📌 White House To Choose Press, Economy Downer, More

A senior White House correspondent sharply criticized the White House’s decision to take over the press pool.

Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News pushed back on press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that “we are giving the power back to the people” by taking control of the White House press pool, a small group of reporters that travels with and covers the president’s daily activities.

“This move does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House,” Heinrich said in a post, responding to Leavitt’s statement. Heinrich, part of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) board, explained the practical reasons it has governed the press pool for decades.

“Only representatives FROM our outlets can determine resources all those outlets have — such as staffing — in order to get the President’s message out to the largest possible audience, no matter the day or hour,” Heinrich wrote.

Leavitt announced on Tuesday that, moving forward, the White House press pool would be determined by administration officials. “It’s beyond time the White House press pool reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025,” she said.

The Consumer Confidence Index fell by seven points in February to 98.3, the largest decline since August 2021.

Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist for global indicators at The Conference Board, said in a statement: ”This is the third consecutive month-on-month decline. … Of the five components of the index, only consumers’ assessment of present business conditions improved, albeit slightly.”

She said that views of current labor market conditions weakened. “Consumers became pessimistic about future business conditions and less optimistic about future income. Pessimism about future employment prospects worsened and reached a 10-month high.”

The fall in consumer confidence was marked across all age groups but was especially present among consumers between 35 and 55 years old.

"Average 12-month inflation expectations surged from 5.2% to 6% in February. This increase likely reflected a mix of factors, including sticky inflation but also the recent jump in prices of key household staples like eggs and the expected impact of tariffs," Guichard said.

Most American workers (63%) do not use AI much or at all in their jobs, a PEW Research Center survey finds.

5,395 panelists in full or part-time work responded out of 6,490 who were sampled. Only 16% of workers use AI for at least some of their work, just 2% use it for all or most of their work, and 17% have not heard about AI use in the workplace, the survey reports.

It was found that workers under 50 and those with a bachelor's degree are more likely to use AI than older workers and those with less education. Among non-AI users, 31% say at least some of their work can be done with AI, while 45% say it can’t do much or any at all.

The survey notes AI users tend to be younger, more educated, likelier to live in cities, and more likely to work in data processing and banking, finance, and IT. About half of workers received job training in the past year, but only 24% was related to AI.

AI skills are deemed extremely or very important by 35% of workers, with those who use AI more likely to value these skills compared to non-AI users. However, most workers regard interpersonal skills, communication, critical thinking, and basic computer skills as more important than AI skills.

Mohamed Amra, a fugitive French prisoner who prompted an international hunt, was arrested in Bucharest, Romania.

The French government said 10 of his alleged accomplices were also arrested. French President Emmanuel Macron called the capture a ''formidable success'' and praised European colleagues who had pursued him.

Two guards were killed when armed assailants helped Amra escape from a prison convoy in Normandy last May. The brutality of the ambush, caught on CCTV, shocked France and Amra instantly became the country's most wanted man.

Amra, 30, fled after being sentenced for burglary. He was under investigation for an attempted organized homicide and a kidnapping that resulted in death. Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Amra was connected with Marseille's crime syndicates and suspected of heading a drug trafficking network.

Amra's first offenses occurred at the ages of 11–14, the prosecutor said. Nicknamed "La Mouche" (The Fly), Amra has also been referred to by other aliases such as "Yanis," "Momo," and "Schtroumpf" (Smurf).

Amra changed his appearance and dyed his hair but was identified through facial recognition tools and his fingerprints.

After Mark Zuckerberg’s turnaround on “free expression,” what can billions of Facebook and Instagram users expect?

They could encounter at least 277 million more instances of hate speech and other harmful content each year, reported the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that frequently battles social media companies over moderation practices.

Last month, Meta announced sweeping changes to the community guidelines that define the speech it allows. The company said it would shift how it enforces many of its rules and ratchet back limits to speech targeting women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups.

The main driver for a potential surge in hate speech, CCDH said, is an important change to how Meta says it will identify some harmful content: relying on users to report it rather than automated systems to take it down.

Meta took issue with the report. “CCDH’s methodology is flawed and makes significant assumptions that don’t stand up to scrutiny,” Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels said. “While we will still address content that violates our policies, we are focused on reducing mistakes and over-enforcement of our rules.”

Meta didn’t specify what was “flawed.” Yael Eisenstat, a Cybersecurity for Democracy director and a former Facebook executive, commented: “Putting the responsibility on those suffering the abuse to also do the moderation for this multibillion-dollar company is a gross abdication of its responsibility to keep people safe.”

Singapore’s biggest bank plans to cut 4,000 jobs as it expects AI to take on more work done by human employees.

"My current projection in the next three years is we will shrink our workforce by about 4,000 or 10%,” Piyush Gupta, CEO of the Development Bank of Singapore, said at an industry conference in Mumbai, India. He said 1,000 new positions would be added in AI.

A Bloomberg Intelligence report last month said global banks were expected to cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as AI encroached on tasks currently carried out by humans.

Gupta reportedly said last year that his bank had been working on AI for over a decade. "We today deploy over 800 AI models across 350 use cases and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn ($747.61 million)," he said.

A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research warned that AI would likely have a “seismic impact” on the economy and society, particularly in sectors reliant on computer-based tasks.

The think tank’s analysis of 22,000 common tasks performed by human workers found that up to 70% of computer-based roles could be significantly altered or even eliminated by AI.

DNA evidence has exonerated a Hawaii man who served 30 years in prison for murder.

Gordon Cordeiro’s first desire was to visit the grave of his mother, who died of ALS just before he was arrested.

Cordeiro was freed based on advocacy from the Hawaiian Innocence Project, which seeks to free those wrongfully convicted by more closely examining the evidence of settled cases. Cordeiro stood two trials in 1994 for the murder of Tim Baisdell during a drug deal-turned-robbery on the island of Maui.

The state sought to prosecute Cordeiro despite the 22-year-old having four alibis, by relying on four jailhouse informants motivated by promises of reduced sentences, something which the Innocence Project described as “prosecutorial misconduct.”

A DNA profile of an unidentified person was found on the inside pockets of Blaisdell’s jeans, which when combined with other DNA findings, put the possibility of Cordeiro’s involvement squarely within reasonable doubt, a report said.

There were tears in the courtroom when Judge Kristin Hammam ordered the suspect released. “He cried, we all cried,” Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, said.