looking for survivors, finding only body parts for bereaved families looking for some semblance of closure.
My own cancer was likely related to the chemicals and smoke I breathed in from the smoldering debris as I, like so many others who worked downtown, continued doing my job as best I could amid all of the confusion.
But as I look back, I’m somehow glad I was there. Consider this a bid to ensure 9/11 isn’t forgotten — and isn’t twisted into something other than the singularly evil act that it was.
And New York’s rebirth, I would submit, is the true embodiment of what it means to be an American.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order recognizing 9/11 Friday — and then gave the symbolic pen to his controversial aide who once represented an al-Qaeda terrorist with links to the attack on the Pentagon.
Administration officials were gathered at City Hall for a pair of executive orders — ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks — one establishing a Day of Remembrance and another beefing up security against future terror threats.
After Mamdani signed the last of the documents, Hizzoner gave Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch the ceremonial pen, and whispered, “Can you pass this?”
Mamdani asked Tisch to pass the 9/11 pen to his chief council, Ramzi Kassem, right.NYC Mayor's Office
Tisch awkwardly handed it to Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who just snuck into the press conference, before she hurried out of the Blue Room — the first official to exit the press conference.
“It was calculated,” retired detective and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Michael Alazar told The Post.
“It happened during a ceremony meant to be about the victims, and no one else. 9/11 families didn’t come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight someone whose work intersects with the very ideology that took their loved ones. Commissioner Jessica Tisch was reduced to a prop rather than acknowledging her role as the leader of the NYPD.”
Kassem, a lawyer who famously represented al-Qaeda operative Ahmed al-Darbi, is seen on video smirking as he receives the symbolic pen.
“It’s bulls–t,” slammed Dennis Warchola, whose brother Michael, a firefighter with Ladder 5, was killed in the North Tower.
“How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?”
“It shows exactly where his loyalties truly lie,” said Council Member Joann Ariola (R-Queens), who slammed the socialist mayor’s stunt as “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful.”
“The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged. On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.”
Al-Darbi was sent to Guantánamo Bay after he was convicted of terrorism in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker in the Middle East — part of an al Qaeda plot to attack the global oil trade after 9/11. His sister married Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
The 48-year-old Kassem, who founded a legal clinic at CUNY that offers free legal representation to Muslims, also defended Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia who was detained by ICE.
The controversial lawyer and top Mamdani aide wasn’t present during the press conference until the very end, when he snuck in some 15 minutes late — and made a quick exit, right behind Tisch.
“Ramzi Kassem said he was inspired by 9/11 — not to join the fight against terrorism, but to defend the terrorists themselves. He doesn’t even belong in this country, much less in our government,” seethed Council Member Vicki Paladino (R-Queens).
“His participation in anything related to 9/11 is an insult to every New Yorker who survived that day, and indeed all Americans. But I suspect that’s the point.
“Was it deliberate on your part to give your Muslim base a hint that this is all BS to pacify other New Yorkers?” former Democratic political consultant David Sivella blasted on X.
City Hall and Kassem did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.
