还记得去年飞机接连坠落的情况吗？虽然在空中和跑道上发生飞机失事的消息较为罕见，但这对于那些在从纽约到芝加哥的商业航班上已经需要靠药物和祈祷才能撑过去的人来说毫无帮助。而现在，美国联邦航空管理局（FAA）希望利用一种新的 AI 工具来优化运行。 “空域、航路和轨迹战略管理”（Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories），简称 SMART，旨在通过提前数日预测需求、天气和空域限制，使 FA…
"NO ONE IN CANADIAN MEDIA ASKED THE OBVIOUS QUESTION OF WHO HAD BEEN PUTTING THEIR CASE TO THE PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE BEFOREHAND."
卡尼（Carney）1月份访问北京期间在新闻发布会上的照片。 据 Victoria Media 报道，此次启动仪式有市政府成员以及中华人民共和国驻多伦多总领事馆的外交人员出席。《新闻周刊》请求多伦多中国领事馆和驻渥太华大使馆置评，但未收到回复。 “加拿大媒体中没有人提出那个显而易见的问题：在此之前是谁向总理办公室提交了申请，或者代表谁提交的，”该消息人士表示，并将这一事件描述为一个可能未被审查的潜在影响力渠道的例子。 “这就是调查结果，”该消息人士说。“这…
[GENERATION GAIN] Young workers are earning more and facing lower unemployment than millennials did at the same age, complicating the familiar perception of Gen Z
SUZANNE BLAKE Z 世代一直被指责不愿工作。但在关于特权感和职业道德低下的熟悉抱怨背后，数据讲述了一个不同的故事。 Z 世代员工进入劳动力市场的条件与千禧一代截然不同，新数据表明这种差异带来了回报。根据简历平台 Zety 的一份新劳动力市场报告，尽管劳动力参与率较低，但 Z 世代成年人面临的失业率更低，且收入高于同年龄段的千禧一代。 “每一代人都记得自己年轻时工作多么辛苦。我们记得漫长的工作时间和艰辛。但不知为何，我们不太记得自己在 22 岁时…
《新闻周刊》的 AI 政策计分卡显示，人工智能接管华盛顿议程的速度，快于两党决定如何应对它的速度 ADAM MILLS 和 ALEX J. ROUHANDEH ● ● ● ● ● 你知道还有谁跟不上 的步伐吗？美国政治家。在两年的时间里，人工智能已从委员会会议室里的新鲜事，变成了 2026 年中期选举中最具争议的问题之一。唐纳德·特朗普总统声称已向 产业投入了超过 $2.7 万亿加元。游说资金随之而来：根据 Issue One 的数据，2026, 前六个月…
一场全国性的抵制浪潮正迫使候选人们进入陌生的领域 ALEX J. ROUHANDEH 在乔恩·休斯顿担任俄亥俄州副州长的六年里，他将为该州引进数据中心视为经济发展推动计划的一部分而感到自豪，该计划向运营商提供了数千万美元的税收减免。2025年，即休斯顿在JD 万斯就任副总统而被选中接替其参议院席位的那一年，俄亥俄州针对数据中心的销售税豁免导致该州损失了近 $1.6 亿美元的潜在收入。 两年前，休斯顿的这一记录会被视为一份出色的共和党资历。但随着中期选举的临…
有一个问题打破了这一模式：数据中心。《新闻周刊》的 AI 政策计分卡反映了过去两年的公开记录，而这两年间发生的事件在很大程度上解释了这种分歧。在特朗普 2024 年赢得选举之后，技术行业出现了向特朗普的剧烈转向，支持数据中心成为了共和党的立场：它是与中国竞争的物理基础设施，也是就业和投资的来源。特朗普继续在“真相社交”上亲自为此辩护。 民主党人在很大程度上并未跟进。随后，公众舆论发生了转变。安嫩伯格公共政策中心（Annenberg Public Polic…
与此同时，在北京，政策制定者之间也正在进行一场平行的辩论，他们同样关注着专家们关于失控的 AI 进步可能带来潜在风险的日益高涨的警告。毕竟，如果模型表明 AI 有一天可能会使人类变得多余，那么不受控制的扩散在理论上也可能挑战中国共产党的主导地位，布兰特（Brandt）将此定义为影响中国关于安全讨论的主要动机之一。 但在这种情景下，华盛顿同样面临风险，这成为了促使美国两党在 与中国政策之关联上达成一致的又一个因素。 麻省理工学院技术、经济与国家安全项目主任 …
由于联盟尚未定型，关于什么才算作对 AI 的合理应对之争具有额外的分量，而业界正投入巨资来塑造这一定义。共同撰写该分析报告的 Issue One 技术改革政策负责人伊莎贝尔·桑德兰（Isabel Sunderland）表示，$41.800 万 的联邦游说资金“反映了联邦层面的书面情况”，但这并不包括通过超级政治行动委员会（super PACs）流入竞选活动的资金。 最大的游说争端之一在于，联邦法规是否应该优先于州和地方的 AI 法律。商业软件联盟（Busi…
在真人秀电视节目的早期，《天鹅》（The Swan）向女性承诺了一张“金票”。埃琳·李·卡尔（Erin Lee Carr）的新纪录片揭露了她们从未看到的细则。 H. ALAN SCOTT 真人秀电视节目的早期就像是“西部荒野”。全美国的普通人们纷纷报名参加未知的体验。从《幸存者》（Survivor）中的遇难者到《美国超模》（America's Next Top Model）中的超模追梦人，数以千计的人参加试镜，希望成为某种全新事物的一部分。2004年，数千…
把《美国恐怖故事》（American Horror Story）变成他自己的“全明星赛季”这件事，只能交给 Ryan Murphy 了。第 13 季迎回了标志性人物杰西卡·朗格、凯西·贝茨、安吉拉·巴塞特和莎拉·保尔森。在《Live With Kelly and Mark》节目中，朗格提出了一个条件：“如果我能扮演全部四个角色，我就回来。”自然地，Murphy 答应了。根据朗格的说法，“几乎每个人都是回归角色。”坦白说，我简直在尖叫。 坦白说，我简直在尖叫…
«We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know. We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.»
白宫禁令能成为头条新闻。而对新闻自由更隐秘的限制则很少能做到这一点。 CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS 又有一位《新闻周刊》的读者罗宾·T·埃利奥特（Robyn T. Elliott）对我们感到愤怒。在总统唐纳德·特朗普禁止 CNN、MS NOW 和 Politico 进入白宫后，埃利奥特写信称， “你们竟然同意审查民主的第四支柱，这简直可耻，”并补充说，如果《新闻周刊》不相信新闻自由，也许我们应该“重新定位为娱乐新闻”。真扎心。
这并不意味着 Z 世代处境轻松。飙升的住房成本和生活开支依然是沉重的负担；尽管他们的薪水比前辈们更高，但负担能力和职业稳定性仍是年轻劳动者最焦虑的问题。 “在参与劳动力市场的人群中，Z 世代的失业率较低，但整体参与就业的年轻人数量在减少。因此，这并非一场完胜，”瑞安表示。“对我而言，更大的启示是，每一代人都会对他们所面对的经济环境做出反应。千禧一代适应了一个劳动力市场，而 Z 世代正在适应另一个。” 这种优势能否维持仍是一个未知数。劳动力市场的冷却可能会削…
Matthew Cannon, Anna Commander, Toby Meyjes, Daniel Orton, Matthew Robinson Amanda Castro, Dan Gooding, Amanda Greenwood, Hannah Parry, Anna Skinner, Samuel Stevenson John Feng 生活与趋势受众编辑
Conglomerate | 1 | Samsung C&TSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | SK Inc.SEOL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | HanwhaSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | FujifilmTOKYO | 5 | Reliance IndustriesMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Astra InternationalJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 7 | Hankyu HanshinIKEDA, JAPAN | 8 | ItaúsaSÃO PAULO | 9 | WesfarmersPERTH, AUSTRALIA | 10 Hitachi TOKYO
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Newsweek's AI policy scorecard shows that artificial intelligence took over Washington's agenda faster than the parties could decide what to do with it.
1900年，French Oil Mill Machinery Company 始于一个全新的构想——一个旨在改进制造工艺并挑战既有行业方法的构想。作为一家专注于创新和工程创造力的第四代家族企业，我们延续这一传统，旨在造福我们的客户。
新闻周刊
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French Oil Mill Machinery Company | Piqua, Ohio | www.frenchoil.com
In 1900 the French Oil Mill Machinery Company began as a new idea - an idea that improved manufacturing processes and challenged established industry methods. Always focused on innovation and engineering creativity, our fourth generation family-owned company continues this tradition for the benefit of our customers.
Newsweek is where diverse voices and opinions meet — a place where curious and open minds come to get a broader understanding of the key issues shaping our world. We provide a forum that enables you to find common ground by participating in good-faith debate with others across political, social and cultural divides.
The flags were flown, the red carpets rolled out and the photo ops scheduled. All President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping had to do was spend a few days demonstrating the “truly great friendship” Trump says they have forged, with the U.S. president adding: “America is very happy about this visit.” But despite the grand welcome, state dinner and warm words at their Washington, D.C. summit from September 23-25, every encounter appeared forced: compressed lips, rigid postures, handshakes conducted with the warmth of a hostage exchange. The Chinese leader’s trip ended without any movement on AI, chips, rare earth minerals or Taiwan, with Xi saying competition should be “healthy” and “kept within bounds,” resembling “a race of catching up” rather than one producing a winner. A soothing account of two superpowers wrestling for economic and technological supremacy. Neither leader showed his hand and both looked like they would rather be anywhere else.
与此同时，其他人则公开质疑相关政策。在堪萨斯州，参议员罗杰·马歇尔（Roger Marshall）质疑了移民与海关执法局（ICE）的运作方式，认为联邦特工应与地方当局更紧密地协调。“我们的警长和警察比任何人都更了解这些社区，”他在 X 上写道。马歇尔的评论出现在共和党内部对移民执法产生更广泛不安的背景之下。佛罗里达州众议员玛丽亚·埃尔维拉·萨拉查（Maria Elvira Salazar）警告称，特朗普的一些移民政策已经“走得太远”。在德克萨斯州，众议员莫妮卡·德·拉·克鲁兹（Monica De La Cruz）在一段竞选广告中重点介绍了一名 DACA 受益者，她曾帮助该受益者脱离 ICE 的拘留，并赞扬其将“人民置于政治之上”。前缅因州州长保罗·勒佩奇（Paul LePage）目前正在竞选国会议员，他也批评了一起涉及持有工作许可的亲属的驱逐案件，称这种情况“不对”。
At the Republican Party's "Trumpapalooza" convention, President Donald Trump urged supporters to vote as though his name were on the ballot. But away from the show of unity, a number of Republican candidates are taking positions that diverge from the administration.
California Representative Young Kim removed references to Trump and “America First” branding from prominent parts of her campaign website, while
Florida candidates Mike Beltran and Casey Askar scaled back Trump-focused language on theirs. Kim's campaign denied claims that the changes represented a break with the president, and Beltran's campaign said the edits did not reflect any
Husted has called for an end to the Iran war
weakening of support, but the changes nevertheless mark a shift in campaign messaging.
Others, meanwhile, have openly questioned policies. In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall questioned the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations were conducted, arguing that federal agents should coordinate more closely with local
authorities. “Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone,” he wrote on X. Marshall’s comments come amid wider Republican unease over immigration enforcement. Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar warned that some of Trump’s immigration policies had “gone too far.” In Texas, Representative Monica De La Cruz featured a DACA recipient whose release from ICE custody she helped secure, in a campaign
ad praising her for putting “people over politics.” Former Maine Governor Paul LePage, now running for Congress, also criticized a deportation case involving a relative who held a work permit, calling the situation “not right.”
In Ohio, Senator
Jon Husted called for an end to the Iran war “as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” Republican Iowa Senate nominee Ashley Hinson and Republican Michigan nominee Mike Rogers also called for the conflict to end. While most remain broadly supportive of Trump, signs of strain are beginning to emerge.
For years, Texas Democrats have treated statewide victory like a mirage, always out of reach. But Texas' young voters may end up holding the key to flipping the deep-red state's marquee Senate seat.
"I am incredibly proud to have students across our state... fight[ing] for the future of Texas."
As Newsweek recently reported, Democrats have focused this cycle on building the infrastructure previous campaigns lacked. Young voters may now supply the energy to test it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent the summer courting them, launching “Students for Paxton” chapters and touting a new generation of conservative activists. “I am incredibly proud to have students across our state stepping up to fight for the future of Texas,” he said.
Yet the political payoff has been elusive. A new survey from Texas Southern University's Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center found Democratic state Representative James Talarico leading Paxton 76 percent to 18 percent among likely voters under 35, a sharp widening from July, when Talarico led 59 percent to 29 percent.
The youth gap is striking, with the same poll showing Talarico ahead by just a point, 47 percent to 46 percent. Political strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek that Talarico's frequent appearances on podcasts and online shows popular with young men have helped his rise. "He's on these platforms," Madrid said. "He's very popular and well received by the hosts and presumably the audience."
Texas could elect its first Democrat statewide in over three decades, reshaping politics far beyond the state.
Italy has joined a long-running debate over integration, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announcing plans to ban burqas and niqabs in schools and limit foreign students in classes. The measures, which would include Italian language requirements for migrant parents, echo policies elsewhere in Europe, including France. Backers say they encourage cohesion; opponents warn they could deepen alienation and stigmatize communities.
The deaths of 10 lions in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area have put a spotlight on the dangers confronting one of Africa's most iconic species. Authorities suspect the animals were poisoned, though a probe is ongoing. It underscores the fragile balance between wildlife conservation and human activity in East Africa, where lion populations face multiple pressures beyond protected reserves.
Google has been hit with a 403 million euro (\$463 million) fine by Ireland's privacy regulator after authorities found the company breached EU data protection rules in its handling of location data between 2018 and 2020. The ruling highlights concerns about the commercial value of information generated by people's daily movements and online activity. Google says the case relates to historical policies and that it has significantly evolved its location data practices.
Indonesia is keeping Russian crude oil on the table, despite the growing risk of U.S. penalties for buyers of Moscow's energy exports. With a second procurement phase under way, officials say future purchases will depend on economic viability and compliance with international rules as Jakarta seeks to bolster energy security. It reflects a broader challenge for import-dependent economies navigating increasingly politicized global energy markets.
Drones have transformed the war in Ukraine from above. Now they are changing how attacks unfold on the ground. During Operation Vivaldi, Ukraine's counteroffensive around Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region, heavy bomber drones carried explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian lines. Once on the ground, the smaller machines were used to disrupt defenses before Ukrainian troops advanced.
"Our heavy bomber drones deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers [six miles] into the enemy's rear," said Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps. He called it the world's first airborne deployment of ground-based robotic systems. Ukrainian media noted that ground robots had previously been carried by air, but not explosive models over such a distance. The tactic illustrates the growing sophistication of unmanned warfare. Aerial drones are becoming more than surveillance platforms or weapons: they can now transport other machines and place them where soldiers would face the greatest risk. Ukraine said Operation Vivaldi had liberated two settlements, secured a third and reclaimed about 19 square miles. Military analyst Mick Ryan said: "We may be approaching, or in the midst of, a shift to a new phase of this war."
A half-empty chamber is supposed to communicate isolation. In diplomacy, absence is judgment: the speaker is no longer worth hearing. But modern populism has made that symbolism unstable. Condemnation can be repackaged as persecution, while an establishment's refusal to listen becomes evidence that its opponent is saying what it cannot bear to hear.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands this grammar well. As he began his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 24, dozens of delegates walked out, leaving much of the chamber empty. He immediately absorbed their protest into his own argument. “If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left the hall, please do so now,” he said.
The diplomats intended their absence as a rebuke. Yet once the cameras captured the walk-out, the empty seats acquired another political life. For Netanyahu's supporters, isolation can signify not abandonment but steadfastness: the solitary defender refusing to bend before a hostile world. The larger the chorus against him becomes, the easier it is to present resistance as authority. Visually, the diplomats became the supporting cast in the story they meant to reject. That does not make their protest meaningless. Diplomatic estrangement can bring policy changes and weakened alliances that rhetoric cannot dissolve. But the scene captured a central tension in modern politics: humiliation and validation can occupy the same image.
The delegates withheld their attention. In doing so, they gave Netanyahu something politicians usually have to manufacture: visible opposition.
A familiar voice used to be proof of identity. Now it can be manufactured from a few seconds of audio. Scammers are using AI to impersonate relatives in distress, reviving the “family emergency” con with fake pleas for bail, ransom or urgent help. Americans aged 55 and older who fall victim to phone scams lose an average of \$1,298 per incident, according to voice-security company Hiya.
The U.S. faces an identity-fraud crisis accelerating faster than systems can track, Jordan Burris, head of public sector at the identity verification platform Socure, recently told the House Oversight Committee.
Deepfakes now mimic gender, accent, speaking style and even mood. “They can sound super happy and bubbly... [or] aggressive and demanding,” Officer Matthew Pesta of the Garland Police Department, Texas, told NBC.
In March, one in four Americans said they had received a deepfake voice call in the previous year. Dark-web ads for voice-cloning services rose 82 percent in 2025 and another 75 percent till July this year, according to a NordVPN report
Now a call can raise the question at the heart of sci-fi thriller Total Recall: How do you know what's real when evidence can be manufactured?
Remember when planes were falling out of the sky last year? News of plane crashes in the air and on the tarmac, while rare, doesn't help people who already need a pill and a prayer to make it through a commercial flight from New York to Chicago. And now the Federal Aviation Administration wants to smooth operations with a new AI tool.
The Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART, aims to move the FAA “from a reactive approach to a predictive one” by anticipating demand, weather and airspace constraints days in advance.
Major airline CEOs are on board, but will flyers be?
In the first two months of 2025 alone, there were 188 aviation accidents. By the end of the year, the Aviation Safety Network Safety Database reported a seven-year high in aviation fatalities, up 30 percent from 2024. That came as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cut around 400 aviation jobs—some of which were directly involved in safety measures.
The Harris Poll found that 65 percent of Americans reported being more nervous about flying after the string of incidents in early 2025. And more than one-third said their fears of flying led them to change their travel plans.
This year, there have already been over 1,000 airplane accidents in the U.S. Virginia Democratic Representative Don Beyer said airlines were reportedly “privately panicking” over the rollout of SMART, and that air traffic controllers were not consulted on the system’s design or trained on it before it was implemented. And with Americans growing increasingly skeptical of AI and its impact on our future, a Xanax prescription might not be enough to quell flight anxiety.
Japan's centenarian population has exceeded 100,000 for the first time, setting a national record after decades of steady growth. The country has more people aged 100 or older than anywhere else in the world, and nearly 88 percent of those are women.
Nearly nine months after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's interim president met Donald Trump, flashed a peace sign and thanked him from the podium. Trump had declared, "To the victor belong the spoils." The spoils include Maduro's understudy.
Venezuela's Nobel-winning opposition leader failed three times in two days to get home from Panama. Rodríguez got a General Assembly seat; Machado couldn't get one on a Beechcraft.
Trump told Britain's new prime minister relations were better “than they were with your last prime minister” and called him a “natural business-person.” Burnham built his career in politics, not business; Labour will wonder what he sold.
纽约市长利用与特朗普的第三次友好会面，推销一项在皇后区铁路场地上建设 12,000 套住房的 210 亿加元 billion 计划。特朗普曾称他为“100 percent Communist Lunatic”，但这个左翼分子精通皇后区的房地产语言。
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Zohran Mamdani
New York's mayor used his third friendly meeting with Trump to pitch a \$21 billion plan for 12,000 homes over a Queens rail yard. Trump once called him a “100 percent Communist Lunatic,” but this pinko speaks fluent Queens real estate.
After nearly two years of annexation threats, Denmark's prime minister gave Trump access to bases a 1951 treaty already allowed. She kept Greenland by letting the Americans reopen a base they closed themselves.
The Costa Rican economist retook the lead for U.N. secretary-general with nine Security Council votes of encouragement, exactly enough. But discouraging votes have climbed from 1 to 5. Two more, and the magic nine stops being possible.
\- Converse's decision to pull an advert featuring K-pop star Karina after accusations of racist imagery has sparked a debate beyond the image itself.
Some said lighting on the singer's skirt resembled a Ku Klux Klan hood, and that the positioning of a pair of sneakers recalled lynching imagery. Others pointed to the controversy as evidence that reports of the demise of “Woke 1.0” may have been exaggerated.
Converse apologized and removed the campaign, but the episode has fed into a broader argument about whether the dynamics associated with Woke 1.0 are still operating.
The term is often used to describe an era when social media activism could turn cultural disputes into corporate crises,
THE ARCHIVES
1998 leaving brands little choice but to apologize and retreat or risk being canceled.
That question has taken on new relevance following reactions to a recent essay by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. It fueled arguments that some of the assumptions underpinning the height of progressive activism are being re-examined, raising the possibility that woke idealism is giving way to a more skeptical outlook.
The Converse dispute, however, followed a familiar script: competing interpretations of an image, a social media firestorm and a company deciding that withdrawal was the
least risky option.
Whatever viewers saw in the advert, it's probably too soon to write a eulogy for Woke 1.0.
对 TikTok 的批评是理所应当的，但这并非全貌。在审判期间，威斯康星州的母亲布兰迪·马利根为克兰西的父母发起了一场 GoFundMe 众筹，筹集了超过 $1.2 百万美元。更令人触动的是那些在案件中看到自己身影的女性所做出的反应。艾莎·阿尔维为国际产后支持组织（Postpartum Support International）撰文道：“林赛·克兰西就是我。唯一的区别是……我足够幸运，最终得到了……产后精神病的诊断和治疗。如果不是因为我见到的第六位医疗服务提供者，我的女儿和我今天都不会在这里。”
根据母亲心理健康领导力联盟（Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance）的数据，大约五分之一的母亲经历过产后心理健康问题，且其中约四分之三未接受治疗。但这并不能为造成的伤害开脱。一位悲痛的父亲面临着毫无根据的指控，而该案件在算法驱动下的反复炒作，往往让猜测而非事实获得回报。
"Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference... was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated."
TikTok's treatment of the Lindsay Clancy case fits a recurring pattern. From Gabby Petito to Karen Read, the platform has turned tragedies into content economies: hashtags, merchandise, sponsored commentary and amateur juries reaching verdicts long before the real one arrives. More than 164,400 videos carried the #clancy hashtag during her murder trial over the deaths of her three children—which ended in a mistrial—as conspiracy theories swirled.
Criticism of TikTok is deserved, but it isn't the whole picture. During the trial, Wisconsin mom Brandee Mulligan launched a GoFundMe for Clancy's parents, raising more than \$1.2 million. More striking was the response to the case from women who saw themselves in it. Aaisha Alvi wrote for Postpartum Support International: "Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference...was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated for...postpartum psychosis. If not for the sixth provider I saw, my daughter and I would not be here today."
Roughly one in five mothers experience a maternal mental health condition, and about three-quarters go untreated, according to Maternal Mental Health Leadership
Alliance. None of this excuses the harm. A grieving father faced unfounded accusations, and the case's algorithmic churn has often rewarded speculation over fact.
But TikTok didn't only make things worse. For every conspiracy theory, there was a woman finally saying the quiet part aloud.
“The best way to grasp this is to see the economic events of the past 15 months as a set of dominoes that, as they tumbled, have imperiled U.S. production and profits—and frayed Americans’ confidence,” Newsweek wrote after a series of international economic crunches—including the Asian and Russian financial crises, which led to the collapse of one of the largest U.S. hedge funds at the time—caused the stock market to slide almost 17 percent in less than three months and drove recession fears. This confidence was important, as consumer buying made up two-thirds of the U.S. economy at the time. Twenty-five years later, the GDP is just as reliant on consumers. However, if Americans’ confidence was shaken then, it’s at rock bottom now. U.S. consumer sentiment has dropped almost 16 percent since the start of the Iran war, renewing worries of a spending pullback that could tip the dominoes again.
If you tuned into the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys game on September 20, you may be eligible for financial compensation—in the form of a dollar from a swear jar. Ex-pro quarterback and FOX Sports NFL analyst Tom Brady dropped the s-bomb during the live broadcast of the prime-time game while watching the gruesome slow-mo footage of Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels dislocating his elbow. Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark—for both Daniels and Brady.
The commentator immediately realized his mistake and apologized, but the damage was already done. Brady's on-air slip of the tongue could cost upward of \$500,000 in an FCC fine for violating the agency's indecency rules, which basically prohibit broadcast television and radio from airing anything you wouldn't want your sweet little grandmother hearing or seeing.
The amount is pocket change for FOX. The real cost is the reputational damage from viewers who had to explain what adult words were to their children. But considering many children are consuming far worse content on their iPhones nowadays—albeit with increasing regulation—the need for such strict rules becomes a little blurrier.
Parents are becoming laxer about their children cursing. Just under half say it's never OK to curse, according to a University of Michigan poll.
Is this shift the result of a growing cultural acceptance of swearing, or has the test for what is profane changed? Standards elsewhere have shifted—ads of models in lingerie and swimwear barely register; many are now just shy of fully nude. And advanced technology has made gore and violence look all the more realistic on the big screen. Even our politicians are cursing more. Is this just the direction we're headed in?
What is clear is that profanity has become a signal for authenticity. Though some questioned Brady's professionalism, most laughed off his unfiltered outburst—and his later description of a pass as a “p\*\*\* missile”—as evidence that he was finally becoming comfortable on-air. Brady, only in his third season behind the mic, signed the richest deal in broadcasting history in 2022: 10 years, \$375 million. His debut drew complaints of being “vanilla” and lacking the charisma that defined his playing career. But as one fan put it after the s-bomb: “I hate Tom Brady but that’s about the only thing that makes him interesting.”
AI is already at war. During the first 24 hours of this year's conflict with Iran, the U.S. used the AI-powered Maven system to help identify and strike more than 1,000 targets. Yet President Donald Trump has proposed an “AI Force” and an AI czar, arguing America must accelerate AI development. At nearly the same moment, the administration floated an AI incident hotline with China. Together, those moves highlight the central tension of AI policy: Washington wants to oversee a technology it also believes it must race to develop faster than Beijing.
The debate is now well established. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar want a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence. Sanders has urged Trump to seek a treaty with China limiting AI development, warning that a superintelligent system would threaten all of humanity, not just one country. Some industry leaders have voiced similar concerns. Others, including Trump allies such as former AI czar David Sacks, argue existing laws governing fraud, privacy and liability already provide sufficient oversight. Public confidence remains low. Pew found majorities distrust both the federal government's ability to regulate AI and companies' ability to develop it responsibly.
The real question is not whether AI should move faster or slower. It is who actually controls it. Trump's Space Force analogy offers one answer. Congress turned Space Force from an idea into an institution with legal authority, personnel and funding. An AI Force currently has none of those. Markets are another force entirely. Goldman Sachs estimates AI-related investment will exceed \$1 trillion globally in 2026, including roughly \$581 billion in the United States. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates data centers could consume 11.8 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has already integrated AI into military operations through Maven, and the international race is shaped by China, whose decisions Washington cannot control.
That leaves a narrow role for any future AI Force. It may advise, coordinate and advocate. But unless it gains authority over law, military systems, investment and international agreements, the forces most shaping AI will remain elsewhere.
A high number of U.S.-made combat boots failed Marines during NATO training in the Arctic, putting them at risk of frostbite and hypothermia. Fresh legislation on military procurement could make the problem worse
BY
ELLIE COOK
I T TOOK ONLY A FEW FRIGID FEBRUARY DAYS OF TRUDGING through Norwegian snow and ice for several United States Marines to notice something was wrong. First, they found holes in the leather of their often brand-new military-issue boots. Next, gaps opened up in the soles of the shoes that let in freezing cold water as they hiked and skied, weighed down by the packs strapped to their backs, according to a Pentagon official and U.S. military records reviewed by Newsweek.
The failures occurred during training for Cold Response 2026, a Norwegian-led NATO exercise involving more than 25,000 personnel in the Nordic country, and more than 7,000 others in Finland. Among those taking part were roughly 3,000 U.S. Marines. Most of them were deployed with the II Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, according to the Marine Corps, to Norwegian training grounds above the Arctic Circle in early 2026.
The boot issues have raised questions about the quality of military-issued footwear and about the Better Outfitting Our Troops (BOOTS) Act, a congressional proposal to expand U.S.-made boot requirements by limiting troops' access to some foreign-made footwear permitted under existing rules. Currently, Pentagon funds can only be used to buy military boots if they're made in the U.S. (subject to certain limited exceptions). The intention was to give U.S. companies a boost and reduce dependence on foreign supply chains, but critics say service members are suffering because they're being forced to wear poor-quality footwear and, ultimately, rack up costs when they need to buy replacements.
Failures in cold weather clothing and footwear can expose troops to frostbite, hypothermia and other life-threatening conditions, particularly during prolonged operations in the depths of Arctic winter.
It comes as NATO turns its attention to the Arctic, wary of Russia's expanding presence and growing Chinese interest, and follows President Donald Trump's long-running fixation with exerting greater U.S. control over Greenland, a self-governing territory of fellow alliance member Denmark.
The Cold Response exercises were part of the “Arctic Sentry” drills NATO unveiled in February, through which the alliance says it is making its presence known in the austere region, getting soldiers and marines accustomed to an unforgiving climate where Moscow’s troops are far more comfortable.
The exercises were intended to showcase how U.S. forces could operate alongside other NATO countries in some of the toughest
PERISCOPE
conditions they could face. And in many ways, they did—but not always in a good way.
Marines were pulled off the icy Norwegian fields during the exercises with their boot soles peeling away, or part of the plastic heel digging into their tendons, the Pentagon official—granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly—told Newsweek. For others, the heel cup wore quickly through the lining or the eyelets became loose.
The Marine Corps has confirmed that the concerns involved Intense Cold Weather Boots manufactured by Belleville Boot Co. It said Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel observed the problems firsthand in Norway.
“Enormous sets of issues started coming up” with the U.S.-made footwear, the Corps said.
According to the Pentagon official, the Norwegian military helped the U.S. Marines source M/77 boots manufactured by the Nordic country's Alfa company, which developed the footwear with Norway's army back in the 1970s. Some pairs of replacement boots were bought directly from nearby stores. The Pentagon official said critical provisions had to be taken off a U.S. resupply ship so the vessel could be reloaded with more American-made boots and rerouted to Norway.
A joint statement provided to Newsweek by Lt. Col. Kurt Stahl, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Europe and Africa, said U.S. forces had used an established Host Nation Support mechanism to procure locally available footwear with U.S. funds.
“Commanders and logisticians took action to meet Marines’ equipment needs and sustain training during the exercise,” the statement said. “We are not aware of any Norwegian forces purchasing or donating boots on behalf of U.S. Marines.”
The statement described Host Nation Support as a standard sustainment process that enables forces to obtain specialized or locally available equipment without requiring every item to be shipped from the U.S.
Stahl disputed the Pentagon official's account of the resupply ship, saying there was no rerouted ship that provided replacement boots to the Marines.
by Newsweek, described “significant defects” in the specialist boot, and said the problems were discovered during the training in Norway from late February.
The assessment referenced a brief given in fall 2025 which said an unspecified vendor “did not identify poor craftsmanship and unacceptable materials” before shipping boots to the Marines. Two photos beneath these judgments show boots overlaid with the Belleville logo. There were “ongoing quality failures” between fall 2025 and spring 2026 with the boots approved for the U.S. Marines to hand to their service members, including the Belleville ones, the briefing says.
The problems did not end when the troops left Norway. After the failures emerged, the Marines returned to their warehouses and inspected additional stockpiles, finding more examples of faulty boots at Camp Lejeune, the Pentagon official said.
The Marine Corps said that Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel subsequently conducted three inspections of Intense Cold Weather Boots at the base. The initial inspection took place one week after the team returned to the U.S., with subsequent inspections conducted in April and July
this year, with representatives for Belleville and Defense Logistics Agency present.
A spokesperson for the DLA—which is responsible for buying
clothes, shoes and equipment for service members—separately confirmed that it supplied the Belleville boots through what they described as a commercial, off-the-shelf contract vehicle to meet a Marine Corps requirement.
“We are aware of the issues with the boots and have been assisting the Marine Corps with inspections,” the spokesperson told Newsweek.
The early 2026 assessment said the vendor, which wasn't explicitly named, was scheduled to inspect 5,000 pairs of boots at Camp Lejeune because “initial sampling” at the warehouse found a roughly 50 percent defect rate. This statement came directly under a description of defects in Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots.
Faulty boots were later identified in other Marine Corps bases, including in Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan, the Pentagon official said. It's
not clear how many boots in total were affected. Newsweek did not view records detailing the number or type of defective boots identified at those additional locations.
A separate presentation from summer 2026, seen by Newsweek, said the inspection had taken place “following widespread failures during Cold Response 2026.”
The information on the slide also said Marines had been pulled from the field because of faulty boots that had all been worn for
Troops attend a military exercise on March 12, 2026, at the Bardufoss Airbase in Norway. Cold Response 2026, which began in the Nordic country a month earlier, exposed failures in U.S. Marines' boots.
fewer than 30 days, and that the corps then had “to buy replacements from the local economy.”
The presentation called the April findings “an alarming rate of defective pairs.” It said the follow-up inspection in July “revealed a substantially higher incidence of defects, indicating a notable deterioration in product quality between the two inspection periods.”
According to the presentation, inspectors examined 2,642 Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots at Camp Lejeune in April and found 183 with defects, a failure rate of 6.93 percent. In July, 1,781 boots were inspected and 355 were found to have defects, a failure rate of 19.93 percent. Combined, 4,423 boots were inspected and 538 were found to have defects, an overall defect rate of 12.16 percent.
The briefing said the industry norm was between a 2 and 3 percent failure rate.
The Marine Corps confirmed that the inspections identified 538 “out-of-the-box workmanship failures.” It said the findings produced a corrective action plan for Belleville to replace affected boots on a one-for-one basis.
Belleville describes its military footwear as “built with the uncompromised craftsmanship, quality and dependability required by warfighters around the globe.”
In a statement to Newsweek, the company said it had been working directly with the Marines to address their concerns and ensure it delivered the quality of combat footwear the service required.
“Belleville is committed to continuous quality improvements and works to quickly resolve any issues,” the company said.
Belleville said it consistently exceeds DLA performance expectations and receives the highest ratings under the agency's Supplier Risk Performance System, which it said measures on-time delivery and product quality.
The company, founded in 1904, described itself as the country's oldest and largest manufacturer of American-made military boots and said it had supplied footwear to the U.S. military since World War I.
The controversy around the equipment has renewed scrutiny of rules that favor American-made military footwear and the push to tighten them further.
The defective boots were military-issued footwear. The proposed BOOTS Act would apply to a related but distinct category: optional combat boots that service members acquire themselves and are permitted to wear with their uniforms.
Because of the decades-old Berry Amendment, Pentagon funds generally cannot be used to buy foreign-made footwear or other covered clothing unless an exemption applies. These exemptions include purchases not exceeding \$200,000, certain emergencies, and cases in which American-made products cannot be obtained when needed in satisfactory quality and sufficient quantity at U.S. market prices.
The BOOTS Act would introduce further restrictions. The House version would require the defense secretary to prohibit service members from wearing optional combat boots as part of a required uniform unless the boots were manufactured entirely in the U.S. from American-grown, reprocessed, reused or produced materials and domestically manufactured components.
The legislation would limit the Marine Corps' Optional Boot Program, which allows service members to wear approved models that are not manufactured in the U.S. as long as they comply with applicable trade rules.
A favored option among service members is footwear made in Cambodia by U.S.-registered company OTB. Three types of boots made by OTB can be worn by Marines.
"THE RESULT IS THAT THE WAR-FIGHTER DOESN'T GET THE BEST PRODUCT."
But the prospect of closing this loophole makes many troops shudder. Not because they oppose the idea of wearing only U.S.-made boots, but because they think the change will harm U.S. Marines and shoemakers won't be able to keep up with the demand.
"The U.S. manufacturers aren't keeping up with quality or quantity," the Pentagon official said. "Just because it is American-made, doesn't mean we're seeing quality."
There's concern even among the current manufacturers about what the BOOTS Act could mean. Chris Perrotti, the head of manufacturing tasked with overseeing quality control and production at Danner—a Belleville competitor—said there was “frustration” among Berry-compliant bootmakers for the U.S. military that the
descriptions handed down by the DLA are based on using certain types of products to build the boots, rather than what will work best.
"The result is that the warfighter doesn't get the best product," Perrotti said in an email seen by Newsweek that was sent to another major U.S. military contractor in November 2025.
It is too expensive for U.S.-based suppliers to scale up their manufacturing to a point where they could support more boots being made, Perrotti said, meaning American companies “can’t support a military ramp up.”
In mid-2024, Washington-based defense and national security think tank CNA published its results of a report commissioned by the DLA. The point, the
report said, was to work out the vulnerabilities and problems with the U.S.'s production of items like Marines' boots, and how it could change during wartime.
In this scenario, the DLA would need to buy an additional 456,000 boots for its service members each year. Industry participants in this war game said this would only be possible with significant investment before a conflict started and caused demand for footwear to surge, as they can only produce a maximum of 525,000 boots currently each year. The additional purchases would put annual production at 981,000.
A separate internal military examination concluded in April this year that U.S.-based vendors could not keep up with demand for boots for U.S. service members, with up to 4.2 million pairs needed across the branches each year in peacetime, Newsweek understands.
The average life span of U.S. military boots is assessed within the armed forces to be between one and two years. Each service member is required to have at least two pairs at any one time.
The BOOTS Act was ultimately removed from the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act outlining the Pentagon's priorities for the 2027 fiscal year, according to information reviewed by Newsweek. Language from the proposal was reintroduced in the Senate in July, leaving open the possibility that it could return as lawmakers resume work on the legislation.
Its backers hope its scope could extend beyond the U.S. military to the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon official said.
That could add millions of pairs of boots to the order books of a limited number of authorized manufacturers. DHS includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. ICE said its ranks had grown by more than 120 percent to 22,000 officers and agents in one year.
The question facing lawmakers is therefore larger than whether one model of boot failed inspection. They must decide whether stricter domestic manufacturing rules would encourage the investment needed to strengthen the American footwear industry, as supporters contend, or restrict access to alternative boots before U.S. companies can reliably supply the necessary quality, performance and volume.
CONTROVERSIAL TAKE INCOMING. NEW YORK CITY MAYOR Zohran Mamdani is the current leader of the Democratic Party. Full stop.
But how could a political neophyte in his first year as a mayor, who has a hard ceiling on his ambitions, since he's not U.S.-born and can't run for president, become the de facto face of a main political party? Partly, there's no one else rising to the occasion, and politics abhors a vacuum. Also, he's just that talented.
This past month, President Donald Trump made a pit stop at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, during a visit to New York City—their third in-person sit-down of the year. Trump just loves this guy. He told reporters at their joint press conference that Mamdani had “great potential,” then patted him on the arm and lingered in the background while the mayor took questions. Mamdani then made a point of calling on CNN, Politico and MSNBC—the three outlets Trump had just banned from the White House.
The irony is that Mamdani is, quite literally, everything Trump used to falsely say about President Barack Obama: Muslim, African-born, socialist. But something closer to a father-son dynamic is developing between these two. The president meeting with an avowed democratic socialist weeks before national elections his own party is trying to frame as a referendum on socialism is not
an ideal look. Trump doesn't care. Game recognizes game. I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani. Both are outer-borough strivers the elites wrote off as jokes before proving everybody wrong. Both have built personality cults around themselves. And Mamdani has that charisma that Trump used to have.
So what if Trump likes guys who remind him of himself? If you're a Republican running for reelection this fall, it gets hard to sell socialism as a bogeyman when the leader of your own party is palling around with an actual socialist. But the more interesting story is what Mamdani is doing for Democrats. He wasn't a nationally known figure when he took office; now he's among the most popular Democrats anywhere. That's rare. Politicians typically lose popularity as they govern. Not Mamdani. Why? It's part social media instinct. Some is his governing record, which has landed closer to the center than his politics suggest, particularly on crime, where he's mostly let the NYPD do its job. And some of it is that charisma.
Mamdani gets away with regular meetings with a president his party's base considers the devil. There's been no real backlash from the DSA wing for sitting down with the man they call Orange Hitler. Compare that to Hakeem Jeffries, who is still taking heat from Democrats for taking a single meeting with Jared Kushner. The difference is charisma. Jeffries doesn't have it. So much of
politics comes down to that. You either have it, like Trump, Mamdani, Obama and Clinton, or you don't, like Vance, Harris, Biden, and Jeffries.
Before the Trump meeting, Mamdani spoke at a U.N. summit of global mayors and made a nuanced argument about his governing philosophy I found compelling: that the left has ceded "I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani."
issues like fraud, efficiency and quality of life to the right, and once an issue gets coded right-wing, Democrats get too scared to touch it. That's how you end up with a CVS where you need to push a button to get toothpaste, or a subway commute where you're stepping around someone in a psychiatric crisis on the way to drop your kid at school. It's a relief to hear a Democratic elected official say you're not a fascist for wanting something better than that.
Call it Nixon-in-China. Mamdani can take on these issues from the left without triggering a backlash, just as Nixon opened relations with China because his anti-communist credentials were beyond reproach.
As a New Yorker, I'm still not sold on Mamdani as a mayor. I have real complaints about how the city is being run right now. But on the national political stage, he's doing the Democratic Party's work for it: principled without being obstinate, telegenic without the plastic polish of a Gavin Newsom, fluent in social media without sounding like he was raised online. He throws red meat to the base when it suits him—calling for the arrest of Benjamin
Netanyahu, say—and pivots to statesman mode just as easily. He’s willing to touch the third rails of progressive politics that everyone else avoids. The African-born, Muslim, socialist mayor of America’s largest city is showing Democrats a path forward. Whether they take it is another question.
SCAN HERE
to watch The 1600
podcast
Carlo Versano is director of politics and culture at Newsweek. Email him at c.versano@newsweek.com
Newsweek examines an alleged influence campaign that coincided with Canada's decision to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles
BY
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
A BUSINESSMAN WITH LINKS TO CHINA'S united front influence network urged Canada to rethink its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles just days before Ottawa slashed the levy, a dossier provided to Newsweek alleges.
Officials announced during Prime Minister Mark Carney's trip to China in January that 49,000 Chinese-made EVs would be allowed into the country at a 6.1 percent tariff—replacing a 100 percent surtax imposed in 2024 under his predecessor Justin Trudeau. The deal was part of a broader trade agreement that included tariff relief from China for Canadian agricultural exports.
But it marked a break with the United States, which continues to restrict Chinese EVs, and raised the temperature around national security concerns in North America over Chinese-made automotive technology.
According to the Canadian source who provided the dossier, a policy paper seeking “a structural rethink of Canada’s 100 percent surtax on Chinese electric vehicles” was delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office and to members of parliament shortly before Carney left for Beijing. The person and the association behind the proposal are not registered lobbyists, according to a search of Canada’s lobby registry.
When Newsweek contacted the prime minister's office seeking confirmation and comment, the Privy Council Office responded, directing the question to Global Affairs Canada, which did not reply to a request for comment.
The dossier identifies the businessman as Shui Shousong, president of the Sino-Canada Entrepreneurs Association, also known as SinoCann. Chinese-language reports reviewed by Newsweek describe Shui as having been a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which is a key part of China's united front system, a Chinese Communist Party network that builds ties with non-party groups, business leaders, diaspora communities and other organizations in support of Beijing's political objectives. The reports included one by Zhejiang Minjian, a magazine affiliated with the United Front in Zhejiang province.
Shui and SinoCann did not respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The United Front Work Department is the CCP body responsible for overseeing much of that work. Western governments and security agencies have scrutinized united front-linked organizations over concerns that they are advancing Beijing's political and economic objectives abroad.
The Canadian source, who asked not to be named because of sensitivities around strained U.S.-Canada ties, said Shui had “a very extensive footprint of united front membership and activity” and had appeared at events with Canadian municipal and federal politicians, including one “where a Chinese consular official openly praised the host organization for advancing ‘reunification’ work,” citing Chinese-language reports. That means “reunification” with Taiwan, which is a core political goal of the CCP and its united front work.
In August, Shui gave a speech at the launch of a new Canada-China EV association and the unveiling of a service center to build a “transnational industrial cooperation platform” between the two countries, according to a report by Victoria Media, a Chinese-language outlet in Canada. Shui is the president of the Canada-China Business Council that hosted the event, according to Chinese-language media reports.
Sitting and retired members of the Canadian Parliament also spoke at the
9月，美国交通部长肖恩·P·达菲（Sean P. Duffy）致信福特汽车公司（Ford Motor Company）首席执行官吉姆·法利（Jim Farley），措辞严厉地表达了对福特与中国公司及技术之间联系的“深切担忧”。交通部引用了福特使用中国宁德时代（CATL）的授权电池技术、涉及总部位于杭州的吉利（Geely）的合作伙伴关系，以及其他与中国相关的供应链问题。
"NO ONE IN CANADIAN MEDIA ASKED THE OBVIOUS QUESTION OF WHO HAD BEEN PUTTING THEIR CASE TO THE PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE BEFOREHAND."
TRADE DEAL
Carney at a press conference in Beijing during his January trip.
launch, which was attended by municipal government members and diplomats from the Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in Toronto, Victoria Media reported. Newsweek requested comment from the Chinese consulate in Toronto and the embassy in Ottawa but did not hear back.
“No one in Canadian media asked the obvious question of who had been putting their case to the Prime Minister’s Office beforehand, or on whose behalf,” the source said, and characterized the episode as an example of a potential influence channel that may have gone unexamined.
“That is the finding,” the source said. “Not a covert operation but an unexamined one: access obtained through ordinary channels, in daylight, by a figure whose affiliations were a matter of public record in two languages, with no registry entry, no reporting, and no evidence that any Canadian body looked [into the matter].”
Chinese EVs have become a major issue in North American trade and security policy. Washington has kept Chinese EVs out of the U.S. market, warning about loss of manufacturing strength in core products and technologies, and has warned that connected vehicle technology could create security vulnerabilities. China's EV industry, led by companies such as BYD, has expanded rapidly overseas, intensifying concerns in Western capitals, particularly in Germany, about industrial capacity, supply chains and data security.
In September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy sent a sharply worded letter to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley expressing “profound concern”
about Ford's ties to Chinese companies and technology. The Department of Transportation cited Ford's use of licensed battery technology from China's CATL, a partnership involving Hangzhou-based Geely, and other China-linked supply chain issues.
"While DOT recognizes the intense competitive pressures of the global market, the Company's recent strategic decisions paint a troubling picture of a foundational American brand actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises," Duffy wrote. Ford rejected the criticism, calling the letter "wrongheaded." The company said it supports U.S. efforts to advance American innovation and manufacturing.
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Newsweek's senior correspondent, international affairs. Email her at d.tatlow@newsweek.com
“这种优势在一定程度上反映了截然不同的经济环境。千禧一代在经济大衰退前后进入成年期，而 Z 世代则受益于疫情后产生了异常强劲工资增长的劳动力市场，”比恩说。“这并不一定意味着 Z 世代工作更努力，或者千禧一代效率较低。年轻人面对的是一个根本不同的劳动力市场，而其中取得成功的人在财务状况上比人们熟悉的‘懒惰 Z 世代’叙事所暗示的要好得多。”
[GENERATION GAIN] Young workers are earning more and facing lower unemployment than millennials did at the same age, complicating the familiar perception of Gen Z
BY
SUZANNE BLAKE
GEN Z HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF NOT WANTING to work. But behind the familiar complaints about entitlement and poor work ethic, the numbers tell a different story.
Gen Z workers are entering the labor market under strikingly different conditions than millennials did, and new data suggests it is paying off. Despite lower labor force participation, Gen Z adults are facing lower unemployment and are earning more than millennials did at the same age, according to a new labor market report from resume platform Zety.
“Every generation remembers how hard we worked when we were young. We remember the long hours and the struggle. Somehow we’re a little less good at remembering all the complaining we did at 22,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek.
“Gen Z isn’t lazy. They’re different. They’re more willing to question whether the old bargain of ‘work hard, keep your head down and eventually you’ll be rewarded’ still makes sense.”
Zety's Early Career Labor Market Report analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data on adults ages 20 to 24 during two comparable periods: millennials from 2005 to 2008 and Gen Z from 2021 to 2024. Median weekly earnings for full-time Gen Z workers averaged about \$756, versus \$674 for millennials after adjusting for inflation, a gap of roughly 12.3 percent. Unemployment averaged 7.5 percent for Gen Z, compared with 8.9 percent for millennials at the same age.
The Market Did the Heavy Lifting "One could argue that with fewer Gen Z workers participating in the traditional workforce, the lower supply of available workers means wages have to be a bit higher to attract them," Kevin Thompson, CEO of 9i Capital Group and host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek.
“For years, we’ve heard a repeated stereotype from older Americans that Gen Z
"FOR YEARS, WE'VE HEARD A REPEATED STEREOTYPE... THAT GEN Z DOESN'T WANT TO WORK, BUT THIS DATA SUGGESTS OTHERWISE."
doesn't want to work, but this data suggests otherwise," said Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin to Newsweek.
Gen Z's advantage comes despite lower overall workforce participation: 71.1 percent, versus 74.5 percent for millennials at the same age. The employment-population ratio also trailed, at 65.8 percent versus 67.9 percent. Fewer Gen Zers are working or looking for work, but those who are tend to come out ahead.
“Gen Z has allowed themselves to fight back against lower-than-average wages and, in some cases, will accept going into debt or forgoing purchases rather than chasing materialism simply for the sake of it,” Thompson said. “I don’t think that means they are unmotivated. Their motivation just doesn’t seem to be centered around money in the same way it may have been for previous generations.”
So why is this happening? Unlike millennials, who entered the workforce ahead of the Great Recession, Gen Z came of age in a historically tight, post-pandemic labor market, with employers battling shortages across industries and younger workers finally holding real leverage.
"Some of that advantage reflects very different economic circumstances. Millennials entered adulthood around the Great Recession, while Gen Z benefited from a post-pandemic labor market that produced unusually strong wage growth," Beene said. "Gen Z isn't necessarily working harder or millennials less effectively. Young people are approaching a fundamentally different labor market, and those succeeding in it are doing considerably better financially than the familiar 'lazy Gen Z' narrative would suggest."
Digital fluency hasn't hurt either. A generation raised on technology and social media aligns neatly with what employers now want. Add retiring Baby Boomers and a wave of vacancies, and conditions tilt further in young workers' favor.
“Give any cohort of workers a tight market and they’ll command, and get, higher pay. Hand them a recession and they’ll spend a decade, or a lifetime, digging out,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek. “The only variable that matters here is the balance of power between employers and workers, and employers spend billions doing everything they can to keep it tilted their way.”
None of this means Gen Z has it easy. Soaring housing costs and living expenses remain real burdens, while affordability and career stability still top the list of anxieties for young workers, even with fatter paychecks than their predecessors had.
“Gen Z has lower unemployment among people participating in the labor force, but fewer young adults are participating or employed overall. So this isn’t a clean victory lap,” Ryan said. “To me, the bigger lesson is that generations respond to the economy they’re handed. Millennials adapted to one labor market. Gen Z is adapting to another.”
Whether that advantage holds is an open question. A cooling labor market could erode Gen Z's gains, while AI may reshape entry-level work altogether in the years ahead.
“I’m seeing the tide move,” Driscoll said. “The market is cooling and employers are clawing back, spending more on lobbying than what it would cost to just pay people more and cover benefits. What we’re seeing is the reality of concessions, extracted under pressure, now retreating. Workers only keep what we can defend.”
Gen Z wasn't handed an easier path, just a different one. So far, they're working it smarter, not harder.
Suzanne Blake reports for Newsweek on consumer and social trends. Email her at s.blake@newsweek.com
这是一个旨在为复杂且快速演变的 政策辩论带来某种秩序的系统。“这场辩论中极少有领导者是 潜力的‘怀疑论者’，”主张加强保障措施的 Public First Action 总法律顾问布伦丹·帕雷茨（Brendan Parets）告诉《新闻周刊》。“然而，在‘向前竞赛’阵营中，有许多人公开怀疑 是否会对我们的国家安全、家庭和社区构成严重风险，而这些
为了绘制立法者的真实立场，新闻周刊（Newsweek）创建了 AI 政策计分卡。它将所有 537 名现任国会议员（包括参议员、众议员和无投票权的众议院代表）定位在从“AI 怀疑论者 (1)”到“AI 推动者 (5)”的量表上。该分数基于每位成员在五个领域的立场：监管与治理、数据中心与能源、就业与经济、安全与隐私，以及国家安全与中国。这些分数参考了官方记录：点名投票和法案
“这尚未遵循许多其他议题中典型的极化政治动态。”
需要强有力的监管。
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HOW AI ATE DC
NEWSWEEK'S AI POLICY SCORECARD SHOWS THAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOK OVER WASHINGTON'S AGENDA FASTER THAN THE PARTIES COULD DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT
BY
ADAM MILLS AND ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
● ● ● ● ●
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THE PACE OF AI? American politicians. In the space of two years, artificial intelligence has gone from a committee-room curiosity to one of the most contested issues of the 2026 midterms. President Donald Trump claims to have directed more than \$2.7 trillion into the AI industry. The lobbying dollars have followed: 11 of the largest technology and AI companies and their trade associations spent \$41.8 million lobby-
ing the federal government in the first six months of 2026, according to Issue One, roughly 10 percent more than a year earlier. This past spring, more than \$27 million from groups linked to OpenAI and Anthropic poured into a single Democratic congressional primary in Manhattan. The sudden emergence of AI as a political issue has turned zoning fights over data centers into attack ads. And it has pushed a question that once belonged to science fiction—will humanity be wiped out by killer robots?—into cable news bookings.
What artificial intelligence hasn't done, unlike nearly every other topic in the
public discourse in the year 2026, is sort itself cleanly into the two parties. “There’s been a total scrambling of partisan politics on this,” Evan Roth Smith, a pollster and founding partner at Sling-shot Strategies, told Newsweek. “We have seen AI have an impact in just about every way that an issue can impact an election.”
That leaves voters heading to the polls on November 3 with an unusual problem. On abortion, guns or immigration, a party label tells you most of what you need to know about a candidate. On AI, it tells you less.
Some members of Congress have told reporters they've used AI only a handful of times; others say their offices rely on it. Some lawmakers abhor data centers while others see them as vital. Some think AI should be regulated by the states, others that it ought to be a purely federal matter. Instead of a party line, AI policy is a patchwork that shifts from
district to district and state to state.
sponsorship from the soon concluding 119th Congress, as well as a wide review of public statements made in speeches, interviews, press releases and social media posts.
The Booster end describes the agenda the hyperscalers and the investors financing the buildout have pressed on Washington: minimal regulation for the sake of technical progress, safety risks as engineering problems to be solved later, vast economic gains worth the job displacement, urgent data center construction at scale, and a race with China that is America's existential national security challenge of
its time. A Skeptic answers no on all five counts.
Between them sits nearly everyone, in combinations no party platform describes, which is why the five category scores matter as much as the overall grade. A single number makes hundreds of lawmakers comparable. The categories show which parts of the agenda each one accepts and which they reject.
It's a system designed to bring some order to a complicated and quickly moving policy debate around AI. “Very few leaders in this debate are ‘skeptics’ of AI’s potential,” Brendan Parets, general counsel for Public First Action, which advocates for stronger safeguards, told Newsweek. “There are, however, many in the ‘race forward’ camp who are publicly skeptical that AI poses serious risks to our national security, families and communities that
To map where lawmakers actually stand, Newsweek built the AI Policy Scorecard. It positions all 537 sitting members of Congress, including senators, representatives and nonvoting House delegates, on a scale from AI Skeptic (1) to AI Booster (5). That score is based on the stances each member has taken in five areas: Regulation & Governance, Data Centers & Energy, Jobs & Economy, Safety & Privacy, and National Security & China. The scores draw on the official record: roll-call votes and bill
SEVERAL FINDINGS FROM THE AI POLICY Scorecard stand out. The extremes are, as extremes tend to be, highly polarized, but Congress does not sort itself on AI policy along familiar partisan lines. The extremes are also nearly empty. Only 18 members score as AI Skeptics, all of them in the Democratic caucus, and only 10 as AI Boosters, all Republicans. Those 28 members are 5 percent of Congress.
As a whole, each party leans in opposite directions: The average Democrat
SLOW IT DOWN
The 10 biggest AI Skeptics in Congress whose records most consistently favor slowing AI down, tougher safety protections and more caution about jobs and the economy
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Bernard Sanders | VT | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.3 | 1.3 | Sen. Tina Smith | MN | D | - | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.3 | Sen. Jeff Merkley | OR | D | 1 | 2 | - | 1.8 | 1 | 1.4 | Sen. Alex Padilla | CA | D | 1 | - | - | 2 | - | 1.5 | Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand | NY | D | 2 | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Mazie K. Hirono | HI | D | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Peter Welch | VT | D | 2 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Raphael G. Warnock | GA | D | - | 2 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.7 | Rep. Frederica S. Wilson | FL-24 | D | 1 | 1.8 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 | Sen. Edward J. Markey | MA | D | 1.3 | 1.5 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 |
加利福尼亚州民主党众议员泰德·刘（Ted Lieu）得分为 2.6，被评为“倾向于怀疑”，而他的记录则展现了这些标签背后的复杂性。今年 4 月，刘与共和党众议员杰伊·奥伯诺特（Jay Obernolte）共同推动了跨党派的《美国 AI 领导力法案》，该方案旨在通过研究、标准、联邦采用和劳动力开发来加强美国的领导地位。三个月后，他支持了《AI 紧急停止开关法案》，该法案将要求最强大系统的开发人员在系统构成灾难性风险时，必须保留将其减速或关闭的能力。
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FULL SPEED AHEAD
The 10 biggest AI Boosters in Congress whose records most consistently favor faster AI development, fewer rules and more data centers
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Alan Armstrong | OK | R | - | 5 | - | - | - | 5.0 | Sen. Dan Sullivan | AK | R | 5 | - | - | - | 5 | 5.0 | Sen. Kevin Cramer | ND | R | - | 4.7 | - | - | 4.5 | 4.6 | Sen. Deb Fischer | NE | R | - | - | 4 | 4 | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. James E. Risch | ID | R | 3 | 5 | - | - | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. Jim Banks | IN | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.8 | 4.3 | Sen. John Thune | SD | R | 4.5 | 4 | - | - | - | 4.3 | Sen. Joni Ernst | IA | R | 4 | - | - | - | 4.5 | 4.3 | Sen. Mike Rounds | SD | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.5 | 4.2 | Sen. Ted Cruz | TX | R | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4.8 | 4.2 | scores 2.60, Lean Skeptic, while the average Republican scores 3.26, Lean Booster. More than half of Democrats, 137 of 262, fall in the Lean Skeptic band, and more than half of Republicans, 137 of 266, fall in Lean Booster. But the distance between the parties—0.66 points on a scale that runs 1 to 5—is relatively small.
And there is also a lot of overlap. Nine Democrats score Lean Booster and 25 Republicans score Lean Skeptic. Together, these 34 members have AI records closer to the opposing party's average than to their own. Another 191, more than a third of Democrats and a third of Republicans, land in Mixed, the scorecard's
narrowest band reserved for records that balance right at the center.
Dig deeper into the data and those differences mask a lot of similarities, with the two parties agreeing on many of the questions at the center of the AI debate: how dangerous (or not) the technology is, and how much it matters to beat China in the AI race (a lot). The primary issue where Republicans and Democrats
SCAN HERE
to see all the data from our study and read a detailed methodology.
do break decisively is the one, not surprisingly, that has received the most attention in midterm campaigns: data centers. On Safety, the mean score for both Republicans and Democrats is 2.1, a low Lean Skeptic score. On National Security, the mean is 4.4 Booster for Republicans and 3.9 Lean Booster for Democrats. But on Data Centers, the parties show a 1.7-point gap from the 3.5 Lean Booster for Republicans and 1.9 Lean Skeptic for Democrats.
Individual member combinations are where the scores gets especially interesting. Representative Andy Barr, a Kentucky Republican, scores 3.7, in the middle of Lean Booster territory.
He's taken Booster positions, advocating in June that U.S. policy should be to “win the race for artificial intelligence dominance,” and argued that competing would require more data centers, semiconductor production and power generation. Yet he has also sounded Skeptic notes, leaving the question of where that infrastructure gets built to local communities.
"Some communities are going to want those projects, some communities are not," Barr said. "The people should be in charge of those decisions."
Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, scores 2.6, Lean Skeptic, and his record displays the complexity behind the labels. In April, Lieu partnered with Republican Representative Jay Obernolte on the bipartisan American Leadership in AI Act, a package aimed at strengthening U.S. leadership through research, standards, federal adoption and workforce development. Three months later, he backed the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require developers of the most powerful systems to retain the ability to slow or shut them down if they pose catastrophic risks.
“在这一问题上，尚未出现像许多其他议题那样典型的两极分化政治动态，”斯坦福大学法学院的内森尼尔·珀西利（Nathaniel Persily）告诉《新闻周刊》，他同时领导着美国政治学会（American Political Science Association）关于 AI 与政治的任务小组。
国会之外的联盟同样令人感到陌生。美国劳工联合会-产业组织技术研究所（AFL-CIO Technology Institute）执行主任劳伦·麦克费伦（Lauren McFerran）表示，在某些 AI 问题上，劳工领袖现在与保守派宗教领袖共同签署同一封信函，他们被对就业、安全以及技术发展方向的焦虑所凝聚在一起。
“你确实能在这里看到一些有趣的‘床伴’（意指不寻常的结盟），”她说。
麦克费伦听到最多的焦虑是关于工作的，而这正是 AI 政策计分卡（AI Policy Scorecard）显示两党达成共识的另一个领域：双方的手段
“我们面临着这样一个风险，而且我们知道它是真实的，即这些模型中的一个会变成‘终结者’。”
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Agreement on Both Sides
"THIS IS NOT YET FOLLOWING THE TYPICAL POLARized political dynamics of so many other issues," Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School, who co-leads the American Political Science Association's task force on AI and politics, told Newsweek.
The coalitions outside Congress are just as unfamiliar. Lauren McFerran, executive director of the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, said labor leaders now sign on to the same letters as conservative religious leaders on some AI issues, drawn together by anxiety over jobs, safety and the direction of the technology.
“You really see some interesting bedfellows here,” she said.
The anxiety McFerran hears most is about work, which is another place the AI Policy Scorecard shows bipartisan agreement: the means of both
这种反转在共和党党团内部也清晰可见。在《新闻周刊》的 AI 政策计分卡中，国会共和党人在数据中心问题上的平均得分为 3.64（倾向于支持），而民主党人则为 1.97（倾向于怀疑）——在五个评分问题中，这是唯一一个可以通过党派预测成员立场的议题；而在安全性、就业与经济以及国家安全等议题的得分上，两党的分布则更为接近。
Slingshot 的史密斯在选民中看到了同样的趋同现象，但达成这一结果的路径各不相同。他说，一名担心 AI 的民主党人可能会关注财富集中以及技术高管的权力；而一名共和党人则可能认为一个精英阶层正在获得对普通生活的某种新权力。独立人士通常对权力集中持有更深层的怀疑。这些不同的世界观最终可能会得出相同的结论。
AI 在政治上的兴起“比近期记忆中的几乎任何议题都要快”，史密斯表示，因为 通过生活的方方面面触及人们。Slingshot 的民意调查发现，人们在自己舒适地使用 的同时，仍然担心 对周围经济和社会可能产生的“系统性影响”。“人们持怀疑和忧虑态度，”史密斯说。
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THE DATA CENTER ELECTION
A nationwide backlash is forcing candidates onto unfamiliar ground
BY
ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
IN THE SIX YEARS JON HUSTED SPENT AS OHIO'S lieutenant governor, he celebrated bringing data centers to the state as part of an economic development push that handed operators tens of millions in tax breaks. In 2025, the year Husted was
tapped to fill JD Vance's Senate seat when he became vice president, Ohio's sales tax exemption for data centers cost the state almost \$1.6 billion in foregone revenue.
Two years ago, Husted's record would have been regarded as a sterling Republican credential. But heading into the midterms and fighting to keep his seat, Husted is finding that record is a political liability he is trying to legislate his way out of.
His opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has put the record Husted built at the forefront of his campaign. “Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs,” Brown said, “and Ohioans—not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends—should get to decide if data centers are built in their community.”
That reversal is visible across the Republican caucus. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, Republicans in Congress average a 3.64 Lean Booster score on Data Centers while Democrats are Lean Skeptics at 1.97—the only topic of the five scored questions where party predicts a member's stance, unlike the scores for Safety, Jobs & Economy and National Security, where the two parties are more closely clustered together.
Much of the reason for the split on data centers is that these scores record positions taken over the past two years, a period in which the politics of data centers has changed dramatically. When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, flanked by tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, Republican support for tech company buildouts was a natural fit.
Today, Trump remains one of the biggest public boosters for data centers, lending his dominance over the news cycle to their cause. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
But public opinion has moved the other way. In opinion polls, local opposition to data centers is broad and rising. A Gallup survey released in May found roughly seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community—more than oppose the idea of a nearby nuclear plant. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August put opposition to a local data center at 61 percent, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents against. It is one of the few AI questions where majorities of voters in both parties are firmly in agreement.
“Whether you come at this from the existential risk, geopolitical concerns, labor force impacts or the actual economics and climate and energy issues related to data centers, it is the physical manifestation of AI,” Nathaniel "I AM RESPONDING
TO WHAT THE
VOTERS WANT. THEY
WANT THE DATA
CENTERS TO BE
HELD ACCOUNTABLE
FOR THE COSTS
OF NEW
ELECTRICITY AND
INFRASTRUCTURE.
AND MY BILL
DOES THAT."
Persily, who researches AI at Stanford Law School, told Newsweek. "It is literally a concrete building where you can then channel your anxieties and frustrations."
Congressional Republicans have demonstrated an awareness of
their vulnerabilities on this issue. In the House, Republicans rallied around the Ratepayer Protection Act, which aims to prevent consumers and small businesses from footing the bill for electrical grid upgrades required by AI data centers. Democrats overwhelmingly joined them when the bill passed September 16 with a 417-3 vote. Before it becomes law, however, the bill must pass the Senate, where it is stalled.
The senator who first introduced the measure in the chamber? Jon Husted of Ohio. The day after the bill passed the House, he took to the floor to urge the Senate to pass it by unanimous consent. “I am responding to what the voters want. They want the data centers to be held accountable for the costs of new electricity and infrastructure. And my bill does that,” he told Newsweek.
But the move was blocked by Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, who said he doesn't think it goes far enough. "Rather than voluntary pledges or suggestions to states, Congress needs to pass real legislation, with real teeth," Heinrich said, urging passage of his own bill. That measure, the GRID Savings Act, would require large data center operators
and other industrial users to finance the grid infrastructure they need, instead of asking states to consider it. “If hyperscalers and other Big Tech developers need expensive new facilities and more energy, they should pay for it,” he said.
The bill's fate now sits at the intersection of two campaigns. Husted, who says he's always believed data center development should be a local decision, needs a record of data center skepticism he can point to. But Heinrich and other Democrats have no reason to hand vulnerable Republican incumbents an accomplishment ahead of November 3. "Democrats proved that they're more interested in playing politics than they are at responding to the needs of the American people. They don't really care about affordability when it comes to electricity and data centers. They care about having a political issue. And so they own it now," Husted said.
Ultimately, what neither party is offering is a way to stop the buildout. In Ohio, 78 percent of residents favor a moratorium on new data center construction while more information can be gathered, per a Bowling Green State University poll. Husted doesn't support one. Neither does Brown, who promises instead to make operators pay their full electricity costs, protect water supplies and give communities a say in approvals. However, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, at least 138 Ohio communities have put active data center moratoriums on their books.
That is also why the issue travels so well. Wider grievances against tech companies found a target in data centers: a windowless building on the edge of town, a transmission line, a tax abatement the county already approved.
Husted's arc is the whole shift in miniature: a lieutenant governor who cut the deals is now the senator asking colleagues to protect voters from the bills those deals helped run up. He is not alone, only earlier and more exposed than most. Whether he corrected course fast enough is a question Republicans everywhere will see answered on November 3.
parties land in Mixed, with Republicans at 3.0 and Democrats at 2.8. Some 72 percent of Americans said it was a bad time to find a job, per a Gallup poll published in March.
"The rubber is going to hit the road here when it comes to job security," McFerran said. She pointed to two especially exposed groups: young people trying to enter the workforce and workers in clerical and administrative jobs that have traditionally offered a route into the middle class without a college degree. Protecting workers, she argued, doesn't have to mean resisting technology. Employees often understand where a new system could fail and what would make it useful. "It's who's in the room to make the decision," she said.
"IF CONGRESS ACTS HASTILY BEFORE THE TECHNOLOGY IS UNDERSTOOD, CONGRESS RISKS KILLING INNOVATION AND SETTING THIS TECHNOLOGY BACK DECADES."
Smith of Slingshot sees the same convergence among voters, but arriving by different routes. A Democrat worried about AI might focus on concentrated wealth and the power of technology executives, he said. A Republican might see an elite class acquiring new authority over ordinary life. Independents often bring a deeper suspicion of centralized power. These different worldviews can end up at the same conclusions.
AI has taken off politically “faster than just about any issue in recent memory,” Smith said, because it reaches people through so many parts of their lives. Slingshot’s polling found that people can be comfortable using AI themselves and still fear the “systemic impacts” of what it could do to the economy and society around them. “People are skeptical and apprehensive,” Smith said.
这一切始于一次辞职。离开 Anthropic 的研究员雅各布·考克森（Jacob Coxon）发布了一则笔记，指责前沿实验室在“拿我们的生命赌博”，该笔记在 X 上的浏览量超过 1.73 亿 次。Anthropic 对齐科学团队的负责人埃文·胡宾格（Evan Hubinger）放大了这种警报。他发帖称：“我们真的真诚地相信 AI 可能会杀死所有人类。”
Politico 9 月的一项民意调查发现，63% 的美国人认为 AI 至少会对毁灭人类构成中度风险。
9 月 12, Anthropic 首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）发表了一篇题为《我们必须控制前沿步伐》（We Must Pace the Frontier）的文章。他写道：“我们必须放慢提高 AI 模型能力的步伐。”OpenAI 的萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）迅速表示赞同（“我同意达里奥的观点，即我们需要控制前沿步伐”），伊隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）也是如此（“达里奥是对的”）。
IT STARTED WITH A RESIGNATION. JACOB Coxon, a researcher leaving Anthropic,
posted a note accusing frontier labs of “gambling with our lives” that was viewed more than 173 million times on X. Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s alignment science team, amplified the alarm. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he posted.
A September Politico poll found that 63 percent of Americans believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity.
On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. OpenAI’s Sam Altman quickly agreed (“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier”) and so did Elon Musk (“Dario is right”).
Amodei's case for slowing down rests on the same three premises Congress holds. The technology, he wrote, “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” But slow down too much, “then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” he added, warning of giving China’s ruling Communist Party an advantage.
Persily puts the stakes in similar terms. "When [Claude] Mythos first came out, we were living in a world that had never existed before where an American company could basically take down almost any government in the world if it wanted to," he said. "Things are moving so fast that we kind of forget where we are and where we've been."
就白宫而言，其立场比 AI 行业自身的领导者更偏向支持端。特朗普 9 月 14, 在真相社交（Truth Social）上写道：“AI 需要的唯一控制或‘护栏’就是一位强大且聪明（高智商！）的总统，而美国恰恰拥有这样一位总统，而且绰绰有余！”他指责阿莫代“现在在伪装成一个‘完美的小天使’”。
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AGREEMENT...TO A POINT
The average Democrat scores as a Lean Skeptic while the average Republican is a Lean Booster. But on four of the five questions in Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, the parties sit close together. Each dot shows the caucus' average on each issue from 1 (Skeptic) to 5 (Booster). Only data centers truly divide them
Democratic Caucus
2.60
Republican Caucus 3.26
Holding both convictions at once has not produced much legislation. On September 16, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, tried to fast-track a bill requiring AI developers to build shutdown mechanisms into advanced systems. “We’ve got this risk out there that we know is real of one of these models becoming the Terminator,” Kennedy said.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, blocked it. “If Congress acts hastily before the technology is understood,” Paul said, “Congress risks killing innovation and setting this technology back decades.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, has backed legislation to ban superintelligence outright. Republican senators including Kennedy, Rick Scott of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri have declined to support it; Hawley has pushed instead to hold companies legally liable for what their systems do.
The White House, for its part, has staked out a position to the booster side of the AI industry's own leaders. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High
IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote on Truth Social on September 14, accusing Amodei of "now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'"
有一个问题打破了这一模式：数据中心。《新闻周刊》的 AI 政策计分卡反映了过去两年的公开记录，而这两年间发生的事件在很大程度上解释了这种分歧。在特朗普 2024 年赢得选举之后，技术行业出现了向特朗普的剧烈转向，支持数据中心成为了共和党的立场：它是与中国竞争的物理基础设施，也是就业和投资的来源。特朗普继续在“真相社交”上亲自为此辩护。
民主党人在很大程度上并未跟进。随后，公众舆论发生了转变。安嫩伯格公共政策中心（Annenberg Public Policy Center）8 月发布的一项调查发现，61% 的美国人反对在他们所在的地区建设新的数据中心，比今年早些时候高出 12 个百分点。民主党人、共和党人和独立人士中的大多数人都表示反对。
ONE ISSUE BREAKS THE PATTERN: DATA CENTERS. The Newsweek AI Policy Scorecard reflects the past two years of public record, and the events of the last two years go a long way toward explaining the split. In the wake of Trump's 2024 election victory, marked by a sharp turn toward Trump in the technology industry, backing data centers became a Republican position: the physical infrastructure for the race with China and a source of jobs and investment. Trump continues to make the case himself on Truth Social.
Democrats, for the most part, did not follow. Then public opinion turned. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August found that 61 percent of Americans opposed construction of a new data center in their area, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents were opposed.
Persily calls data centers the “physical manifestation of AI,” a place where anxieties about jobs, geopolitics, energy or the technology itself suddenly acquire a
target: land, transmission lines, water use, tax breaks and an electricity bill.
Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of the Republican polling firm Cygnal, said data centers began surfacing unprompted in his focus groups toward the end of 2025. By the later primaries, candidates were attacking opponents over their records on data centers and the tax incentives that came with them.
“Nobody’s explaining why we need more of them,” Buchanan said. The fight, he argued, has become a stand-in for something larger: “It’s a proxy issue of, ‘Is this person in the pocket of special interest or is this person for people like me?’”
The record is now moving in real time. On September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, introduced by Representative Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, by a vote of 417 to 3. The bill requires technology companies to pay for new energy infrastructure serving data centers rather than passing those costs on to other customers. Several Republicans in competitive races signed on as cosponsors in the weeks before the vote. The
“中国越来越多地被用来证明在 监管方面采取不同政策立场的合理性，”布鲁金斯学会约翰·L·桑顿中国中心（John L. Thornton China Center）专门研究美中关系和新兴技术的研究员凯尔·陈（Kyle Chan）告诉《新闻周刊》。“我们都能同意中国是 监管中不可忽视的关键因素，但我们对于应对中国的最佳方法并不一致。”
Competition with China drives unusually broad consensus across Capitol Hill
BY
TOM O'CONNOR
● ● ● ● ●
MUCH LIKE THE RACE FOR SUPREMACY IN NUCLEAR arms and space exploration during the Cold War, the United States once again finds itself contending with a communist rival with vast capabilities in a cutting-edge field likely to define the world for gen-
erations to come. AI, however, in many ways poses an even more complex set of challenges as the U.S. and China move to set and advance their agendas.
As the debate over AI policy plays out in Washington, no issue animates support for an aggressive AI buildout more than the national security implications. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, 86 members received the highest Booster score of 5 in National Security for their positions on AI issues tied to national security and competition with China. That's more than the other four questions covering regulation, data centers, jobs and safety. The caucuses sit closer here than on any other question in the scorecard—Democrats average 3.9, Republicans 4.4.
“China is increasingly being invoked to justify differing policy positions on AI regulation,” Kyle Chan, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center who specializes in U.S.-China relations and emerging technologies, told Newsweek. “We can all agree that China is the elephant in the room for AI regulation, but we don’t agree on what’s the best approach for dealing with China.”
“In general, people looking for some kind of unifying force behind the AI debate are looking to China,” Chan said. “There’s an effort to find common ground on AI issues in the face of so much division.”
AI INDEED REMAINS A DIVISIVE ISSUE IN CONGRESS. THE LARGEST share of lawmakers—191—received a Mixed score of between 2.8 and 3.2, while Skeptics outweigh the Boosters at 162 to 146, according to the AI Policy Scorecard data. But even among those who aim to rein in AI at home through stricter regulation, some lawmakers stand out as prominent proponents of the narrative that the field constitutes a powerful tool in the superpower contest with China.
In the Democratic camp, they include Senators Dick Durbin and Amy Klobuchar, each of whom has a 5 in the national security and China component of AI policy while scoring under 2 in the other categories concerning domestic policy, indicating a track record of seeking more stringent checks and balances on AI at home.
Among Republicans, Senator Josh Hawley emerges as one of the most prominent proponents of curbing unbridled AI expansion at home while pushing for supremacy against China in this field.
Seth Center, former State Department acting special envoy for critical and emerging technologies who co-led the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in 2024, argued the two positions may ultimately collide.
“You cannot hold a ‘beat China in AI consensus’ and a ‘slow down AI development and stop AI infrastructure projects’ view domestically forever without contradictions emerging sooner rather than later,” Center told Newsweek. “There is a synthesis, but politics seems to be making it less likely.”
ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT GROUP OF LAWMAKERS GENERALLY PREFER boosting AI proliferation in the U.S. rather than imposing guardrails as the way to meet the challenge from Beijing.
Republicans within this faction include Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York, who is retiring from the House, Jodey Arrington of Texas, Richard McCormick of Georgia, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
Meanwhile, the lead Democrat in this group is Representative Jared Golden of Maine, also retiring at the end of this term, who ranks second behind Pennsylvania's Senator John Fetterman as the top ranked AI boosters in his party.
Jessica Brandt, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center, pointed to “a broad consensus that AI could transform the balance of military and economic power globally for decades to come and have profound consequences for the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world.”
“That shared understanding creates a simple, unifying
Yet she argued that “the consensus breaks down over what ‘winning’ actually means,” as goals remain ill-defined by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And given Beijing's notable advances in AI, Brandt argued that time was of the essence for outlining U.S. objectives and concrete strategies to pursue them.
"A year ago, the dominant conversation was: How can we beat China in the race to the frontier?" Brandt said. "Now the conversation is shifting to: How, if at all, can we pace the frontier without China?"
与此同时，在北京，政策制定者之间也正在进行一场平行的辩论，他们同样关注着专家们关于失控的 AI 进步可能带来潜在风险的日益高涨的警告。毕竟，如果模型表明 AI 有一天可能会使人类变得多余，那么不受控制的扩散在理论上也可能挑战中国共产党的主导地位，布兰特（Brandt）将此定义为影响中国关于安全讨论的主要动机之一。
MEANWHILE, IN BEIJING, A PARALLEL DEBATE IS PLAYING OUT among policymakers observing the same growing chorus of warnings from experts about the potential risks posed by runaway AI advances. After all, if models indicate AI could one day render humanity obsolete, unchecked proliferation could also theoretically challenge the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, which Brandt defines as one of the top motivations coloring China's discussions on safety.
But there are risks for Washington in this scenario as well, serving as yet another factor bringing both U.S. parties together on the links between AI and China policies.
If China doesn't get AI safety under control, the consequences are swift and global, R. David Edelman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project on Technology, the Economy & National Security, told Newsweek: "The geopolitical risks of a cavalier approach to AI in Beijing could break out into a shooting war far quicker than many would care to admit.
“So regardless of what motivates lawmakers—whether they are concerned about advanced AI as an existential risk to humanity, as a critical way to grow the economy amidst global competition or as a risk to our national security in another country’s hands—all of those policies demand a thoughtful approach to China,” Edelman said.
There is also some logic to seeking cooperation.
“Both governments have an interest in regular channels for flagging and fixing vulnerabilities before they become crises,” Jessica Chen Weiss, former U.S. State Department official who serves as faculty director of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for America, China and the Future of Global Affairs, told Newsweek.
"As China bets on open-weight models, its companies have a growing stake in sharing threat information and best practices," Weiss said. "Technical dialogues could make both countries safer, starting with a common enemy: the ransomware gangs that exploit shared vulnerabilities."
In fact, there is precedent for such collaboration.
Weiss pointed out that when California-based cybersecurity firm Calif used AI to detect a bug that could allow illicit access to accounts associated with popular Chinese messaging platform WeChat, the findings were reported to Shenzhen-based parent conglomerate Tencent.
“That is the kind of disclosure both governments should want more of,” Weiss said.
“IT’S NOT QUITE CLEAR WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A REPUBLICAN ON AI OR A DEMOCRAT ON AI.” POLITICIANS... ARE “FIGURING THIS OUT ON THE FLY.”
scorecard rates the measure a 2, Lean Skeptic, and that single vote moved a number of House Republicans' scores.
Democrats voted for it too—and argued it was not enough. Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, called the bill “only the beginning.” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said it “falls short.” As of press time, there have been no signs of advancing to a Senate vote since the House passage.
由于联盟尚未定型，关于什么才算作对 AI 的合理应对之争具有额外的分量，而业界正投入巨资来塑造这一定义。共同撰写该分析报告的 Issue One 技术改革政策负责人伊莎贝尔·桑德兰（Isabel Sunderland）表示，$41.800 万 的联邦游说资金“反映了联邦层面的书面情况”，但这并不包括通过超级政治行动委员会（super PACs）流入竞选活动的资金。
最大的游说争端之一在于，联邦法规是否应该优先于州和地方的 AI 法律。商业软件联盟（Business Software Alliance）美国政府关系高级副总裁克雷格·奥尔布赖特（Craig Albright）告诉《新闻周刊》，一套国家级的风险管理和透明度框架将比碎片化的州级规则更好地服务于公司和客户，但前提是该框架必须足够强有力，以“赢得优先权”。他补充道：“监管本质上并非全然不好。”
这些公司还拥有信息优势。纽约大学的约书亚·塔克（Joshua Tucker）指出，无论社交媒体有多少缺陷，它大部分时间是在公开环境下运行的。塔克与珀西利（Persily）共同领导美国政治学会（American Political Science Association）的 OpenAI 任务组。他说：“我们将面临一个巨大的盲区，那就是人们实际上是如何使用这些模型的，因为绝大多数人与聊天机器人的交互都发生在一对一的情况下，这本质上是私人对话。”
政策制定者无法像公司那样，在如此大规模的程度上观察这些系统是如何被使用的。
Now 研究所共同执行主任安巴·卡克（Amba Kak）将这种不平衡视为一种政治权力。她说：“这是一个极其不透明的行业——我们所知道的一切都是通过记者、研究人员和立法者的调查拼凑而成的。”
WITH THE COALITIONS UNSETTLED, THE FIGHT OVER what counts as a reasonable response to AI carries extra weight, and the industry is spending heavily to shape it. The \$41.8 million in federal lobbying “captures what’s on paper at the federal level,” said Isabel Sunderland, policy lead for technology reform at Issue One, which co-authored the analysis. It leaves out money flowing through super PACs into campaigns.
Among the biggest lobbying fights is over whether federal rules should preempt state and local AI laws. Craig Albright, senior vice president for U.S. government relations at the Business Software Alliance, told Newsweek that a national framework for risk management and transparency would serve companies and customers better than a patchwork of state rules, but only if it is strong enough to “earn the preemption.” He added, “Regulation isn’t all bad by nature.”
The companies also hold an information advantage. Social media, whatever its flaws, mostly happened in public, noted Joshua Tucker of New York University, who co-leads the American Political Science
Association's AI task force with Persily. “Where we're going to have an enormous blind spot is actually how people are using these models, because the vast, vast, vast majority of interactions that people have with chatbots are in one-on-one circumstances, which is an essentially private conversation,” he said.
Policymakers can't see how these systems are used at anything like the scale the companies can.
Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, sees that imbalance as a form of political power. “This is an incredibly opaque industry—everything we know is pieced together through investigations by journalists, researchers and lawmakers,” she said.
Training data, internal risk evaluations, release decisions and government contracts all remain largely out of view, though Congress, she noted, has subpoena power and other tools that could force more of it into public view.
"The opacity in this industry is about them holding technical expertise and access close," she said, "but even more so it's about the narratives that disempower even political leaders from thinking anyone but the industry can do anything about these problems. That's what shrinks the policy conversation down to whatever the companies are willing to offer."
Whether any of this decides elections is still unclear. In New York's 12th District, the June Democratic primary became a proxy war over the state's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, which requires AI providers to publish harm incidents within 72 hours and goes into effect on January 1, 2027. Groups linked to OpenAI, which opposed the measure, and Anthropic, which supported it, ended up spending millions on both sides of the bill's sponsor Alex Bores, who was running to replace the retiring Representative Jerrold Nadler.
In the end, the race was a high-dollar draw: Bores finished second, 35 percent to 39 percent, to Assemblymember Micah Lasher who had co-sponsored the same law.
最终，“ 政策计分卡”捕捉的是国会在特定时刻的状态： THAT 已变得足够重要，足以影响投票、资金、竞选和地方政治，但没有任何一个政党就支持或反对 THAT 究竟意味着什么达成共识。
塔克表示：“目前还不清楚在 THAT 问题上做一个共和党人或民主党人意味着什么。”他说，政治家们正在“边走边摸索”。
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A Snapshot of a Moving Target
ULTIMATELY, THE AI POLICY SCORECARDS CAPTURE Congress at a particular moment: AI has become important enough to move votes, money, campaigns and local politics, but neither party has settled on what supporting or opposing it is supposed to mean.
"It's not quite clear what it means to be a Republican on AI or a Democrat on AI," said Tucker. Politicians, he said, are "figuring this out on the fly."
The generation expected to love AI may become its toughest critic
BY
LAUREN GIELLA
● ● ● ● ●
WHEN NEW TECHNOLOGIES EMERGE—FROM CDS to the internet to mobile phones—the familiar pattern has been that young people are the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. With AI, only half that pattern is holding.
This year, for the first time, a majority (55 percent) of American adults under 30 told the Pew Research Center they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. In 2021, that figure was 31 percent. Over the same period, the share who are more excited than concerned fell from 25 percent to 11 percent.
It's not that young people aren't using AI—66 percent of adults under 30 have used a chatbot, and 31 percent use one daily, according to Pew—the problem is that the longer and more they use it, the less they like it.
"I think the older generation is dramatically underestimating how much Gen Z hates AI," Amita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an AI-powered surplus inventory management platform, told Newsweek.
Bhasin, who is also an OpenAI ChatGPT Futures honoree and was featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2026, said youth antipathy to AI is driven by fears of its impact on their present and future, from deepfakes to job losses.
Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who focuses on law & technology, privacy and regulation, said the perception of AI among young people has “cratered” in the nearly four years since ChatGPT hit the market.
A Gallup poll fielded earlier this year found that half of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) use generative AI weekly or daily, roughly unchanged from a year earlier. But everything else in their survey moved: Excitement fell to 22 percent, down 14 points. Anger rose nine points to 31 percent. The share saying AI's risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace climbed from 37 percent to 48 percent and 80 percent said they worry about AI hindering their ability to learn. While familiarity with new technologies has often been the path to acceptance, with AI and young people, it's producing hostility.
Those views are already hardening into policy preferences. In an August poll of adults aged 18 to 34 published by CNBC/Generation Labs, 60 percent said data center construction should slow down, 40 percent said the government should regulate AI and 45 percent expected AI to hurt their own careers. Millennials view the issue of AI differently from their Gen Z peers. In the Pew survey, 48 percent of adults under 30 said they expect AI to have a negative effect on society, compared with 39 percent of those aged 30 to 49, even though both groups use chatbots at similar rates.
Author and generational futurist Ryan Vet attributes part of this split to the way millennials experienced quick changes. They saw flip phones evolve into smart phones and witnessed social media eat the world. The technological evolution Gen Z has witnessed is the iPhone becoming a slightly better iPhone.
AI is outpacing those older technological shifts in terms of evolution and adoption—it took years for more than half of U.S. adults to adopt social media, while it took ChatGPT just two months to accountability because the plan needs to be a combination of the public and the private sector."
It will be a while before a significant bloc of Gen Z is walking the halls of Congress, with the average age of a House or Senate member around 60 years old and millennials currently accounting for about 15 percent of Congress. But Gen Z will become a rising share of voters. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagements at Tufts University, nearly 49 million young people aged 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterms, 8 million more Gen Z voters than were eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
According to a report from Brookings this summer, “the evidence suggests that Gen Z’s reservations about AI are more than superficial or based on public narratives.” Earning Gen Z’s trust in AI will require specific protective policies, not voluntary pledges from tech companies.
The trajectory of Facebook is instructive here: In the 2010s, Facebook was going to change the world, improve education, rally political support for change and shatter loneliness. Today, schools are banning iPhones, governments are issuing age restrictions for social media and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta reached a \$17 billion settlement in a suit alleging it was selling kids an addictive product that harmed their mental health.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are probably going to be the pressure testers or victims of this first, and then I think it's going to be a minute before they are the decision-makers,” Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, told Newsweek. “It takes a number of years to get into a place where you feel like running for a political office that has the capacity to regulate this happens.”
The National Center for Youth Law in 2024 called for an up-to-date policy to govern AI, but also for lawmakers to listen and learn from the “most tech-involved generation” because “never before in all of human history have the sleek threads of technology been
reach over 100 million users—but with less clarity of where the transformation is headed. Vet calls this a velocity gap: "Technology is accelerating faster than human wisdom can keep up."
"[Gen Z] have grown up in a world where content is just prolific everywhere and being constantly generated, and so they're already in the mindset of 'verify then trust,'" Vet said. "And I think the previous generations were in [the mindset] 'trust but verify.'"
And they are not giving AI providers any benefit of the doubt. In the CNBC/Generation Labs poll, 69 percent said they don't trust OpenAI's Sam Alt-
"IT'S NOT THAT YOUNG PEOPLE AREN'T USING AI... THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE LONGER AND MORE THEY USE IT, THE LESS THEY LIKE IT."
man, 70 percent said the same of Elon Musk and 71 percent of Mark Zuckerberg.
“AI leaders need to take accountability for the fact that their technology is really disrupting everything, and they don’t have a plan,” Bhasin said. “But I think the government also needs to take so tightly woven into the tender fabric of a child's daily existence."
Looking ahead, Guggenberger said this all points to a trend in the U.S. toward more regulation of AI. That might come through localized policies on data center construction, restrictions on use for minors and labor protections.
“We have seen people that are underrepresented in the formal halls of politics express their views and exert influence through other channels, through civil society or just through spontaneous organization,” Guggenberger said. “One shouldn’t discount
those avenues of influence."
Lawmakers are writing the first rules for a technology whose politics have not stopped moving, for people who will have to live with the results of those rules long after their terms in office have expired.
这位来自丹佛郊区选区的共和党人一直将自己起草的《纳税人保护法》视为一项标志性成就：该法案旨在防止与数据中心开发相关的消费者能源成本增加。他的对手，进步派州众议员曼尼·鲁蒂内尔（Manny Rutinel），一直公开主张 AI 监管，并投放广告宣扬埃文斯支持《一个宏伟法案》（One Big Beautiful Bill Act），该法案包含了有利于数据中心运营商的税收减免。
Each dot on this map is a U.S. House district, shaded by its representative's overall score on Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard. Skeptics and Boosters share states, regions and sometimes neighboring districts
● ● ● ●
KEY
Skeptic
Lean Skeptic
Mixed
Lean Booster
Booster
REP. GABE EVANS (CO-08) 3.4 LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican in this suburban Denver district has been touting his authoring of the Ratepayer Protection Act as a signature accomplishment: a bill aimed to prevent increased consumer energy costs tied to data center development. His opponent, progressive state Rep. Manny Rutinel, has been outspoken regarding AI regulation and has aired ads trumpeting Evans' support for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included tax breaks that benefited data center operators.
REP. VICENTE GONZALEZ (TX-34)
2.9
MIXED
The incumbent Democrat was a victim of Governor Greg Abbott's redistricting push, giving a leg up to his Republican challenger, military veteran Eric Flores. But amidst a brewing data center backlash in the Lone Star State, Gonzalez has turned the issue on Abbott, calling him “the biggest flip-flopper in America” to pull off the improbable and save his seat.
这位共和党人的选区位于纽约州下哈德逊河谷，在 2024, 投票给了卡玛拉·哈里斯。他发布了一则广告，将他的民主党挑战者凯特·康利（Cait Conley）与数据中心及 AI 产业联系起来，并询问她是否支持暂停建设数据中心。康利反击称她此前已经支持此类暂停，并指出劳勒曾评论称，暂停禁令向企业传递了远离纽约州的信号。
TIERNEY L. CROSS / GETTY; JIM WATSON / AFP VIA GETTY; ROBERTO SCHMIDT / ; JUSTIN SULLIVAN / ; ALEX WONG
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REP. MARCY KAPTUR (OH-9)
3.0 MIXED
The 22-term incumbent Democrat has defied political odds by winning her red district near Toledo election after election. She's going after her latest Republican challenger, state Rep. Derek Merrin, for backing data center tax incentives in a 2017 legislative vote, long before AI emerged as a political issue.
REP. RYAN MACKENZIE
(PA-7)
LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican's Allentown district is a top Democratic target, and his opponent Bob Brooks, a former firefighter, boasts the credentials to flip this blue-collar area. With local opposition to a Lehigh Valley data-center complex and Governor Josh Shapiro's executive order restricting data center permitting, Mackenzie has backtracked from his previous votes in favor of tax breaks to data centers and is now campaigning on holding them to account.
REP. MIKE LAWLER
(NY-17)
MIXED
The Republican, whose district in New York's lower Hudson Valley voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, put out an ad tying his Democratic challenger Cait Conley to data centers and the AI industry and asked whether she supports a data center moratorium. Conley fired back that she already backed such a pause and pointed to Lawler's comments that the moratorium sent a message to businesses to stay out of New York state.
TIERNEY L. CROSS/GETTY; JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY; ROBERTO SCHMIDT/GETTY; JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY; ALEX WONG/GETTY
Online reviews can help shoppers, but they don't always tell the whole story
BY CHARLOTTE GRAINGER
READ MORE
Scan the QR code for the full ranking
hoppers today have more choice than any prior generation, all at their fingertips. Type a size and style, and thousands of results appear in seconds—a far cry from walking into a store with a curated inventory.
To help shoppers sort through the search results, Google and shopping websites put product reviews front and center. A dishwasher that earns a three-star rating averaged by 781 reviews is shown next to those that earn five stars based on three reviews.
了解虚假或购买评论的普遍程度同样重要。除了偶尔出现的 AI 生成帖子，一些零售商可能会利用海量的虚假评论积极地误导买家。雷海格大学（Lehigh University）营销学副教授 Rebecca Wang 指出了隐藏在眼前的风险。“捏造的评论——即从评论工厂购买的评论，卖家可以购买数百甚至数千条好评——显然是一个严重的、不道德的，甚至是违法的议题，”Wang 告诉《新闻周刊》。
Consumer survey data from Kinsta found that more than 70 percent of shoppers have suspected a product review was fake or AI-generated. That skepticism exists even as the star rating, review count and comment stream keep signaling trust the way they always have.
While shoppers may doubt what they're reading, they often buy anyway. Star Kashman, founding partner at Cyber Law Firm, warns consumers to be more choosy about which reviews to trust.
“Fake and incentivized reviews do not affect consumer trust as much as it likely should,” Kashman told Newsweek. “On marketplaces like Amazon where purchases can be cheap, impulsive and rapid, consumers can see a 4.8-star rating with thousands of reviews and make a decision to trust that product in seconds without investigating” their source.
Understanding the prevalence of fake or bought reviews matters, too. Beyond the odd AI-generated post, some retailers may be actively misleading buyers with an avalanche of fake reviews. Rebecca Wang, associate professor of marketing at Lehigh University, names the risk hiding in plain sight. “A fabricated review, one bought from a review farm where a seller can purchase hundreds or even thousands of glowing reviews, is obviously a serious, unethical and even illegal issue,” Wang told Newsweek.
“But even genuine reviews can become systematically skewed depending on how companies solicit them.”
What You Don't See Decides What You Buy
The order in which reviews show up can also impact how you view a product. While some platforms list reviews chronologically, others use algorithms based on shoppers' search and viewing history. "The problem with algorithmic ordering is that most consumers are not going to read five pages of reviews," Kashman explained. "If the first reviews they encounter are overwhelmingly positive, while newer complaints about defects or safety issues present in a new batch of lower quality product are buried deeper, consumers will walk away with a distorted impression of the product."
Statista R 是创建公司、品牌和产品排名及顶尖名单的全球领导者，基于全面的市场研究和数据分析： R 认可最优秀者。凭借一支由 100 多名专家分析师组成的团队，并与遍布所有大洲的 40 多个知名媒体品牌合作， R 为消费者和商业决策者创造透明度，并帮助公司在众多行业和产品类别中建立信任和认可。欲了解更多关于 R 及其排名之信息，请访问 r..com。
But don't give up on reviews altogether. Kashman advises, slow down before hitting "buy."
“Shoppers should not blindly trust online reviews,” Kashman said. “They should be checking multiple resources, doing their research, understanding the review platform’s vetting process and reliability.” She also recommends sorting reviews to see both positive and negative posts.
“Reviews are incredibly useful,” Wang added. “But consumers should look beyond the stars, the words and the pictures. Believe the reviews, but pay attention to the context.”
Siemens
Methodology
n the corporate world, maintaining trust among customers, employees and investors is paramount for success in a competitive
landscape. The World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026 ranking aims to highlight the companies that are most trusted in the 20 target countries included in this study. Trust can have several characteristics and be viewed from different perspectives. Recognizing this, Newsweek and Statista developed a methodology which takes several aspects into account.
The Most Trustworthy Companies were selected based on a holistic approach. The three primary pillars of trust we considered in our evaluation: customer trust, investor trust and employee trust.
The analysis followed a three-step process: 1. Scope: All stock-listed companies headquartered in one of the target countries with a revenue of over \$500 million were considered in the longlist of the project.
2. Extensive survey: The basis of the analysis was an independent survey from a sample of more than 65,000 participants from the target countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States). The participants rated companies they knew and that were headquartered in the respective country in terms of the three dimensions of trust. A total of 200,000 company evaluations were submitted.
3. Social Listening: For each company that received a sufficient number of evaluations, a social listening analysis was conducted. This involved researching what was said about a company across various media segments to determine whether the public sentiment toward a company was positive, neutral or negative. In total, over 320,000 mentions were gathered. Additionally, all companies that were involved in any recent scandals or lawsuits relevant to trust were excluded from the analysis.
The overall score was composed of 80 percent from the survey results and 20 percent from social listening analysis.
The 1,000 companies with the highest score have been awarded as World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026. The final list is categorized by industry, with the top 10 in each category appearing in print. The full list is available online.
Statista R is a world leader in the creation of company, brand and product rankings and top lists, based on comprehensive market research and data analysis: Statista R recognizes the best. With a team of over 100 expert analysts and in cooperation with more than 40 highprofile media brands across all continents, Statista R creates transparency for consumers and business decision-makers and helps companies build trust and recognition across a plethora of industries and product categories. Visit r.statista.com for further information about Statista R and our rankings.
Statista R is a division of Statista. The leading data and business intelligence portal provides an extensive collection of statistics, reports and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries. Find out more at statista.com.
The United States accounts for the largest share of companies, though its count declined from 378 to 346, while Japan, India, Canada and the United Kingdom remain strongly represented.
Conglomerate | 1 | Samsung C&TSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | SK Inc.SEOL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | HanwhaSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | FujifilmTOKYO | 5 | Reliance IndustriesMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Astra InternationalJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 7 | Hankyu HanshinIKEDA, JAPAN | 8 | ItaúsaSÃO PAULO | 9 | WesfarmersPERTH, AUSTRALIA | 10 Hitachi TOKYO
Construction & Building Materials | 1 | TotoKITAKYUSHU, JAPAN | 2 | SIGJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 3 | Galliford TryUXBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM | 4 | GeberitJONA, SWITZERLAND | 5 | Saint-GobainCOURBEVOIE, FRANCE | 6 | TrexWINCHESTER, VA | 7 | LX HausysSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 8 | North American ConstructionACHESON, CANADA | 9 | BRCK GroupBRACKNELL, UNITED KINGDOM | 10 RVNL
Food & Beverage remains the most represented industry with 88 companies (up from 86 in 2025), followed by Energy & Utilities with 72 companies, and Retail and Materials & Chemicals with 63 each. | 5 | Ulta BeautyBOLINGBROOK, IL | 6 | Pets at HomeHANDFORTH, UNITED KINGDOM | 7 | CostcoISSAQUAH, WA | 8 | Lowe'sMOORESVILLE, NC | 9 | Autosports GroupLEICHHARDT, AUSTRALIA | 10 | M&SLONDON |
Software & Telecommunications | 1 | Samsung SDSSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | IBMARMONK, NY | 3 | GammaLONDON | 4 | RakutenSETAGAYA, JAPAN | 5 | Palo Alto NetworksSANTA CLARA, CA | 6 | SAPWALLDORF, GERMANY | 7 | TCSMUMBAI, INDIA | 8 | NaverSEONGNAM, SOUTH KOREA | 9 | VeriSignRESTON, VA | 10 | 3DSVELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, FRANCE |
在真人秀电视节目的早期，《天鹅》（The Swan）向女性承诺了一张“金票”。埃琳·李·卡尔（Erin Lee Carr）的新纪录片揭露了她们从未看到的细则。
作者：
H. ALAN SCOTT
真人秀电视节目的早期就像是“西部荒野”。全美国的普通人们纷纷报名参加未知的体验。从《幸存者》（Survivor）中的遇难者到《美国超模》（America's Next Top Model）中的超模追梦人，数以千计的人参加试镜，希望成为某种全新事物的一部分。2004年，数千名女性申请参加福克斯（Fox）的一档节目，该节目承诺将“丑小鸭”改造为人工打造的美女。这档节目名为《天鹅》。
现在，一部新的 Hulu 纪录片《天鹅：镜后》（The Swan: Behind the Mirror）探讨了该节目对参与其中的女性造成了什么影响。导演埃琳·李·卡尔在青少年观众时期曾“觉得自己的外在相当丑陋”，她一度认同这部真人秀系列的宣传，直到裂痕开始显现。
H. Alan Scott 是《新闻周刊》的高级编辑及 The Parting Shot 播客的主持人。可在各平台关注 @HAlanScott
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THE CRUELEST MAKEOVER
The Swan promised women a golden ticket in the early days of reality TV. Erin Lee Carr's new documentary reveals the fine print they never saw
BY
H. ALAN SCOTT
THE EARLY DAYS OF REALITY TELEVISION WERE THE WILD West. Regular people across the United States signed up for unknown experiences. From castaways on Survivor to aspiring supermodels on America's Next Top Model, thousands auditioned to be part of something brand new. And in 2004, thousands of women applied for a Fox show that promised to turn “ugly ducklings” into manufactured beauties. It was called The Swan.
Now, a new Hulu documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror, examines what the show did to the women who lived it. Director Erin Lee Carr, who as a teen viewer “felt fairly ugly on the outside,” bought the pitch for the reality series until the cracks started to show.
"It [The Swan] became what was supposed to be about female empowerment, then moved into this slow-moving car crash of how much can we do to these women," Carr told Newsweek's Parting Shot podcast. "To subject them to a transformation that we want for them versus of their own choice."
Over three months, contestants were cut off from friends and family while undergoing intense cosmetic surgery and fitness regimens. Carr calls it “a literal Willy Wonka golden ticket.” The catch? Most of them had no idea what was waiting at the end.
"When they signed people up for [The Swan], they didn't know about the pageant," Carr said. "So, 'Oh, you're gonna transform my life, amazing, great. Wait, part of that ticket is that I have to get in public in my lingerie that you picked for me?"
Even the crown came with fine print. Carr said the season 2 winner was handed a haul of prizes, including a necklace billed at \$100,000 that was actually worth about \$30,000, and was then asked to pay taxes on every item at full sticker value.
“Imagine you win. You won it all, you did it,” Carr said. “And then they’re like, ‘Here’s your prizes,’ and you can’t afford them because you have to pay taxes on it.”
Critics hated it, but 9 million viewers a season tuned in anyway. So was it ever feminist? “The answer is no,” Carr said.
"There was so much judgment about why the women participated, and then all of us collectively judged them about their reveal and had they done the work," she said. "So it was about unlearning all that, and then, how do I make a documentary that doesn't just re-injure everyone who was exploited in television?"
Fox canceled The Swan after two seasons, but nothing really changed. From the Kardashians to Real Housewives, women getting things pulled and plucked on camera is more popular than ever.
“I can’t stand to not point out my own hypocrisy,” she said. “We live in the world that The Swan built, in ways that we like to have outrage about and then comply with.”
Carr's final documentary interview question was the most surprising. She asked every woman if she'd do it again.
“I expected everybody to be like, ‘Hell no,’ in different tones,” Carr said. “And every single interview[ee] said, ‘I would do it again.’”
Why?
“They found each other,” she said. “For one of the first times in their life, they felt special and chosen because it was drilled into their head by Nely [Galán, the show’s creator], by producers, by Fox. ‘You were picked out of 200,000 women. We chose you.’ And what is more uniquely satisfying than feeling chosen? It is the American dream.”
H. Alan Scott is a Newsweek senior editor and host of The Parting Shot podcast. Follow them everywhere @HAlanScott
无论它是如何开始的，多亏了《沙鼠》这部播客，这个传闻在短期内不会消失。——H. Alan Scott
Trixie Mattel 在电视抛弃万圣节之际接棒 Elvira
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The Tale That Lingers
A new podcast explores why a debunked myth persists
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From the Poltergeist curse to the Munchkin who supposedly died by suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz, Hollywood is built on urban legends. But no legend has been snickered about more than the one involving Richard Gere and a gerbil.
Yes, a gerbil.
(This is a respectable magazine, so let's just say that in this legend, which has no basis in fact, Gere and the gerbil got to know each other very well at some point in the 1970s or '80s.)
Gerbil, a new 12-episode investigative podcast from The
Hollywood Reporter's Allen Salkin, digs into where the rumor came from and why it refuses to die.
“Many, many people heard this,” Salkin tells Newsweek. “And the rumor has never died. I’m very skeptical that it’s true. It’s also an investigation of why. What can we learn from the durability of this rumor?”
Gere has only referenced the rumor in passing. But as Salkin points out, Gere's silence may be exactly what's kept this thing running on its wheel. "Crisis communications PR was not in the '80s what it is now," Salkin says. "There's almost a playbook now, and ignoring it is not usually a good idea."
It may also have something to do with Gere's reputation. "Richard Gere is a wonderful humanitarian," Salkin says. "Much to be admired, and I admire him. But when he was young, he was a d\*\*\*."
As for who started it, Salkin won't say. That answer arrives in episode 12. But the rumor about that rumor has long pointed to Sylvester Stallone, briefly Gere's co-star in 1974's The Lords of Flatbush. Stallone told Ain't It Cool News in 2006 that Gere was fired from the film after clashing with him.
Salkin says he's “very skeptical” that it was just one person who started the rumor, “like Sylvester Stallone,” he says. “I really do think I know the answer.”
However it started, thanks to Gerbil, this rumor isn't burrowing away anytime soon. —H. Alan Scott
Trixie Mattel picks up Elvira's mantle as TV abandons Halloween
这位《鲁保罗变装皇后秀：全明星》（RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars）的冠军刚刚发行了《直到死亡将我们分离》（Till Death Do Us Part），这是一张由单曲《月亮上的鬼魂》（Ghost on the Moon）领衔的万圣节专辑。她还在 YouTube 上延续着制作万圣节特辑的传统。
“这是惊悚合成器音效与原声爱情弹唱的一次由衷结合，”Mattel 在一份正式声明中表示。
电视可能已经抛弃了万圣节，但至少有人在接手 Elvira 创造的那个著名的惊悚衣钵。——H. Alan Scott
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Be Afraid. Very Afraid
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Remember when October meant Halloween episodes of your favorite sitcoms? When Elvira popped up hosting every spooky special on TV? When artists put out Halloween music? These days you'd be hard-pressed to find any of it, and you can largely thank the slow death of network TV. But fear not. (Actually, in the spirit of the season, be very afraid.)
Network sitcoms used to air weekly, so writers had to reckon with a late October episode. That's how we got Halloween classics from The Office, Roseanne and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. When a streaming season drops all at once, no episode lands on Halloween, so nobody bothers dressing up for it.
It gets scarier. Elvira has all but hung up her beehive, leaving a Mistress of the Dark-sized void every fall. Enter Trixie Mattel.
The RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars winner just released “Till Death Do Us Part, a Halloween LP led by the single “Ghost on the Moon.” She’s also keeping up her tradition of a Halloween special on YouTube.
"It's a heartfelt marriage of spooky synths and acoustic love-strumming," Mattel said in a statement of the record.
TV may have abandoned Halloween, but at least someone is picking up the spooky mantle Elvira made famous. —H. Alan Scott
[Kainar-AKB] BUILDING ON 50 YEARS OF INDUSTRIAL EXPERTISE
By Frank Coldwell
Kazakhstan entered the second half of 2026 with one of Central Asia's strongest growth stories still intact. The International Monetary Fund said in June that "economic growth remains robust," supported by domestic demand, investment and high oil prices, and projects real GDP growth of about $4.6\%$ for the year. Manufacturing has also been a bright spot, with official data showing industrial activity continuing to expand
as the country looks beyond hydrocarbons and builds a broader production base.
Kazakhstan's automotive industry is also expanding rapidly, providing a strong domestic market for battery and component manufacturers. In January–July 2026, the country produced 111,115 vehicles and other automotive equipment, up 33.3% from the same period a year earlier, according to the Kazakhstan Automobile Union, citing the Bureau of National Statistics. Automotive manufacturing now accounts for 40.5% of Kazakhstan's mechanical-engineering sector. With new vehicle plants, greater localization and a growing requirement for locally made components, the environment is creating new opportunities for established industrial suppliers.
Few companies reflect Kazakhstan's industrial evolution as clearly as Kainar-AKB, one of Central Asia's leading automotive battery manufacturer. The Taldykorgan-based battery producer traces its history to 1976, when the plant began production and Chief Executive Officer Yerbol Azhmagambetov's father joined the newly launched operation as a young process engineer. He later became director and ran one of the country's most successful privatization processes. From output of roughly 300,000 batteries a year in 2001, Kainar-AKB has grown to an installed annual capacity of around four million batteries, with current production of about three million depending on demand. In the early 2000s, the 22-hectare industrial business was valued at only about \$300,000; by 2008, it had secured roughly \$35 million in financing.
Kainar-AKB's business model perfectly reflects the full cycle manufacturer: the company produces starter batteries for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and agricultural machinery, manufactures its own plastic battery cases, and operates a recycling business that recovers lead and plastic from used batteries while neutralizing electrolyte. Its plastics operation alone can produce between 4.5 million and five million cases annually. Recovered lead can return to battery production, while recycled plastic can be reused internally or supplied elsewhere, giving Kainar-AKB greater control over inputs while turning used products back into industrial raw material.
Much of the company's scaling took place as it invested heavily in modernization. The CEO sees those years as the period that defined what the company Kainar-AKB became today. "We effectively transformed a Soviet-era plant into a modern industrial facility operating according to international standards. We used that period to lay the foundations for the company we have today," says Azhmagambetov. That combination of long industrial experience and modernized production remains one of the company's defining strengths.
The next phase of growth is increasingly industrial. Kainar-AKB already supplies batteries for railway and telecommunications applications and is expanding toward backup-power solutions for banks, data centres, oil and gas companies, metallurgical groups and other infrastructure users across Central Asia. It is here where the CEO sees smart partnership opportunities. "A Western company could bring technology and experience to Kazakhstan, while we could contribute our manufacturing capabilities, knowledge of the regional market and local industrial expertise. Each side would have something meaningful to offer the other," Azhmagambetov says. The company is also studying lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies as it considers future opportunities in electric mobility and energy storage.
For Azhmagambetov, the wider case for cooperation begins with the country itself. "Kazakhstan can give new momentum to an investor. A project here may not always generate enormous profits immediately, but it can offer knowledge, experience and a different perspective, all of which can culminate in significant long term gains. Our country has many success stories and interesting business cases from which international investors can learn."
Exports are already central to Kainar-AKB's business, accounting for roughly 60–70% of revenue. Its principal markets remain in the post-Soviet region, but the company has also explored opportunities in Europe and the Middle East, including Dubai. Traditional routes into markets such as Poland, Germany and Italy have become more complicated, increasing the importance of alternative corridors and regional hubs. Geography can make logistics difficult for a landlocked exporter, yet it also places Kazakhstan between China, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and the Middle East. Expanding that reach will depend on new routes, commercial relationships and partners able to open additional markets.
As Kainar-AKB marks its 50th anniversary, the company is looking beyond its traditional automotive base toward industrial batteries, energy storage, new export markets and international technology partnerships. Its five decades of manufacturing experience provide a strong foundation for that next stage, while its position in Kazakhstan gives potential partners access to local production capabilities and knowledge of the wider Central Asian market. "We are willing to help international leaders and major companies bring their values, achievements and technologies to Kazakhstan and, through cooperation, to other markets as well," says Azhmagambetov. For Kainar-AKB, the opportunity ahead is not simply to sell more batteries, but to become a stronger industrial partner connecting international expertise with Kazakhstan's growing manufacturing base.
Grammy-winning artist and producer Wyclef Jean is going back to his roots with his first jazz album, Q Theory. Blending Caribbean, Latin American, African and Middle Eastern influences, the Fugees member also draws on Haiti's traditional rara street music. Songs like "Lady Havana" and "Sugarcane & Watermelon"
是我一个人的感觉，还是觉得《周六夜现场》（Saturday Night Live）已经消失了很久？庆幸的是，SNL 将回归第 52 季，并带来一批新鲜且及时的主持人。尼克斯队控球后卫 Jalen Brunson 将作为首次主持人拉开序幕，随后是回归的宠儿 Dakota Johnson 和 Shane Gillis，以及《Obsession》的突破性演员 Inde Navarrette。随着中期选举临近，我们现在比以往任何时候都更需要 SNL 回到我们的屏幕上。
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[COMEDY] COLD OPEN
Is it just me, or does it feel like Saturday Night Live has been gone forever? Thankfully, SNL returns for its 52nd season with a fresh, timely slate of hosts. Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson kicks things off as a first-time host, followed by returning favorites Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis, then Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette. And with the midterms around the corner, we need SNL back on our screens now more than ever.
把《美国恐怖故事》（American Horror Story）变成他自己的“全明星赛季”这件事，只能交给 Ryan Murphy 了。第 13 季迎回了标志性人物杰西卡·朗格、凯西·贝茨、安吉拉·巴塞特和莎拉·保尔森。在《Live With Kelly and Mark》节目中，朗格提出了一个条件：“如果我能扮演全部四个角色，我就回来。”自然地，Murphy 答应了。根据朗格的说法，“几乎每个人都是回归角色。”坦白说，我简直在尖叫。
坦白说，我简直在尖叫。
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名人
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[TELEVISION] SCREAM TEAM
Leave it to Ryan Murphy to turn American Horror Story into his very own all-stars season. Season 13 brings back icons Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett and Sarah Paulson. On Live With Kelly and Mark, Lange gave one condition: "I'll come back if I can do all four characters." Naturally, Murphy obliged. And according to Lange, "everybody is a returning character, pretty much." Frankly, I'm screaming.
Are celebrities just as messy as us? Fans speculate Channing Tatum might be, after noticing the same Instagram account (“bidness\_nonya”) commenting in support of Tatum under posts about his ex Zoë Kravitz with her fiancé Harry Styles. Tatum denied the rumors that he was running a burner account, but some fans were happy to give props to a fellow petty poster.
Salzburg, Austria, is alive with the sound of music. And now the city has opened its first-ever museum
starring Julie Andrews. At Hellbrunn Palace, fans can marvel at movie props, costumes and the iconic gazebo from “Sixteen Going
on Seventeen." The museum, which distinguishes between the film and the real-life von Trapp family, is guaranteed to be one of your favorite things on your next trip to Austria.
Grupo Poma has carried a century of Salvadoran enterprise across the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. A fourth generation carries it further, on one conviction: discipline builds what haste cannot.
BARTOLOMÉ POMA, WHO FOUNDED THE FAMILY'S AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS IN EL SALVADOR IN 1919.
Four Generations of Growth
The story began in 1919: Bartolomé Poma, a Spanish mechanic from Barcelona, founded an automotive business in El Salvador. It grew into one of Central America's most established family groups.
His son Luis Poma added Chevrolet and, in 1953, Toyota, making the family the automaker's first partner in the Americas, second worldwide after Taiwan. Then came workshops and spare parts; then industry, real estate and hospitality — the foundations of the group's businesses.
Luis's son Ricardo Poma led Grupo Poma for more than four decades, taking it across the Americas — deepening each business, adding global brands and forging long-term relationships, including one with Bain Capital, dating back to its earliest days.
Today the group operates five companies — Excel, Grupo Roble, Real Hotels & Resorts, Autofácil and Solaire — in 10 countries, with more than 12,000 employees. In a recent interview in El Salvador, Fernando Poma, a member of the fourth generation and Ricardo Poma's eldest son, said: "We have been around for 107 years in El Salvador, and now operate in 10 countries. We have a very long-term vision."
Grupo Poma's defining strategy is knowing where it can win — and declining everything else, however tempting. Diversification has meant geography: extending the same five businesses into new countries, where experience compounds — never into industries the family does not understand. The filter is exacting: enter only businesses that are predictable not one year out, but 10 or 20 years out; protect capital before chasing returns, because losing half means doubling just to recover. Profits go back into widening competitive advantages, not out the door. Execution belongs to what Poma calls “gente 10”: 10-out-of-10 talent, given direction and room to work.
“We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know,” Poma said. “We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.”
That aggression shows at Real Hotels & Resorts, where Poma has spent a quarter-century building partnerships with Choice Hotels International, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Hyatt: a Grand Hyatt underway in Panama City and the JW Marriott San Salvador rising at home will lift the portfolio — 24 hotels in 10 countries — to 26, and the group is constantly looking to expand. Excel, led by Andrés Poma, Fernando's brother, is Central America's largest automotive company, with 19 brands and 42 franchises across five countries, from Toyota and Chevrolet to BMW, Nissan, Kia and Mitsubishi Motors. Grupo Roble's real estate platform, led by Alberto Poma, spans eight countries, with 20 shopping centers and 60,000-plus homes delivered, alongside corporate and mixed-use developments.
«We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know. We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.»
FERNANDO POMA
ESEN, the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios, is a university founded in 1993 so that financial circumstances never keep a capable student from a first-rate education. Two in three students receive financial aid; more than 2,600 professionals have graduated.
The Salvadoran American Humanitarian Foundation (SAHF), established in Miami by Luis Poma in 1983, has channeled more than \$900 million in aid to El Salvador. FUSAL, the family's own foundation on the ground, now led by Alejandro Poma, advances child nutrition and early development in its most vulnerable communities.
Fundación Renacer has given more than 450 abandoned young adults hands-on training in fields matched to their interests, followed by a job at a participating company.
“We don’t train them to get a job; we guarantee them a job,” Fernando Poma said. “Our ultimate goal is to improve the lives of abandoned and vulnerable young adults through dig-
Behind the businesses lies another continuity — family unity. Across four generations, preserving harmony has mattered more than any single deal. That principle underpins orderly succession: six members of the fourth generation currently work across the group's companies, in different roles.
That conviction guides the next cycle of investment. “Our objective is not scale alone but differentiation — products and services with advantages durable enough to defend,” Poma explained. The family calls the standard “pride of ownership”: invest more than the market asks to build something unique. Success, Poma likes to say, demands a rare pairing: a dreamer and a doer at once.
After 107 years, the proposition remains what it was in that first workshop, now written across the Americas: build to last, and stay true to the country, people and values that built the enterprise.
Christopher Roberts 是《新闻周刊》出版与订阅战略副总裁。可通过 c.roberts@newsweek.com 与其联系。
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📄 Original Section
---
FREE PRESS, FREE PASS?
A White House media ban makes great headlines. Quieter constraints on press freedom rarely do
BY
CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS
YET ANOTHER NEWSWEEK READER, ROBYN T. ELLIOTT, IS FURIOUS WITH US. AFTER PRESIDENT DONALD Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, Elliott wrote that it was
“shameful that you agree with the censoring of the fourth pillar of democracy,” adding that if Newsweek didn’t believe in press freedom, perhaps we should “rebrand as entertainment news.” Ouch.
Yet our article hadn't agreed with Trump. We reported what he did, quoted his critics and defenders, and let readers judge via our Fairness Meter. Seventy-two percent said the article was fair, 9 percent left-leaning and 19 percent right-leaning. Still, Elliott's email raises a question worth applying rather
more widely. Trump's attack on the press is easy to see. A correspondent arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and a guard says their badge no longer works. The president has made the reason clear, announcing that their employer is being excluded for its “FAKE NEWS” reporting.
Other presidents have preferred paperwork. President Barack Obama's administration brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight alleged leakers of classified information, compared with three under all previous administrations combined, per the Committee to Protect Journalists. His Justice Department also secretly seized two months of records from more than 20 Associated Press phone lines used by more than 100 journalists.
Trump's first administration did the same. His Justice Department secretly obtained phone records for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times reporters while probing leaks. President Joe Biden's prohibited compulsory demands for journalists' records, with limited exceptions. Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed that in 2025, letting the government seek reporters' records and testimony to identify leakers. This year, the department issued, then withdrew, subpoenas to
Wall Street Journal, Post and Times journalists. But the White House ban is just the tip of the iceberg. The federal FOIA backlog grew from 115,080 requests in 2016 to 339,671 in 2025. Requests also surged, so the backlog cannot be pinned on one president. But it illustrates the point quite well. A confiscated badge makes good TV. A delayed FOIA request does not.
If press freedom is the principle, the test cannot be whether we like the president when they restrict it. George Washington detested newspaper attacks, Abraham Lincoln suppressed the press during the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt popularized “muckraker” to describe journalists and Richard Nixon called
the press “the enemy.” That’s part of the deal. So is keeping the front door open for the Fourth Estate, and not putting up barriers round the back.
Christopher Roberts is Newsweek's vice president, publishing & subscriber strategy. Email him at c.roberts@newsweek.com
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The flags were flown, the red carpets rolled out and the photo ops scheduled. All President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping had to do was spend a few days demonstrating the “truly great friendship” Trump says they have forged, with the U.S. president adding: “America is very happy about this visit.” But despite the grand welcome, state dinner and warm words at their Washington, D.C. summit from September 23-25, every encounter appeared forced: compressed lips, rigid postures, handshakes conducted with the warmth of a hostage exchange. The Chinese leader’s trip ended without any movement on AI, chips, rare earth minerals or Taiwan, with Xi saying competition should be “healthy” and “kept within bounds,” resembling “a race of catching up” rather than one producing a winner. A soothing account of two superpowers wrestling for economic and technological supremacy. Neither leader showed his hand and both looked like they would rather be anywhere else.
At the Republican Party's "Trumpapalooza" convention, President Donald Trump urged supporters to vote as though his name were on the ballot. But away from the show of unity, a number of Republican candidates are taking positions that diverge from the administration.
California Representative Young Kim removed references to Trump and “America First” branding from prominent parts of her campaign website, while
Florida candidates Mike Beltran and Casey Askar scaled back Trump-focused language on theirs. Kim's campaign denied claims that the changes represented a break with the president, and Beltran's campaign said the edits did not reflect any
Husted has called for an end to the Iran war
weakening of support, but the changes nevertheless mark a shift in campaign messaging.
Others, meanwhile, have openly questioned policies. In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall questioned the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations were conducted, arguing that federal agents should coordinate more closely with local
authorities. “Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone,” he wrote on X. Marshall’s comments come amid wider Republican unease over immigration enforcement. Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar warned that some of Trump’s immigration policies had “gone too far.” In Texas, Representative Monica De La Cruz featured a DACA recipient whose release from ICE custody she helped secure, in a campaign
ad praising her for putting “people over politics.” Former Maine Governor Paul LePage, now running for Congress, also criticized a deportation case involving a relative who held a work permit, calling the situation “not right.”
In Ohio, Senator
Jon Husted called for an end to the Iran war “as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” Republican Iowa Senate nominee Ashley Hinson and Republican Michigan nominee Mike Rogers also called for the conflict to end. While most remain broadly supportive of Trump, signs of strain are beginning to emerge.
For years, Texas Democrats have treated statewide victory like a mirage, always out of reach. But Texas' young voters may end up holding the key to flipping the deep-red state's marquee Senate seat.
"I am incredibly proud to have students across our state... fight[ing] for the future of Texas."
As Newsweek recently reported, Democrats have focused this cycle on building the infrastructure previous campaigns lacked. Young voters may now supply the energy to test it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent the summer courting them, launching “Students for Paxton” chapters and touting a new generation of conservative activists. “I am incredibly proud to have students across our state stepping up to fight for the future of Texas,” he said.
Yet the political payoff has been elusive. A new survey from Texas Southern University's Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center found Democratic state Representative James Talarico leading Paxton 76 percent to 18 percent among likely voters under 35, a sharp widening from July, when Talarico led 59 percent to 29 percent.
The youth gap is striking, with the same poll showing Talarico ahead by just a point, 47 percent to 46 percent. Political strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek that Talarico's frequent appearances on podcasts and online shows popular with young men have helped his rise. "He's on these platforms," Madrid said. "He's very popular and well received by the hosts and presumably the audience."
Texas could elect its first Democrat statewide in over three decades, reshaping politics far beyond the state.
Italy has joined a long-running debate over integration, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announcing plans to ban burqas and niqabs in schools and limit foreign students in classes. The measures, which would include Italian language requirements for migrant parents, echo policies elsewhere in Europe, including France. Backers say they encourage cohesion; opponents warn they could deepen alienation and stigmatize communities.
The deaths of 10 lions in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area have put a spotlight on the dangers confronting one of Africa's most iconic species. Authorities suspect the animals were poisoned, though a probe is ongoing. It underscores the fragile balance between wildlife conservation and human activity in East Africa, where lion populations face multiple pressures beyond protected reserves.
Google has been hit with a 403 million euro (\$463 million) fine by Ireland's privacy regulator after authorities found the company breached EU data protection rules in its handling of location data between 2018 and 2020. The ruling highlights concerns about the commercial value of information generated by people's daily movements and online activity. Google says the case relates to historical policies and that it has significantly evolved its location data practices.
Indonesia is keeping Russian crude oil on the table, despite the growing risk of U.S. penalties for buyers of Moscow's energy exports. With a second procurement phase under way, officials say future purchases will depend on economic viability and compliance with international rules as Jakarta seeks to bolster energy security. It reflects a broader challenge for import-dependent economies navigating increasingly politicized global energy markets.
Drones have transformed the war in Ukraine from above. Now they are changing how attacks unfold on the ground. During Operation Vivaldi, Ukraine's counteroffensive around Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region, heavy bomber drones carried explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian lines. Once on the ground, the smaller machines were used to disrupt defenses before Ukrainian troops advanced.
"Our heavy bomber drones deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers [six miles] into the enemy's rear," said Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps. He called it the world's first airborne deployment of ground-based robotic systems. Ukrainian media noted that ground robots had previously been carried by air, but not explosive models over such a distance. The tactic illustrates the growing sophistication of unmanned warfare. Aerial drones are becoming more than surveillance platforms or weapons: they can now transport other machines and place them where soldiers would face the greatest risk. Ukraine said Operation Vivaldi had liberated two settlements, secured a third and reclaimed about 19 square miles. Military analyst Mick Ryan said: "We may be approaching, or in the midst of, a shift to a new phase of this war."
A half-empty chamber is supposed to communicate isolation. In diplomacy, absence is judgment: the speaker is no longer worth hearing. But modern populism has made that symbolism unstable. Condemnation can be repackaged as persecution, while an establishment's refusal to listen becomes evidence that its opponent is saying what it cannot bear to hear.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands this grammar well. As he began his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 24, dozens of delegates walked out, leaving much of the chamber empty. He immediately absorbed their protest into his own argument. “If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left the hall, please do so now,” he said.
The diplomats intended their absence as a rebuke. Yet once the cameras captured the walk-out, the empty seats acquired another political life. For Netanyahu's supporters, isolation can signify not abandonment but steadfastness: the solitary defender refusing to bend before a hostile world. The larger the chorus against him becomes, the easier it is to present resistance as authority. Visually, the diplomats became the supporting cast in the story they meant to reject. That does not make their protest meaningless. Diplomatic estrangement can bring policy changes and weakened alliances that rhetoric cannot dissolve. But the scene captured a central tension in modern politics: humiliation and validation can occupy the same image.
The delegates withheld their attention. In doing so, they gave Netanyahu something politicians usually have to manufacture: visible opposition.
A familiar voice used to be proof of identity. Now it can be manufactured from a few seconds of audio. Scammers are using AI to impersonate relatives in distress, reviving the “family emergency” con with fake pleas for bail, ransom or urgent help. Americans aged 55 and older who fall victim to phone scams lose an average of \$1,298 per incident, according to voice-security company Hiya.
The U.S. faces an identity-fraud crisis accelerating faster than systems can track, Jordan Burris, head of public sector at the identity verification platform Socure, recently told the House Oversight Committee.
Deepfakes now mimic gender, accent, speaking style and even mood. “They can sound super happy and bubbly... [or] aggressive and demanding,” Officer Matthew Pesta of the Garland Police Department, Texas, told NBC.
In March, one in four Americans said they had received a deepfake voice call in the previous year. Dark-web ads for voice-cloning services rose 82 percent in 2025 and another 75 percent till July this year, according to a NordVPN report
Now a call can raise the question at the heart of sci-fi thriller Total Recall: How do you know what's real when evidence can be manufactured?
Remember when planes were falling out of the sky last year? News of plane crashes in the air and on the tarmac, while rare, doesn't help people who already need a pill and a prayer to make it through a commercial flight from New York to Chicago. And now the Federal Aviation Administration wants to smooth operations with a new AI tool.
The Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART, aims to move the FAA “from a reactive approach to a predictive one” by anticipating demand, weather and airspace constraints days in advance.
Major airline CEOs are on board, but will flyers be?
In the first two months of 2025 alone, there were 188 aviation accidents. By the end of the year, the Aviation Safety Network Safety Database reported a seven-year high in aviation fatalities, up 30 percent from 2024. That came as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cut around 400 aviation jobs—some of which were directly involved in safety measures.
The Harris Poll found that 65 percent of Americans reported being more nervous about flying after the string of incidents in early 2025. And more than one-third said their fears of flying led them to change their travel plans.
This year, there have already been over 1,000 airplane accidents in the U.S. Virginia Democratic Representative Don Beyer said airlines were reportedly “privately panicking” over the rollout of SMART, and that air traffic controllers were not consulted on the system’s design or trained on it before it was implemented. And with Americans growing increasingly skeptical of AI and its impact on our future, a Xanax prescription might not be enough to quell flight anxiety.
Japan's centenarian population has exceeded 100,000 for the first time, setting a national record after decades of steady growth. The country has more people aged 100 or older than anywhere else in the world, and nearly 88 percent of those are women.
Nearly nine months after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's interim president met Donald Trump, flashed a peace sign and thanked him from the podium. Trump had declared, "To the victor belong the spoils." The spoils include Maduro's understudy.
Venezuela's Nobel-winning opposition leader failed three times in two days to get home from Panama. Rodríguez got a General Assembly seat; Machado couldn't get one on a Beechcraft.
Trump told Britain's new prime minister relations were better “than they were with your last prime minister” and called him a “natural business-person.” Burnham built his career in politics, not business; Labour will wonder what he sold.
New York's mayor used his third friendly meeting with Trump to pitch a \$21 billion plan for 12,000 homes over a Queens rail yard. Trump once called him a “100 percent Communist Lunatic,” but this pinko speaks fluent Queens real estate.
After nearly two years of annexation threats, Denmark's prime minister gave Trump access to bases a 1951 treaty already allowed. She kept Greenland by letting the Americans reopen a base they closed themselves.
The Costa Rican economist retook the lead for U.N. secretary-general with nine Security Council votes of encouragement, exactly enough. But discouraging votes have climbed from 1 to 5. Two more, and the magic nine stops being possible.
\- Converse's decision to pull an advert featuring K-pop star Karina after accusations of racist imagery has sparked a debate beyond the image itself.
Some said lighting on the singer's skirt resembled a Ku Klux Klan hood, and that the positioning of a pair of sneakers recalled lynching imagery. Others pointed to the controversy as evidence that reports of the demise of “Woke 1.0” may have been exaggerated.
Converse apologized and removed the campaign, but the episode has fed into a broader argument about whether the dynamics associated with Woke 1.0 are still operating.
The term is often used to describe an era when social media activism could turn cultural disputes into corporate crises,
THE ARCHIVES
1998 leaving brands little choice but to apologize and retreat or risk being canceled.
That question has taken on new relevance following reactions to a recent essay by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. It fueled arguments that some of the assumptions underpinning the height of progressive activism are being re-examined, raising the possibility that woke idealism is giving way to a more skeptical outlook.
The Converse dispute, however, followed a familiar script: competing interpretations of an image, a social media firestorm and a company deciding that withdrawal was the
least risky option.
Whatever viewers saw in the advert, it's probably too soon to write a eulogy for Woke 1.0.
"Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference... was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated."
TikTok's treatment of the Lindsay Clancy case fits a recurring pattern. From Gabby Petito to Karen Read, the platform has turned tragedies into content economies: hashtags, merchandise, sponsored commentary and amateur juries reaching verdicts long before the real one arrives. More than 164,400 videos carried the #clancy hashtag during her murder trial over the deaths of her three children—which ended in a mistrial—as conspiracy theories swirled.
Criticism of TikTok is deserved, but it isn't the whole picture. During the trial, Wisconsin mom Brandee Mulligan launched a GoFundMe for Clancy's parents, raising more than \$1.2 million. More striking was the response to the case from women who saw themselves in it. Aaisha Alvi wrote for Postpartum Support International: "Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference...was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated for...postpartum psychosis. If not for the sixth provider I saw, my daughter and I would not be here today."
Roughly one in five mothers experience a maternal mental health condition, and about three-quarters go untreated, according to Maternal Mental Health Leadership
Alliance. None of this excuses the harm. A grieving father faced unfounded accusations, and the case's algorithmic churn has often rewarded speculation over fact.
But TikTok didn't only make things worse. For every conspiracy theory, there was a woman finally saying the quiet part aloud.
“The best way to grasp this is to see the economic events of the past 15 months as a set of dominoes that, as they tumbled, have imperiled U.S. production and profits—and frayed Americans’ confidence,” Newsweek wrote after a series of international economic crunches—including the Asian and Russian financial crises, which led to the collapse of one of the largest U.S. hedge funds at the time—caused the stock market to slide almost 17 percent in less than three months and drove recession fears. This confidence was important, as consumer buying made up two-thirds of the U.S. economy at the time. Twenty-five years later, the GDP is just as reliant on consumers. However, if Americans’ confidence was shaken then, it’s at rock bottom now. U.S. consumer sentiment has dropped almost 16 percent since the start of the Iran war, renewing worries of a spending pullback that could tip the dominoes again.
If you tuned into the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys game on September 20, you may be eligible for financial compensation—in the form of a dollar from a swear jar. Ex-pro quarterback and FOX Sports NFL analyst Tom Brady dropped the s-bomb during the live broadcast of the prime-time game while watching the gruesome slow-mo footage of Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels dislocating his elbow. Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark—for both Daniels and Brady.
The commentator immediately realized his mistake and apologized, but the damage was already done. Brady's on-air slip of the tongue could cost upward of \$500,000 in an FCC fine for violating the agency's indecency rules, which basically prohibit broadcast television and radio from airing anything you wouldn't want your sweet little grandmother hearing or seeing.
The amount is pocket change for FOX. The real cost is the reputational damage from viewers who had to explain what adult words were to their children. But considering many children are consuming far worse content on their iPhones nowadays—albeit with increasing regulation—the need for such strict rules becomes a little blurrier.
Parents are becoming laxer about their children cursing. Just under half say it's never OK to curse, according to a University of Michigan poll.
Is this shift the result of a growing cultural acceptance of swearing, or has the test for what is profane changed? Standards elsewhere have shifted—ads of models in lingerie and swimwear barely register; many are now just shy of fully nude. And advanced technology has made gore and violence look all the more realistic on the big screen. Even our politicians are cursing more. Is this just the direction we're headed in?
What is clear is that profanity has become a signal for authenticity. Though some questioned Brady's professionalism, most laughed off his unfiltered outburst—and his later description of a pass as a “p\*\*\* missile”—as evidence that he was finally becoming comfortable on-air. Brady, only in his third season behind the mic, signed the richest deal in broadcasting history in 2022: 10 years, \$375 million. His debut drew complaints of being “vanilla” and lacking the charisma that defined his playing career. But as one fan put it after the s-bomb: “I hate Tom Brady but that’s about the only thing that makes him interesting.”
AI is already at war. During the first 24 hours of this year's conflict with Iran, the U.S. used the AI-powered Maven system to help identify and strike more than 1,000 targets. Yet President Donald Trump has proposed an “AI Force” and an AI czar, arguing America must accelerate AI development. At nearly the same moment, the administration floated an AI incident hotline with China. Together, those moves highlight the central tension of AI policy: Washington wants to oversee a technology it also believes it must race to develop faster than Beijing.
The debate is now well established. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar want a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence. Sanders has urged Trump to seek a treaty with China limiting AI development, warning that a superintelligent system would threaten all of humanity, not just one country. Some industry leaders have voiced similar concerns. Others, including Trump allies such as former AI czar David Sacks, argue existing laws governing fraud, privacy and liability already provide sufficient oversight. Public confidence remains low. Pew found majorities distrust both the federal government's ability to regulate AI and companies' ability to develop it responsibly.
The real question is not whether AI should move faster or slower. It is who actually controls it. Trump's Space Force analogy offers one answer. Congress turned Space Force from an idea into an institution with legal authority, personnel and funding. An AI Force currently has none of those. Markets are another force entirely. Goldman Sachs estimates AI-related investment will exceed \$1 trillion globally in 2026, including roughly \$581 billion in the United States. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates data centers could consume 11.8 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has already integrated AI into military operations through Maven, and the international race is shaped by China, whose decisions Washington cannot control.
That leaves a narrow role for any future AI Force. It may advise, coordinate and advocate. But unless it gains authority over law, military systems, investment and international agreements, the forces most shaping AI will remain elsewhere.
A high number of U.S.-made combat boots failed Marines during NATO training in the Arctic, putting them at risk of frostbite and hypothermia. Fresh legislation on military procurement could make the problem worse
BY
ELLIE COOK
I T TOOK ONLY A FEW FRIGID FEBRUARY DAYS OF TRUDGING through Norwegian snow and ice for several United States Marines to notice something was wrong. First, they found holes in the leather of their often brand-new military-issue boots. Next, gaps opened up in the soles of the shoes that let in freezing cold water as they hiked and skied, weighed down by the packs strapped to their backs, according to a Pentagon official and U.S. military records reviewed by Newsweek.
The failures occurred during training for Cold Response 2026, a Norwegian-led NATO exercise involving more than 25,000 personnel in the Nordic country, and more than 7,000 others in Finland. Among those taking part were roughly 3,000 U.S. Marines. Most of them were deployed with the II Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, according to the Marine Corps, to Norwegian training grounds above the Arctic Circle in early 2026.
The boot issues have raised questions about the quality of military-issued footwear and about the Better Outfitting Our Troops (BOOTS) Act, a congressional proposal to expand U.S.-made boot requirements by limiting troops' access to some foreign-made footwear permitted under existing rules. Currently, Pentagon funds can only be used to buy military boots if they're made in the U.S. (subject to certain limited exceptions). The intention was to give U.S. companies a boost and reduce dependence on foreign supply chains, but critics say service members are suffering because they're being forced to wear poor-quality footwear and, ultimately, rack up costs when they need to buy replacements.
Failures in cold weather clothing and footwear can expose troops to frostbite, hypothermia and other life-threatening conditions, particularly during prolonged operations in the depths of Arctic winter.
It comes as NATO turns its attention to the Arctic, wary of Russia's expanding presence and growing Chinese interest, and follows President Donald Trump's long-running fixation with exerting greater U.S. control over Greenland, a self-governing territory of fellow alliance member Denmark.
The Cold Response exercises were part of the “Arctic Sentry” drills NATO unveiled in February, through which the alliance says it is making its presence known in the austere region, getting soldiers and marines accustomed to an unforgiving climate where Moscow’s troops are far more comfortable.
The exercises were intended to showcase how U.S. forces could operate alongside other NATO countries in some of the toughest
PERISCOPE
conditions they could face. And in many ways, they did—but not always in a good way.
Marines were pulled off the icy Norwegian fields during the exercises with their boot soles peeling away, or part of the plastic heel digging into their tendons, the Pentagon official—granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly—told Newsweek. For others, the heel cup wore quickly through the lining or the eyelets became loose.
The Marine Corps has confirmed that the concerns involved Intense Cold Weather Boots manufactured by Belleville Boot Co. It said Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel observed the problems firsthand in Norway.
“Enormous sets of issues started coming up” with the U.S.-made footwear, the Corps said.
According to the Pentagon official, the Norwegian military helped the U.S. Marines source M/77 boots manufactured by the Nordic country's Alfa company, which developed the footwear with Norway's army back in the 1970s. Some pairs of replacement boots were bought directly from nearby stores. The Pentagon official said critical provisions had to be taken off a U.S. resupply ship so the vessel could be reloaded with more American-made boots and rerouted to Norway.
A joint statement provided to Newsweek by Lt. Col. Kurt Stahl, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Europe and Africa, said U.S. forces had used an established Host Nation Support mechanism to procure locally available footwear with U.S. funds.
“Commanders and logisticians took action to meet Marines’ equipment needs and sustain training during the exercise,” the statement said. “We are not aware of any Norwegian forces purchasing or donating boots on behalf of U.S. Marines.”
The statement described Host Nation Support as a standard sustainment process that enables forces to obtain specialized or locally available equipment without requiring every item to be shipped from the U.S.
Stahl disputed the Pentagon official's account of the resupply ship, saying there was no rerouted ship that provided replacement boots to the Marines.
by Newsweek, described “significant defects” in the specialist boot, and said the problems were discovered during the training in Norway from late February.
The assessment referenced a brief given in fall 2025 which said an unspecified vendor “did not identify poor craftsmanship and unacceptable materials” before shipping boots to the Marines. Two photos beneath these judgments show boots overlaid with the Belleville logo. There were “ongoing quality failures” between fall 2025 and spring 2026 with the boots approved for the U.S. Marines to hand to their service members, including the Belleville ones, the briefing says.
The problems did not end when the troops left Norway. After the failures emerged, the Marines returned to their warehouses and inspected additional stockpiles, finding more examples of faulty boots at Camp Lejeune, the Pentagon official said.
The Marine Corps said that Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel subsequently conducted three inspections of Intense Cold Weather Boots at the base. The initial inspection took place one week after the team returned to the U.S., with subsequent inspections conducted in April and July
this year, with representatives for Belleville and Defense Logistics Agency present.
A spokesperson for the DLA—which is responsible for buying
clothes, shoes and equipment for service members—separately confirmed that it supplied the Belleville boots through what they described as a commercial, off-the-shelf contract vehicle to meet a Marine Corps requirement.
“We are aware of the issues with the boots and have been assisting the Marine Corps with inspections,” the spokesperson told Newsweek.
The early 2026 assessment said the vendor, which wasn't explicitly named, was scheduled to inspect 5,000 pairs of boots at Camp Lejeune because “initial sampling” at the warehouse found a roughly 50 percent defect rate. This statement came directly under a description of defects in Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots.
Faulty boots were later identified in other Marine Corps bases, including in Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan, the Pentagon official said. It's
not clear how many boots in total were affected. Newsweek did not view records detailing the number or type of defective boots identified at those additional locations.
A separate presentation from summer 2026, seen by Newsweek, said the inspection had taken place “following widespread failures during Cold Response 2026.”
The information on the slide also said Marines had been pulled from the field because of faulty boots that had all been worn for
Troops attend a military exercise on March 12, 2026, at the Bardufoss Airbase in Norway. Cold Response 2026, which began in the Nordic country a month earlier, exposed failures in U.S. Marines' boots.
fewer than 30 days, and that the corps then had “to buy replacements from the local economy.”
The presentation called the April findings “an alarming rate of defective pairs.” It said the follow-up inspection in July “revealed a substantially higher incidence of defects, indicating a notable deterioration in product quality between the two inspection periods.”
According to the presentation, inspectors examined 2,642 Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots at Camp Lejeune in April and found 183 with defects, a failure rate of 6.93 percent. In July, 1,781 boots were inspected and 355 were found to have defects, a failure rate of 19.93 percent. Combined, 4,423 boots were inspected and 538 were found to have defects, an overall defect rate of 12.16 percent.
The briefing said the industry norm was between a 2 and 3 percent failure rate.
The Marine Corps confirmed that the inspections identified 538 “out-of-the-box workmanship failures.” It said the findings produced a corrective action plan for Belleville to replace affected boots on a one-for-one basis.
Belleville describes its military footwear as “built with the uncompromised craftsmanship, quality and dependability required by warfighters around the globe.”
In a statement to Newsweek, the company said it had been working directly with the Marines to address their concerns and ensure it delivered the quality of combat footwear the service required.
“Belleville is committed to continuous quality improvements and works to quickly resolve any issues,” the company said.
Belleville said it consistently exceeds DLA performance expectations and receives the highest ratings under the agency's Supplier Risk Performance System, which it said measures on-time delivery and product quality.
The company, founded in 1904, described itself as the country's oldest and largest manufacturer of American-made military boots and said it had supplied footwear to the U.S. military since World War I.
The controversy around the equipment has renewed scrutiny of rules that favor American-made military footwear and the push to tighten them further.
The defective boots were military-issued footwear. The proposed BOOTS Act would apply to a related but distinct category: optional combat boots that service members acquire themselves and are permitted to wear with their uniforms.
Because of the decades-old Berry Amendment, Pentagon funds generally cannot be used to buy foreign-made footwear or other covered clothing unless an exemption applies. These exemptions include purchases not exceeding \$200,000, certain emergencies, and cases in which American-made products cannot be obtained when needed in satisfactory quality and sufficient quantity at U.S. market prices.
The BOOTS Act would introduce further restrictions. The House version would require the defense secretary to prohibit service members from wearing optional combat boots as part of a required uniform unless the boots were manufactured entirely in the U.S. from American-grown, reprocessed, reused or produced materials and domestically manufactured components.
The legislation would limit the Marine Corps' Optional Boot Program, which allows service members to wear approved models that are not manufactured in the U.S. as long as they comply with applicable trade rules.
A favored option among service members is footwear made in Cambodia by U.S.-registered company OTB. Three types of boots made by OTB can be worn by Marines.
"THE RESULT IS THAT THE WAR-FIGHTER DOESN'T GET THE BEST PRODUCT."
But the prospect of closing this loophole makes many troops shudder. Not because they oppose the idea of wearing only U.S.-made boots, but because they think the change will harm U.S. Marines and shoemakers won't be able to keep up with the demand.
"The U.S. manufacturers aren't keeping up with quality or quantity," the Pentagon official said. "Just because it is American-made, doesn't mean we're seeing quality."
There's concern even among the current manufacturers about what the BOOTS Act could mean. Chris Perrotti, the head of manufacturing tasked with overseeing quality control and production at Danner—a Belleville competitor—said there was “frustration” among Berry-compliant bootmakers for the U.S. military that the
descriptions handed down by the DLA are based on using certain types of products to build the boots, rather than what will work best.
"The result is that the warfighter doesn't get the best product," Perrotti said in an email seen by Newsweek that was sent to another major U.S. military contractor in November 2025.
It is too expensive for U.S.-based suppliers to scale up their manufacturing to a point where they could support more boots being made, Perrotti said, meaning American companies “can’t support a military ramp up.”
In mid-2024, Washington-based defense and national security think tank CNA published its results of a report commissioned by the DLA. The point, the
report said, was to work out the vulnerabilities and problems with the U.S.'s production of items like Marines' boots, and how it could change during wartime.
In this scenario, the DLA would need to buy an additional 456,000 boots for its service members each year. Industry participants in this war game said this would only be possible with significant investment before a conflict started and caused demand for footwear to surge, as they can only produce a maximum of 525,000 boots currently each year. The additional purchases would put annual production at 981,000.
A separate internal military examination concluded in April this year that U.S.-based vendors could not keep up with demand for boots for U.S. service members, with up to 4.2 million pairs needed across the branches each year in peacetime, Newsweek understands.
The average life span of U.S. military boots is assessed within the armed forces to be between one and two years. Each service member is required to have at least two pairs at any one time.
The BOOTS Act was ultimately removed from the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act outlining the Pentagon's priorities for the 2027 fiscal year, according to information reviewed by Newsweek. Language from the proposal was reintroduced in the Senate in July, leaving open the possibility that it could return as lawmakers resume work on the legislation.
Its backers hope its scope could extend beyond the U.S. military to the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon official said.
That could add millions of pairs of boots to the order books of a limited number of authorized manufacturers. DHS includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. ICE said its ranks had grown by more than 120 percent to 22,000 officers and agents in one year.
The question facing lawmakers is therefore larger than whether one model of boot failed inspection. They must decide whether stricter domestic manufacturing rules would encourage the investment needed to strengthen the American footwear industry, as supporters contend, or restrict access to alternative boots before U.S. companies can reliably supply the necessary quality, performance and volume.
CONTROVERSIAL TAKE INCOMING. NEW YORK CITY MAYOR Zohran Mamdani is the current leader of the Democratic Party. Full stop.
But how could a political neophyte in his first year as a mayor, who has a hard ceiling on his ambitions, since he's not U.S.-born and can't run for president, become the de facto face of a main political party? Partly, there's no one else rising to the occasion, and politics abhors a vacuum. Also, he's just that talented.
This past month, President Donald Trump made a pit stop at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, during a visit to New York City—their third in-person sit-down of the year. Trump just loves this guy. He told reporters at their joint press conference that Mamdani had “great potential,” then patted him on the arm and lingered in the background while the mayor took questions. Mamdani then made a point of calling on CNN, Politico and MSNBC—the three outlets Trump had just banned from the White House.
The irony is that Mamdani is, quite literally, everything Trump used to falsely say about President Barack Obama: Muslim, African-born, socialist. But something closer to a father-son dynamic is developing between these two. The president meeting with an avowed democratic socialist weeks before national elections his own party is trying to frame as a referendum on socialism is not
an ideal look. Trump doesn't care. Game recognizes game. I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani. Both are outer-borough strivers the elites wrote off as jokes before proving everybody wrong. Both have built personality cults around themselves. And Mamdani has that charisma that Trump used to have.
So what if Trump likes guys who remind him of himself? If you're a Republican running for reelection this fall, it gets hard to sell socialism as a bogeyman when the leader of your own party is palling around with an actual socialist. But the more interesting story is what Mamdani is doing for Democrats. He wasn't a nationally known figure when he took office; now he's among the most popular Democrats anywhere. That's rare. Politicians typically lose popularity as they govern. Not Mamdani. Why? It's part social media instinct. Some is his governing record, which has landed closer to the center than his politics suggest, particularly on crime, where he's mostly let the NYPD do its job. And some of it is that charisma.
Mamdani gets away with regular meetings with a president his party's base considers the devil. There's been no real backlash from the DSA wing for sitting down with the man they call Orange Hitler. Compare that to Hakeem Jeffries, who is still taking heat from Democrats for taking a single meeting with Jared Kushner. The difference is charisma. Jeffries doesn't have it. So much of
politics comes down to that. You either have it, like Trump, Mamdani, Obama and Clinton, or you don't, like Vance, Harris, Biden, and Jeffries.
Before the Trump meeting, Mamdani spoke at a U.N. summit of global mayors and made a nuanced argument about his governing philosophy I found compelling: that the left has ceded "I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani."
issues like fraud, efficiency and quality of life to the right, and once an issue gets coded right-wing, Democrats get too scared to touch it. That's how you end up with a CVS where you need to push a button to get toothpaste, or a subway commute where you're stepping around someone in a psychiatric crisis on the way to drop your kid at school. It's a relief to hear a Democratic elected official say you're not a fascist for wanting something better than that.
Call it Nixon-in-China. Mamdani can take on these issues from the left without triggering a backlash, just as Nixon opened relations with China because his anti-communist credentials were beyond reproach.
As a New Yorker, I'm still not sold on Mamdani as a mayor. I have real complaints about how the city is being run right now. But on the national political stage, he's doing the Democratic Party's work for it: principled without being obstinate, telegenic without the plastic polish of a Gavin Newsom, fluent in social media without sounding like he was raised online. He throws red meat to the base when it suits him—calling for the arrest of Benjamin
Netanyahu, say—and pivots to statesman mode just as easily. He’s willing to touch the third rails of progressive politics that everyone else avoids. The African-born, Muslim, socialist mayor of America’s largest city is showing Democrats a path forward. Whether they take it is another question.
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Carlo Versano is director of politics and culture at Newsweek. Email him at c.versano@newsweek.com
Newsweek examines an alleged influence campaign that coincided with Canada's decision to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles
BY
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
A BUSINESSMAN WITH LINKS TO CHINA'S united front influence network urged Canada to rethink its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles just days before Ottawa slashed the levy, a dossier provided to Newsweek alleges.
Officials announced during Prime Minister Mark Carney's trip to China in January that 49,000 Chinese-made EVs would be allowed into the country at a 6.1 percent tariff—replacing a 100 percent surtax imposed in 2024 under his predecessor Justin Trudeau. The deal was part of a broader trade agreement that included tariff relief from China for Canadian agricultural exports.
But it marked a break with the United States, which continues to restrict Chinese EVs, and raised the temperature around national security concerns in North America over Chinese-made automotive technology.
According to the Canadian source who provided the dossier, a policy paper seeking “a structural rethink of Canada’s 100 percent surtax on Chinese electric vehicles” was delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office and to members of parliament shortly before Carney left for Beijing. The person and the association behind the proposal are not registered lobbyists, according to a search of Canada’s lobby registry.
When Newsweek contacted the prime minister's office seeking confirmation and comment, the Privy Council Office responded, directing the question to Global Affairs Canada, which did not reply to a request for comment.
The dossier identifies the businessman as Shui Shousong, president of the Sino-Canada Entrepreneurs Association, also known as SinoCann. Chinese-language reports reviewed by Newsweek describe Shui as having been a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which is a key part of China's united front system, a Chinese Communist Party network that builds ties with non-party groups, business leaders, diaspora communities and other organizations in support of Beijing's political objectives. The reports included one by Zhejiang Minjian, a magazine affiliated with the United Front in Zhejiang province.
Shui and SinoCann did not respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The United Front Work Department is the CCP body responsible for overseeing much of that work. Western governments and security agencies have scrutinized united front-linked organizations over concerns that they are advancing Beijing's political and economic objectives abroad.
The Canadian source, who asked not to be named because of sensitivities around strained U.S.-Canada ties, said Shui had “a very extensive footprint of united front membership and activity” and had appeared at events with Canadian municipal and federal politicians, including one “where a Chinese consular official openly praised the host organization for advancing ‘reunification’ work,” citing Chinese-language reports. That means “reunification” with Taiwan, which is a core political goal of the CCP and its united front work.
In August, Shui gave a speech at the launch of a new Canada-China EV association and the unveiling of a service center to build a “transnational industrial cooperation platform” between the two countries, according to a report by Victoria Media, a Chinese-language outlet in Canada. Shui is the president of the Canada-China Business Council that hosted the event, according to Chinese-language media reports.
Sitting and retired members of the Canadian Parliament also spoke at the
"NO ONE IN CANADIAN MEDIA ASKED THE OBVIOUS QUESTION OF WHO HAD BEEN PUTTING THEIR CASE TO THE PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE BEFOREHAND."
"NO ONE IN CANADIAN MEDIA ASKED THE OBVIOUS QUESTION OF WHO HAD BEEN PUTTING THEIR CASE TO THE PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE BEFOREHAND."
TRADE DEAL
Carney at a press conference in Beijing during his January trip.
launch, which was attended by municipal government members and diplomats from the Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in Toronto, Victoria Media reported. Newsweek requested comment from the Chinese consulate in Toronto and the embassy in Ottawa but did not hear back.
“No one in Canadian media asked the obvious question of who had been putting their case to the Prime Minister’s Office beforehand, or on whose behalf,” the source said, and characterized the episode as an example of a potential influence channel that may have gone unexamined.
“That is the finding,” the source said. “Not a covert operation but an unexamined one: access obtained through ordinary channels, in daylight, by a figure whose affiliations were a matter of public record in two languages, with no registry entry, no reporting, and no evidence that any Canadian body looked [into the matter].”
Chinese EVs have become a major issue in North American trade and security policy. Washington has kept Chinese EVs out of the U.S. market, warning about loss of manufacturing strength in core products and technologies, and has warned that connected vehicle technology could create security vulnerabilities. China's EV industry, led by companies such as BYD, has expanded rapidly overseas, intensifying concerns in Western capitals, particularly in Germany, about industrial capacity, supply chains and data security.
In September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy sent a sharply worded letter to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley expressing “profound concern”
about Ford's ties to Chinese companies and technology. The Department of Transportation cited Ford's use of licensed battery technology from China's CATL, a partnership involving Hangzhou-based Geely, and other China-linked supply chain issues.
"While DOT recognizes the intense competitive pressures of the global market, the Company's recent strategic decisions paint a troubling picture of a foundational American brand actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises," Duffy wrote. Ford rejected the criticism, calling the letter "wrongheaded." The company said it supports U.S. efforts to advance American innovation and manufacturing.
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Newsweek's senior correspondent, international affairs. Email her at d.tatlow@newsweek.com
PERISCOPE
SOCIETY
[GENERATION GAIN] Young workers are earning more and facing lower unemployment than millennials did at the same age, complicating the familiar perception of Gen Z
[GENERATION GAIN] Young workers are earning more and facing lower unemployment than millennials did at the same age, complicating the familiar perception of Gen Z
BY
SUZANNE BLAKE
GEN Z HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF NOT WANTING to work. But behind the familiar complaints about entitlement and poor work ethic, the numbers tell a different story.
Gen Z workers are entering the labor market under strikingly different conditions than millennials did, and new data suggests it is paying off. Despite lower labor force participation, Gen Z adults are facing lower unemployment and are earning more than millennials did at the same age, according to a new labor market report from resume platform Zety.
“Every generation remembers how hard we worked when we were young. We remember the long hours and the struggle. Somehow we’re a little less good at remembering all the complaining we did at 22,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek.
“Gen Z isn’t lazy. They’re different. They’re more willing to question whether the old bargain of ‘work hard, keep your head down and eventually you’ll be rewarded’ still makes sense.”
Zety's Early Career Labor Market Report analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data on adults ages 20 to 24 during two comparable periods: millennials from 2005 to 2008 and Gen Z from 2021 to 2024. Median weekly earnings for full-time Gen Z workers averaged about \$756, versus \$674 for millennials after adjusting for inflation, a gap of roughly 12.3 percent. Unemployment averaged 7.5 percent for Gen Z, compared with 8.9 percent for millennials at the same age.
The Market Did the Heavy Lifting "One could argue that with fewer Gen Z workers participating in the traditional workforce, the lower supply of available workers means wages have to be a bit higher to attract them," Kevin Thompson, CEO of 9i Capital Group and host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek.
“For years, we’ve heard a repeated stereotype from older Americans that Gen Z
"FOR YEARS, WE'VE HEARD A REPEATED STEREOTYPE... THAT GEN Z DOESN'T WANT TO WORK, BUT THIS DATA SUGGESTS OTHERWISE."
doesn't want to work, but this data suggests otherwise," said Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin to Newsweek.
Gen Z's advantage comes despite lower overall workforce participation: 71.1 percent, versus 74.5 percent for millennials at the same age. The employment-population ratio also trailed, at 65.8 percent versus 67.9 percent. Fewer Gen Zers are working or looking for work, but those who are tend to come out ahead.
“Gen Z has allowed themselves to fight back against lower-than-average wages and, in some cases, will accept going into debt or forgoing purchases rather than chasing materialism simply for the sake of it,” Thompson said. “I don’t think that means they are unmotivated. Their motivation just doesn’t seem to be centered around money in the same way it may have been for previous generations.”
So why is this happening? Unlike millennials, who entered the workforce ahead of the Great Recession, Gen Z came of age in a historically tight, post-pandemic labor market, with employers battling shortages across industries and younger workers finally holding real leverage.
"Some of that advantage reflects very different economic circumstances. Millennials entered adulthood around the Great Recession, while Gen Z benefited from a post-pandemic labor market that produced unusually strong wage growth," Beene said. "Gen Z isn't necessarily working harder or millennials less effectively. Young people are approaching a fundamentally different labor market, and those succeeding in it are doing considerably better financially than the familiar 'lazy Gen Z' narrative would suggest."
Digital fluency hasn't hurt either. A generation raised on technology and social media aligns neatly with what employers now want. Add retiring Baby Boomers and a wave of vacancies, and conditions tilt further in young workers' favor.
“Give any cohort of workers a tight market and they’ll command, and get, higher pay. Hand them a recession and they’ll spend a decade, or a lifetime, digging out,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek. “The only variable that matters here is the balance of power between employers and workers, and employers spend billions doing everything they can to keep it tilted their way.”
None of this means Gen Z has it easy. Soaring housing costs and living expenses remain real burdens, while affordability and career stability still top the list of anxieties for young workers, even with fatter paychecks than their predecessors had.
“Gen Z has lower unemployment among people participating in the labor force, but fewer young adults are participating or employed overall. So this isn’t a clean victory lap,” Ryan said. “To me, the bigger lesson is that generations respond to the economy they’re handed. Millennials adapted to one labor market. Gen Z is adapting to another.”
Whether that advantage holds is an open question. A cooling labor market could erode Gen Z's gains, while AI may reshape entry-level work altogether in the years ahead.
“I’m seeing the tide move,” Driscoll said. “The market is cooling and employers are clawing back, spending more on lobbying than what it would cost to just pay people more and cover benefits. What we’re seeing is the reality of concessions, extracted under pressure, now retreating. Workers only keep what we can defend.”
Gen Z wasn't handed an easier path, just a different one. So far, they're working it smarter, not harder.
Suzanne Blake reports for Newsweek on consumer and social trends. Email her at s.blake@newsweek.com
NEWSWEEK'S AI POLICY SCORECARD SHOWS THAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOK OVER WASHINGTON'S AGENDA FASTER THAN THE PARTIES COULD DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT
BY
ADAM MILLS AND ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
● ● ● ● ●
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THE PACE OF AI? American politicians. In the space of two years, artificial intelligence has gone from a committee-room curiosity to one of the most contested issues of the 2026 midterms. President Donald Trump claims to have directed more than \$2.7 trillion into the AI industry. The lobbying dollars have followed: 11 of the largest technology and AI companies and their trade associations spent \$41.8 million lobby-
ing the federal government in the first six months of 2026, according to Issue One, roughly 10 percent more than a year earlier. This past spring, more than \$27 million from groups linked to OpenAI and Anthropic poured into a single Democratic congressional primary in Manhattan. The sudden emergence of AI as a political issue has turned zoning fights over data centers into attack ads. And it has pushed a question that once belonged to science fiction—will humanity be wiped out by killer robots?—into cable news bookings.
What artificial intelligence hasn't done, unlike nearly every other topic in the
public discourse in the year 2026, is sort itself cleanly into the two parties. “There’s been a total scrambling of partisan politics on this,” Evan Roth Smith, a pollster and founding partner at Sling-shot Strategies, told Newsweek. “We have seen AI have an impact in just about every way that an issue can impact an election.”
That leaves voters heading to the polls on November 3 with an unusual problem. On abortion, guns or immigration, a party label tells you most of what you need to know about a candidate. On AI, it tells you less.
Some members of Congress have told reporters they've used AI only a handful of times; others say their offices rely on it. Some lawmakers abhor data centers while others see them as vital. Some think AI should be regulated by the states, others that it ought to be a purely federal matter. Instead of a party line, AI policy is a patchwork that shifts from
district to district and state to state.
sponsorship from the soon concluding 119th Congress, as well as a wide review of public statements made in speeches, interviews, press releases and social media posts.
The Booster end describes the agenda the hyperscalers and the investors financing the buildout have pressed on Washington: minimal regulation for the sake of technical progress, safety risks as engineering problems to be solved later, vast economic gains worth the job displacement, urgent data center construction at scale, and a race with China that is America's existential national security challenge of
its time. A Skeptic answers no on all five counts.
Between them sits nearly everyone, in combinations no party platform describes, which is why the five category scores matter as much as the overall grade. A single number makes hundreds of lawmakers comparable. The categories show which parts of the agenda each one accepts and which they reject.
It's a system designed to bring some order to a complicated and quickly moving policy debate around AI. “Very few leaders in this debate are ‘skeptics’ of AI’s potential,” Brendan Parets, general counsel for Public First Action, which advocates for stronger safeguards, told Newsweek. “There are, however, many in the ‘race forward’ camp who are publicly skeptical that AI poses serious risks to our national security, families and communities that
To map where lawmakers actually stand, Newsweek built the AI Policy Scorecard. It positions all 537 sitting members of Congress, including senators, representatives and nonvoting House delegates, on a scale from AI Skeptic (1) to AI Booster (5). That score is based on the stances each member has taken in five areas: Regulation & Governance, Data Centers & Energy, Jobs & Economy, Safety & Privacy, and National Security & China. The scores draw on the official record: roll-call votes and bill
SEVERAL FINDINGS FROM THE AI POLICY Scorecard stand out. The extremes are, as extremes tend to be, highly polarized, but Congress does not sort itself on AI policy along familiar partisan lines. The extremes are also nearly empty. Only 18 members score as AI Skeptics, all of them in the Democratic caucus, and only 10 as AI Boosters, all Republicans. Those 28 members are 5 percent of Congress.
As a whole, each party leans in opposite directions: The average Democrat
SLOW IT DOWN
The 10 biggest AI Skeptics in Congress whose records most consistently favor slowing AI down, tougher safety protections and more caution about jobs and the economy
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Bernard Sanders | VT | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.3 | 1.3 | Sen. Tina Smith | MN | D | - | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.3 | Sen. Jeff Merkley | OR | D | 1 | 2 | - | 1.8 | 1 | 1.4 | Sen. Alex Padilla | CA | D | 1 | - | - | 2 | - | 1.5 | Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand | NY | D | 2 | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Mazie K. Hirono | HI | D | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Peter Welch | VT | D | 2 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Raphael G. Warnock | GA | D | - | 2 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.7 | Rep. Frederica S. Wilson | FL-24 | D | 1 | 1.8 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 | Sen. Edward J. Markey | MA | D | 1.3 | 1.5 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 |
The 10 biggest AI Boosters in Congress whose records most consistently favor faster AI development, fewer rules and more data centers
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Alan Armstrong | OK | R | - | 5 | - | - | - | 5.0 | Sen. Dan Sullivan | AK | R | 5 | - | - | - | 5 | 5.0 | Sen. Kevin Cramer | ND | R | - | 4.7 | - | - | 4.5 | 4.6 | Sen. Deb Fischer | NE | R | - | - | 4 | 4 | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. James E. Risch | ID | R | 3 | 5 | - | - | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. Jim Banks | IN | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.8 | 4.3 | Sen. John Thune | SD | R | 4.5 | 4 | - | - | - | 4.3 | Sen. Joni Ernst | IA | R | 4 | - | - | - | 4.5 | 4.3 | Sen. Mike Rounds | SD | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.5 | 4.2 | Sen. Ted Cruz | TX | R | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4.8 | 4.2 | scores 2.60, Lean Skeptic, while the average Republican scores 3.26, Lean Booster. More than half of Democrats, 137 of 262, fall in the Lean Skeptic band, and more than half of Republicans, 137 of 266, fall in Lean Booster. But the distance between the parties—0.66 points on a scale that runs 1 to 5—is relatively small.
And there is also a lot of overlap. Nine Democrats score Lean Booster and 25 Republicans score Lean Skeptic. Together, these 34 members have AI records closer to the opposing party's average than to their own. Another 191, more than a third of Democrats and a third of Republicans, land in Mixed, the scorecard's
narrowest band reserved for records that balance right at the center.
Dig deeper into the data and those differences mask a lot of similarities, with the two parties agreeing on many of the questions at the center of the AI debate: how dangerous (or not) the technology is, and how much it matters to beat China in the AI race (a lot). The primary issue where Republicans and Democrats
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to see all the data from our study and read a detailed methodology.
do break decisively is the one, not surprisingly, that has received the most attention in midterm campaigns: data centers. On Safety, the mean score for both Republicans and Democrats is 2.1, a low Lean Skeptic score. On National Security, the mean is 4.4 Booster for Republicans and 3.9 Lean Booster for Democrats. But on Data Centers, the parties show a 1.7-point gap from the 3.5 Lean Booster for Republicans and 1.9 Lean Skeptic for Democrats.
Individual member combinations are where the scores gets especially interesting. Representative Andy Barr, a Kentucky Republican, scores 3.7, in the middle of Lean Booster territory.
He's taken Booster positions, advocating in June that U.S. policy should be to “win the race for artificial intelligence dominance,” and argued that competing would require more data centers, semiconductor production and power generation. Yet he has also sounded Skeptic notes, leaving the question of where that infrastructure gets built to local communities.
"Some communities are going to want those projects, some communities are not," Barr said. "The people should be in charge of those decisions."
Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, scores 2.6, Lean Skeptic, and his record displays the complexity behind the labels. In April, Lieu partnered with Republican Representative Jay Obernolte on the bipartisan American Leadership in AI Act, a package aimed at strengthening U.S. leadership through research, standards, federal adoption and workforce development. Three months later, he backed the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require developers of the most powerful systems to retain the ability to slow or shut them down if they pose catastrophic risks.
"THIS IS NOT YET FOLLOWING THE TYPICAL POLARized political dynamics of so many other issues," Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School, who co-leads the American Political Science Association's task force on AI and politics, told Newsweek.
The coalitions outside Congress are just as unfamiliar. Lauren McFerran, executive director of the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, said labor leaders now sign on to the same letters as conservative religious leaders on some AI issues, drawn together by anxiety over jobs, safety and the direction of the technology.
“You really see some interesting bedfellows here,” she said.
The anxiety McFerran hears most is about work, which is another place the AI Policy Scorecard shows bipartisan agreement: the means of both
A nationwide backlash is forcing candidates onto unfamiliar ground
BY
ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
IN THE SIX YEARS JON HUSTED SPENT AS OHIO'S lieutenant governor, he celebrated bringing data centers to the state as part of an economic development push that handed operators tens of millions in tax breaks. In 2025, the year Husted was
tapped to fill JD Vance's Senate seat when he became vice president, Ohio's sales tax exemption for data centers cost the state almost \$1.6 billion in foregone revenue.
Two years ago, Husted's record would have been regarded as a sterling Republican credential. But heading into the midterms and fighting to keep his seat, Husted is finding that record is a political liability he is trying to legislate his way out of.
His opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has put the record Husted built at the forefront of his campaign. “Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs,” Brown said, “and Ohioans—not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends—should get to decide if data centers are built in their community.”
That reversal is visible across the Republican caucus. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, Republicans in Congress average a 3.64 Lean Booster score on Data Centers while Democrats are Lean Skeptics at 1.97—the only topic of the five scored questions where party predicts a member's stance, unlike the scores for Safety, Jobs & Economy and National Security, where the two parties are more closely clustered together.
Much of the reason for the split on data centers is that these scores record positions taken over the past two years, a period in which the politics of data centers has changed dramatically. When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, flanked by tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, Republican support for tech company buildouts was a natural fit.
Today, Trump remains one of the biggest public boosters for data centers, lending his dominance over the news cycle to their cause. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
But public opinion has moved the other way. In opinion polls, local opposition to data centers is broad and rising. A Gallup survey released in May found roughly seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community—more than oppose the idea of a nearby nuclear plant. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August put opposition to a local data center at 61 percent, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents against. It is one of the few AI questions where majorities of voters in both parties are firmly in agreement.
“Whether you come at this from the existential risk, geopolitical concerns, labor force impacts or the actual economics and climate and energy issues related to data centers, it is the physical manifestation of AI,” Nathaniel "I AM RESPONDING
TO WHAT THE
VOTERS WANT. THEY
WANT THE DATA
CENTERS TO BE
HELD ACCOUNTABLE
FOR THE COSTS
OF NEW
ELECTRICITY AND
INFRASTRUCTURE.
AND MY BILL
DOES THAT."
Persily, who researches AI at Stanford Law School, told Newsweek. "It is literally a concrete building where you can then channel your anxieties and frustrations."
Congressional Republicans have demonstrated an awareness of
their vulnerabilities on this issue. In the House, Republicans rallied around the Ratepayer Protection Act, which aims to prevent consumers and small businesses from footing the bill for electrical grid upgrades required by AI data centers. Democrats overwhelmingly joined them when the bill passed September 16 with a 417-3 vote. Before it becomes law, however, the bill must pass the Senate, where it is stalled.
The senator who first introduced the measure in the chamber? Jon Husted of Ohio. The day after the bill passed the House, he took to the floor to urge the Senate to pass it by unanimous consent. “I am responding to what the voters want. They want the data centers to be held accountable for the costs of new electricity and infrastructure. And my bill does that,” he told Newsweek.
But the move was blocked by Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, who said he doesn't think it goes far enough. "Rather than voluntary pledges or suggestions to states, Congress needs to pass real legislation, with real teeth," Heinrich said, urging passage of his own bill. That measure, the GRID Savings Act, would require large data center operators
and other industrial users to finance the grid infrastructure they need, instead of asking states to consider it. “If hyperscalers and other Big Tech developers need expensive new facilities and more energy, they should pay for it,” he said.
The bill's fate now sits at the intersection of two campaigns. Husted, who says he's always believed data center development should be a local decision, needs a record of data center skepticism he can point to. But Heinrich and other Democrats have no reason to hand vulnerable Republican incumbents an accomplishment ahead of November 3. "Democrats proved that they're more interested in playing politics than they are at responding to the needs of the American people. They don't really care about affordability when it comes to electricity and data centers. They care about having a political issue. And so they own it now," Husted said.
Ultimately, what neither party is offering is a way to stop the buildout. In Ohio, 78 percent of residents favor a moratorium on new data center construction while more information can be gathered, per a Bowling Green State University poll. Husted doesn't support one. Neither does Brown, who promises instead to make operators pay their full electricity costs, protect water supplies and give communities a say in approvals. However, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, at least 138 Ohio communities have put active data center moratoriums on their books.
That is also why the issue travels so well. Wider grievances against tech companies found a target in data centers: a windowless building on the edge of town, a transmission line, a tax abatement the county already approved.
Husted's arc is the whole shift in miniature: a lieutenant governor who cut the deals is now the senator asking colleagues to protect voters from the bills those deals helped run up. He is not alone, only earlier and more exposed than most. Whether he corrected course fast enough is a question Republicans everywhere will see answered on November 3.
parties land in Mixed, with Republicans at 3.0 and Democrats at 2.8. Some 72 percent of Americans said it was a bad time to find a job, per a Gallup poll published in March.
"The rubber is going to hit the road here when it comes to job security," McFerran said. She pointed to two especially exposed groups: young people trying to enter the workforce and workers in clerical and administrative jobs that have traditionally offered a route into the middle class without a college degree. Protecting workers, she argued, doesn't have to mean resisting technology. Employees often understand where a new system could fail and what would make it useful. "It's who's in the room to make the decision," she said.
"IF CONGRESS ACTS HASTILY BEFORE THE TECHNOLOGY IS UNDERSTOOD, CONGRESS RISKS KILLING INNOVATION AND SETTING THIS TECHNOLOGY BACK DECADES."
Smith of Slingshot sees the same convergence among voters, but arriving by different routes. A Democrat worried about AI might focus on concentrated wealth and the power of technology executives, he said. A Republican might see an elite class acquiring new authority over ordinary life. Independents often bring a deeper suspicion of centralized power. These different worldviews can end up at the same conclusions.
AI has taken off politically “faster than just about any issue in recent memory,” Smith said, because it reaches people through so many parts of their lives. Slingshot’s polling found that people can be comfortable using AI themselves and still fear the “systemic impacts” of what it could do to the economy and society around them. “People are skeptical and apprehensive,” Smith said.
IT STARTED WITH A RESIGNATION. JACOB Coxon, a researcher leaving Anthropic,
posted a note accusing frontier labs of “gambling with our lives” that was viewed more than 173 million times on X. Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s alignment science team, amplified the alarm. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he posted.
A September Politico poll found that 63 percent of Americans believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity.
On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. OpenAI’s Sam Altman quickly agreed (“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier”) and so did Elon Musk (“Dario is right”).
Amodei's case for slowing down rests on the same three premises Congress holds. The technology, he wrote, “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” But slow down too much, “then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” he added, warning of giving China’s ruling Communist Party an advantage.
Persily puts the stakes in similar terms. "When [Claude] Mythos first came out, we were living in a world that had never existed before where an American company could basically take down almost any government in the world if it wanted to," he said. "Things are moving so fast that we kind of forget where we are and where we've been."
The average Democrat scores as a Lean Skeptic while the average Republican is a Lean Booster. But on four of the five questions in Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, the parties sit close together. Each dot shows the caucus' average on each issue from 1 (Skeptic) to 5 (Booster). Only data centers truly divide them
Democratic Caucus
2.60
Republican Caucus 3.26
Holding both convictions at once has not produced much legislation. On September 16, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, tried to fast-track a bill requiring AI developers to build shutdown mechanisms into advanced systems. “We’ve got this risk out there that we know is real of one of these models becoming the Terminator,” Kennedy said.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, blocked it. “If Congress acts hastily before the technology is understood,” Paul said, “Congress risks killing innovation and setting this technology back decades.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, has backed legislation to ban superintelligence outright. Republican senators including Kennedy, Rick Scott of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri have declined to support it; Hawley has pushed instead to hold companies legally liable for what their systems do.
The White House, for its part, has staked out a position to the booster side of the AI industry's own leaders. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High
IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote on Truth Social on September 14, accusing Amodei of "now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'"
ONE ISSUE BREAKS THE PATTERN: DATA CENTERS. The Newsweek AI Policy Scorecard reflects the past two years of public record, and the events of the last two years go a long way toward explaining the split. In the wake of Trump's 2024 election victory, marked by a sharp turn toward Trump in the technology industry, backing data centers became a Republican position: the physical infrastructure for the race with China and a source of jobs and investment. Trump continues to make the case himself on Truth Social.
Democrats, for the most part, did not follow. Then public opinion turned. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August found that 61 percent of Americans opposed construction of a new data center in their area, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents were opposed.
Persily calls data centers the “physical manifestation of AI,” a place where anxieties about jobs, geopolitics, energy or the technology itself suddenly acquire a
target: land, transmission lines, water use, tax breaks and an electricity bill.
Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of the Republican polling firm Cygnal, said data centers began surfacing unprompted in his focus groups toward the end of 2025. By the later primaries, candidates were attacking opponents over their records on data centers and the tax incentives that came with them.
“Nobody’s explaining why we need more of them,” Buchanan said. The fight, he argued, has become a stand-in for something larger: “It’s a proxy issue of, ‘Is this person in the pocket of special interest or is this person for people like me?’”
The record is now moving in real time. On September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, introduced by Representative Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, by a vote of 417 to 3. The bill requires technology companies to pay for new energy infrastructure serving data centers rather than passing those costs on to other customers. Several Republicans in competitive races signed on as cosponsors in the weeks before the vote. The
Competition with China drives unusually broad consensus across Capitol Hill
BY
TOM O'CONNOR
● ● ● ● ●
MUCH LIKE THE RACE FOR SUPREMACY IN NUCLEAR arms and space exploration during the Cold War, the United States once again finds itself contending with a communist rival with vast capabilities in a cutting-edge field likely to define the world for gen-
erations to come. AI, however, in many ways poses an even more complex set of challenges as the U.S. and China move to set and advance their agendas.
As the debate over AI policy plays out in Washington, no issue animates support for an aggressive AI buildout more than the national security implications. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, 86 members received the highest Booster score of 5 in National Security for their positions on AI issues tied to national security and competition with China. That's more than the other four questions covering regulation, data centers, jobs and safety. The caucuses sit closer here than on any other question in the scorecard—Democrats average 3.9, Republicans 4.4.
“China is increasingly being invoked to justify differing policy positions on AI regulation,” Kyle Chan, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center who specializes in U.S.-China relations and emerging technologies, told Newsweek. “We can all agree that China is the elephant in the room for AI regulation, but we don’t agree on what’s the best approach for dealing with China.”
“In general, people looking for some kind of unifying force behind the AI debate are looking to China,” Chan said. “There’s an effort to find common ground on AI issues in the face of so much division.”
AI INDEED REMAINS A DIVISIVE ISSUE IN CONGRESS. THE LARGEST share of lawmakers—191—received a Mixed score of between 2.8 and 3.2, while Skeptics outweigh the Boosters at 162 to 146, according to the AI Policy Scorecard data. But even among those who aim to rein in AI at home through stricter regulation, some lawmakers stand out as prominent proponents of the narrative that the field constitutes a powerful tool in the superpower contest with China.
In the Democratic camp, they include Senators Dick Durbin and Amy Klobuchar, each of whom has a 5 in the national security and China component of AI policy while scoring under 2 in the other categories concerning domestic policy, indicating a track record of seeking more stringent checks and balances on AI at home.
Among Republicans, Senator Josh Hawley emerges as one of the most prominent proponents of curbing unbridled AI expansion at home while pushing for supremacy against China in this field.
Seth Center, former State Department acting special envoy for critical and emerging technologies who co-led the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in 2024, argued the two positions may ultimately collide.
“You cannot hold a ‘beat China in AI consensus’ and a ‘slow down AI development and stop AI infrastructure projects’ view domestically forever without contradictions emerging sooner rather than later,” Center told Newsweek. “There is a synthesis, but politics seems to be making it less likely.”
ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT GROUP OF LAWMAKERS GENERALLY PREFER boosting AI proliferation in the U.S. rather than imposing guardrails as the way to meet the challenge from Beijing.
Republicans within this faction include Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York, who is retiring from the House, Jodey Arrington of Texas, Richard McCormick of Georgia, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
Meanwhile, the lead Democrat in this group is Representative Jared Golden of Maine, also retiring at the end of this term, who ranks second behind Pennsylvania's Senator John Fetterman as the top ranked AI boosters in his party.
Jessica Brandt, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center, pointed to “a broad consensus that AI could transform the balance of military and economic power globally for decades to come and have profound consequences for the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world.”
“That shared understanding creates a simple, unifying
Yet she argued that “the consensus breaks down over what ‘winning’ actually means,” as goals remain ill-defined by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And given Beijing's notable advances in AI, Brandt argued that time was of the essence for outlining U.S. objectives and concrete strategies to pursue them.
"A year ago, the dominant conversation was: How can we beat China in the race to the frontier?" Brandt said. "Now the conversation is shifting to: How, if at all, can we pace the frontier without China?"
MEANWHILE, IN BEIJING, A PARALLEL DEBATE IS PLAYING OUT among policymakers observing the same growing chorus of warnings from experts about the potential risks posed by runaway AI advances. After all, if models indicate AI could one day render humanity obsolete, unchecked proliferation could also theoretically challenge the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, which Brandt defines as one of the top motivations coloring China's discussions on safety.
But there are risks for Washington in this scenario as well, serving as yet another factor bringing both U.S. parties together on the links between AI and China policies.
If China doesn't get AI safety under control, the consequences are swift and global, R. David Edelman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project on Technology, the Economy & National Security, told Newsweek: "The geopolitical risks of a cavalier approach to AI in Beijing could break out into a shooting war far quicker than many would care to admit.
“So regardless of what motivates lawmakers—whether they are concerned about advanced AI as an existential risk to humanity, as a critical way to grow the economy amidst global competition or as a risk to our national security in another country’s hands—all of those policies demand a thoughtful approach to China,” Edelman said.
There is also some logic to seeking cooperation.
“Both governments have an interest in regular channels for flagging and fixing vulnerabilities before they become crises,” Jessica Chen Weiss, former U.S. State Department official who serves as faculty director of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for America, China and the Future of Global Affairs, told Newsweek.
"As China bets on open-weight models, its companies have a growing stake in sharing threat information and best practices," Weiss said. "Technical dialogues could make both countries safer, starting with a common enemy: the ransomware gangs that exploit shared vulnerabilities."
In fact, there is precedent for such collaboration.
Weiss pointed out that when California-based cybersecurity firm Calif used AI to detect a bug that could allow illicit access to accounts associated with popular Chinese messaging platform WeChat, the findings were reported to Shenzhen-based parent conglomerate Tencent.
“That is the kind of disclosure both governments should want more of,” Weiss said.
“IT’S NOT QUITE CLEAR WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A REPUBLICAN ON AI OR A DEMOCRAT ON AI.” POLITICIANS... ARE “FIGURING THIS OUT ON THE FLY.”
“IT’S NOT QUITE CLEAR WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A REPUBLICAN ON AI OR A DEMOCRAT ON AI.” POLITICIANS... ARE “FIGURING THIS OUT ON THE FLY.”
scorecard rates the measure a 2, Lean Skeptic, and that single vote moved a number of House Republicans' scores.
Democrats voted for it too—and argued it was not enough. Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, called the bill “only the beginning.” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said it “falls short.” As of press time, there have been no signs of advancing to a Senate vote since the House passage.
WITH THE COALITIONS UNSETTLED, THE FIGHT OVER what counts as a reasonable response to AI carries extra weight, and the industry is spending heavily to shape it. The \$41.8 million in federal lobbying “captures what’s on paper at the federal level,” said Isabel Sunderland, policy lead for technology reform at Issue One, which co-authored the analysis. It leaves out money flowing through super PACs into campaigns.
Among the biggest lobbying fights is over whether federal rules should preempt state and local AI laws. Craig Albright, senior vice president for U.S. government relations at the Business Software Alliance, told Newsweek that a national framework for risk management and transparency would serve companies and customers better than a patchwork of state rules, but only if it is strong enough to “earn the preemption.” He added, “Regulation isn’t all bad by nature.”
The companies also hold an information advantage. Social media, whatever its flaws, mostly happened in public, noted Joshua Tucker of New York University, who co-leads the American Political Science
Association's AI task force with Persily. “Where we're going to have an enormous blind spot is actually how people are using these models, because the vast, vast, vast majority of interactions that people have with chatbots are in one-on-one circumstances, which is an essentially private conversation,” he said.
Policymakers can't see how these systems are used at anything like the scale the companies can.
Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, sees that imbalance as a form of political power. “This is an incredibly opaque industry—everything we know is pieced together through investigations by journalists, researchers and lawmakers,” she said.
Training data, internal risk evaluations, release decisions and government contracts all remain largely out of view, though Congress, she noted, has subpoena power and other tools that could force more of it into public view.
"The opacity in this industry is about them holding technical expertise and access close," she said, "but even more so it's about the narratives that disempower even political leaders from thinking anyone but the industry can do anything about these problems. That's what shrinks the policy conversation down to whatever the companies are willing to offer."
Whether any of this decides elections is still unclear. In New York's 12th District, the June Democratic primary became a proxy war over the state's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, which requires AI providers to publish harm incidents within 72 hours and goes into effect on January 1, 2027. Groups linked to OpenAI, which opposed the measure, and Anthropic, which supported it, ended up spending millions on both sides of the bill's sponsor Alex Bores, who was running to replace the retiring Representative Jerrold Nadler.
In the end, the race was a high-dollar draw: Bores finished second, 35 percent to 39 percent, to Assemblymember Micah Lasher who had co-sponsored the same law.
ULTIMATELY, THE AI POLICY SCORECARDS CAPTURE Congress at a particular moment: AI has become important enough to move votes, money, campaigns and local politics, but neither party has settled on what supporting or opposing it is supposed to mean.
"It's not quite clear what it means to be a Republican on AI or a Democrat on AI," said Tucker. Politicians, he said, are "figuring this out on the fly."
The generation expected to love AI may become its toughest critic
BY
LAUREN GIELLA
● ● ● ● ●
WHEN NEW TECHNOLOGIES EMERGE—FROM CDS to the internet to mobile phones—the familiar pattern has been that young people are the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. With AI, only half that pattern is holding.
This year, for the first time, a majority (55 percent) of American adults under 30 told the Pew Research Center they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. In 2021, that figure was 31 percent. Over the same period, the share who are more excited than concerned fell from 25 percent to 11 percent.
It's not that young people aren't using AI—66 percent of adults under 30 have used a chatbot, and 31 percent use one daily, according to Pew—the problem is that the longer and more they use it, the less they like it.
"I think the older generation is dramatically underestimating how much Gen Z hates AI," Amita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an AI-powered surplus inventory management platform, told Newsweek.
Bhasin, who is also an OpenAI ChatGPT Futures honoree and was featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2026, said youth antipathy to AI is driven by fears of its impact on their present and future, from deepfakes to job losses.
Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who focuses on law & technology, privacy and regulation, said the perception of AI among young people has “cratered” in the nearly four years since ChatGPT hit the market.
A Gallup poll fielded earlier this year found that half of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) use generative AI weekly or daily, roughly unchanged from a year earlier. But everything else in their survey moved: Excitement fell to 22 percent, down 14 points. Anger rose nine points to 31 percent. The share saying AI's risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace climbed from 37 percent to 48 percent and 80 percent said they worry about AI hindering their ability to learn. While familiarity with new technologies has often been the path to acceptance, with AI and young people, it's producing hostility.
Those views are already hardening into policy preferences. In an August poll of adults aged 18 to 34 published by CNBC/Generation Labs, 60 percent said data center construction should slow down, 40 percent said the government should regulate AI and 45 percent expected AI to hurt their own careers. Millennials view the issue of AI differently from their Gen Z peers. In the Pew survey, 48 percent of adults under 30 said they expect AI to have a negative effect on society, compared with 39 percent of those aged 30 to 49, even though both groups use chatbots at similar rates.
Author and generational futurist Ryan Vet attributes part of this split to the way millennials experienced quick changes. They saw flip phones evolve into smart phones and witnessed social media eat the world. The technological evolution Gen Z has witnessed is the iPhone becoming a slightly better iPhone.
AI is outpacing those older technological shifts in terms of evolution and adoption—it took years for more than half of U.S. adults to adopt social media, while it took ChatGPT just two months to accountability because the plan needs to be a combination of the public and the private sector."
It will be a while before a significant bloc of Gen Z is walking the halls of Congress, with the average age of a House or Senate member around 60 years old and millennials currently accounting for about 15 percent of Congress. But Gen Z will become a rising share of voters. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagements at Tufts University, nearly 49 million young people aged 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterms, 8 million more Gen Z voters than were eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
According to a report from Brookings this summer, “the evidence suggests that Gen Z’s reservations about AI are more than superficial or based on public narratives.” Earning Gen Z’s trust in AI will require specific protective policies, not voluntary pledges from tech companies.
The trajectory of Facebook is instructive here: In the 2010s, Facebook was going to change the world, improve education, rally political support for change and shatter loneliness. Today, schools are banning iPhones, governments are issuing age restrictions for social media and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta reached a \$17 billion settlement in a suit alleging it was selling kids an addictive product that harmed their mental health.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are probably going to be the pressure testers or victims of this first, and then I think it's going to be a minute before they are the decision-makers,” Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, told Newsweek. “It takes a number of years to get into a place where you feel like running for a political office that has the capacity to regulate this happens.”
The National Center for Youth Law in 2024 called for an up-to-date policy to govern AI, but also for lawmakers to listen and learn from the “most tech-involved generation” because “never before in all of human history have the sleek threads of technology been
reach over 100 million users—but with less clarity of where the transformation is headed. Vet calls this a velocity gap: "Technology is accelerating faster than human wisdom can keep up."
"[Gen Z] have grown up in a world where content is just prolific everywhere and being constantly generated, and so they're already in the mindset of 'verify then trust,'" Vet said. "And I think the previous generations were in [the mindset] 'trust but verify.'"
And they are not giving AI providers any benefit of the doubt. In the CNBC/Generation Labs poll, 69 percent said they don't trust OpenAI's Sam Alt-
"IT'S NOT THAT YOUNG PEOPLE AREN'T USING AI... THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE LONGER AND MORE THEY USE IT, THE LESS THEY LIKE IT."
"IT'S NOT THAT YOUNG PEOPLE AREN'T USING AI... THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE LONGER AND MORE THEY USE IT, THE LESS THEY LIKE IT."
man, 70 percent said the same of Elon Musk and 71 percent of Mark Zuckerberg.
“AI leaders need to take accountability for the fact that their technology is really disrupting everything, and they don’t have a plan,” Bhasin said. “But I think the government also needs to take so tightly woven into the tender fabric of a child's daily existence."
Looking ahead, Guggenberger said this all points to a trend in the U.S. toward more regulation of AI. That might come through localized policies on data center construction, restrictions on use for minors and labor protections.
“We have seen people that are underrepresented in the formal halls of politics express their views and exert influence through other channels, through civil society or just through spontaneous organization,” Guggenberger said. “One shouldn’t discount
those avenues of influence."
Lawmakers are writing the first rules for a technology whose politics have not stopped moving, for people who will have to live with the results of those rules long after their terms in office have expired.
Each dot on this map is a U.S. House district, shaded by its representative's overall score on Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard. Skeptics and Boosters share states, regions and sometimes neighboring districts
● ● ● ●
KEY
Skeptic
Lean Skeptic
Mixed
Lean Booster
Booster
REP. GABE EVANS (CO-08) 3.4 LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican in this suburban Denver district has been touting his authoring of the Ratepayer Protection Act as a signature accomplishment: a bill aimed to prevent increased consumer energy costs tied to data center development. His opponent, progressive state Rep. Manny Rutinel, has been outspoken regarding AI regulation and has aired ads trumpeting Evans' support for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included tax breaks that benefited data center operators.
REP. VICENTE GONZALEZ (TX-34)
2.9
MIXED
The incumbent Democrat was a victim of Governor Greg Abbott's redistricting push, giving a leg up to his Republican challenger, military veteran Eric Flores. But amidst a brewing data center backlash in the Lone Star State, Gonzalez has turned the issue on Abbott, calling him “the biggest flip-flopper in America” to pull off the improbable and save his seat.
The 22-term incumbent Democrat has defied political odds by winning her red district near Toledo election after election. She's going after her latest Republican challenger, state Rep. Derek Merrin, for backing data center tax incentives in a 2017 legislative vote, long before AI emerged as a political issue.
REP. RYAN MACKENZIE
(PA-7)
LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican's Allentown district is a top Democratic target, and his opponent Bob Brooks, a former firefighter, boasts the credentials to flip this blue-collar area. With local opposition to a Lehigh Valley data-center complex and Governor Josh Shapiro's executive order restricting data center permitting, Mackenzie has backtracked from his previous votes in favor of tax breaks to data centers and is now campaigning on holding them to account.
REP. MIKE LAWLER
(NY-17)
MIXED
The Republican, whose district in New York's lower Hudson Valley voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, put out an ad tying his Democratic challenger Cait Conley to data centers and the AI industry and asked whether she supports a data center moratorium. Conley fired back that she already backed such a pause and pointed to Lawler's comments that the moratorium sent a message to businesses to stay out of New York state.
TIERNEY L. CROSS/GETTY; JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY; ROBERTO SCHMIDT/GETTY; JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY; ALEX WONG/GETTY
Online reviews can help shoppers, but they don't always tell the whole story
BY CHARLOTTE GRAINGER
READ MORE
Scan the QR code for the full ranking
hoppers today have more choice than any prior generation, all at their fingertips. Type a size and style, and thousands of results appear in seconds—a far cry from walking into a store with a curated inventory.
To help shoppers sort through the search results, Google and shopping websites put product reviews front and center. A dishwasher that earns a three-star rating averaged by 781 reviews is shown next to those that earn five stars based on three reviews.
Consumer survey data from Kinsta found that more than 70 percent of shoppers have suspected a product review was fake or AI-generated. That skepticism exists even as the star rating, review count and comment stream keep signaling trust the way they always have.
While shoppers may doubt what they're reading, they often buy anyway. Star Kashman, founding partner at Cyber Law Firm, warns consumers to be more choosy about which reviews to trust.
“Fake and incentivized reviews do not affect consumer trust as much as it likely should,” Kashman told Newsweek. “On marketplaces like Amazon where purchases can be cheap, impulsive and rapid, consumers can see a 4.8-star rating with thousands of reviews and make a decision to trust that product in seconds without investigating” their source.
Understanding the prevalence of fake or bought reviews matters, too. Beyond the odd AI-generated post, some retailers may be actively misleading buyers with an avalanche of fake reviews. Rebecca Wang, associate professor of marketing at Lehigh University, names the risk hiding in plain sight. “A fabricated review, one bought from a review farm where a seller can purchase hundreds or even thousands of glowing reviews, is obviously a serious, unethical and even illegal issue,” Wang told Newsweek.
“But even genuine reviews can become systematically skewed depending on how companies solicit them.”
What You Don't See Decides What You Buy
The order in which reviews show up can also impact how you view a product. While some platforms list reviews chronologically, others use algorithms based on shoppers' search and viewing history. "The problem with algorithmic ordering is that most consumers are not going to read five pages of reviews," Kashman explained. "If the first reviews they encounter are overwhelmingly positive, while newer complaints about defects or safety issues present in a new batch of lower quality product are buried deeper, consumers will walk away with a distorted impression of the product."
But don't give up on reviews altogether. Kashman advises, slow down before hitting "buy."
“Shoppers should not blindly trust online reviews,” Kashman said. “They should be checking multiple resources, doing their research, understanding the review platform’s vetting process and reliability.” She also recommends sorting reviews to see both positive and negative posts.
“Reviews are incredibly useful,” Wang added. “But consumers should look beyond the stars, the words and the pictures. Believe the reviews, but pay attention to the context.”
Siemens
Methodology
n the corporate world, maintaining trust among customers, employees and investors is paramount for success in a competitive
landscape. The World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026 ranking aims to highlight the companies that are most trusted in the 20 target countries included in this study. Trust can have several characteristics and be viewed from different perspectives. Recognizing this, Newsweek and Statista developed a methodology which takes several aspects into account.
The Most Trustworthy Companies were selected based on a holistic approach. The three primary pillars of trust we considered in our evaluation: customer trust, investor trust and employee trust.
The analysis followed a three-step process: 1. Scope: All stock-listed companies headquartered in one of the target countries with a revenue of over \$500 million were considered in the longlist of the project.
2. Extensive survey: The basis of the analysis was an independent survey from a sample of more than 65,000 participants from the target countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States). The participants rated companies they knew and that were headquartered in the respective country in terms of the three dimensions of trust. A total of 200,000 company evaluations were submitted.
3. Social Listening: For each company that received a sufficient number of evaluations, a social listening analysis was conducted. This involved researching what was said about a company across various media segments to determine whether the public sentiment toward a company was positive, neutral or negative. In total, over 320,000 mentions were gathered. Additionally, all companies that were involved in any recent scandals or lawsuits relevant to trust were excluded from the analysis.
The overall score was composed of 80 percent from the survey results and 20 percent from social listening analysis.
The 1,000 companies with the highest score have been awarded as World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026. The final list is categorized by industry, with the top 10 in each category appearing in print. The full list is available online.
Statista R is a world leader in the creation of company, brand and product rankings and top lists, based on comprehensive market research and data analysis: Statista R recognizes the best. With a team of over 100 expert analysts and in cooperation with more than 40 highprofile media brands across all continents, Statista R creates transparency for consumers and business decision-makers and helps companies build trust and recognition across a plethora of industries and product categories. Visit r.statista.com for further information about Statista R and our rankings.
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The United States accounts for the largest share of companies, though its count declined from 378 to 346, while Japan, India, Canada and the United Kingdom remain strongly represented.
Conglomerate | 1 | Samsung C&TSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | SK Inc.SEOL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | HanwhaSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | FujifilmTOKYO | 5 | Reliance IndustriesMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Astra InternationalJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 7 | Hankyu HanshinIKEDA, JAPAN | 8 | ItaúsaSÃO PAULO | 9 | WesfarmersPERTH, AUSTRALIA | 10 Hitachi TOKYO
Conglomerate | 1 | Samsung C&TSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | SK Inc.SEOL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | HanwhaSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | FujifilmTOKYO | 5 | Reliance IndustriesMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Astra InternationalJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 7 | Hankyu HanshinIKEDA, JAPAN | 8 | ItaúsaSÃO PAULO | 9 | WesfarmersPERTH, AUSTRALIA | 10 Hitachi TOKYO
Construction & Building Materials | 1 | TotoKITAKYUSHU, JAPAN | 2 | SIGJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 3 | Galliford TryUXBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM | 4 | GeberitJONA, SWITZERLAND | 5 | Saint-GobainCOURBEVOIE, FRANCE | 6 | TrexWINCHESTER, VA | 7 | LX HausysSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 8 | North American ConstructionACHESON, CANADA | 9 | BRCK GroupBRACKNELL, UNITED KINGDOM | 10 RVNL
Construction & Building Materials | 1 | TotoKITAKYUSHU, JAPAN | 2 | SIGJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 3 | Galliford TryUXBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM | 4 | GeberitJONA, SWITZERLAND | 5 | Saint-GobainCOURBEVOIE, FRANCE | 6 | TrexWINCHESTER, VA | 7 | LX HausysSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 8 | North American ConstructionACHESON, CANADA | 9 | BRCK GroupBRACKNELL, UNITED KINGDOM | 10 RVNL
Food & Beverage remains the most represented industry with 88 companies (up from 86 in 2025), followed by Energy & Utilities with 72 companies, and Retail and Materials & Chemicals with 63 each. | 5 | Ulta BeautyBOLINGBROOK, IL | 6 | Pets at HomeHANDFORTH, UNITED KINGDOM | 7 | CostcoISSAQUAH, WA | 8 | Lowe'sMOORESVILLE, NC | 9 | Autosports GroupLEICHHARDT, AUSTRALIA | 10 | M&SLONDON |
Software & Telecommunications | 1 | Samsung SDSSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | IBMARMONK, NY | 3 | GammaLONDON | 4 | RakutenSETAGAYA, JAPAN | 5 | Palo Alto NetworksSANTA CLARA, CA | 6 | SAPWALLDORF, GERMANY | 7 | TCSMUMBAI, INDIA | 8 | NaverSEONGNAM, SOUTH KOREA | 9 | VeriSignRESTON, VA | 10 | 3DSVELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, FRANCE |
The Swan promised women a golden ticket in the early days of reality TV. Erin Lee Carr's new documentary reveals the fine print they never saw
BY
H. ALAN SCOTT
THE EARLY DAYS OF REALITY TELEVISION WERE THE WILD West. Regular people across the United States signed up for unknown experiences. From castaways on Survivor to aspiring supermodels on America's Next Top Model, thousands auditioned to be part of something brand new. And in 2004, thousands of women applied for a Fox show that promised to turn “ugly ducklings” into manufactured beauties. It was called The Swan.
Now, a new Hulu documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror, examines what the show did to the women who lived it. Director Erin Lee Carr, who as a teen viewer “felt fairly ugly on the outside,” bought the pitch for the reality series until the cracks started to show.
"It [The Swan] became what was supposed to be about female empowerment, then moved into this slow-moving car crash of how much can we do to these women," Carr told Newsweek's Parting Shot podcast. "To subject them to a transformation that we want for them versus of their own choice."
Over three months, contestants were cut off from friends and family while undergoing intense cosmetic surgery and fitness regimens. Carr calls it “a literal Willy Wonka golden ticket.” The catch? Most of them had no idea what was waiting at the end.
"When they signed people up for [The Swan], they didn't know about the pageant," Carr said. "So, 'Oh, you're gonna transform my life, amazing, great. Wait, part of that ticket is that I have to get in public in my lingerie that you picked for me?"
Even the crown came with fine print. Carr said the season 2 winner was handed a haul of prizes, including a necklace billed at \$100,000 that was actually worth about \$30,000, and was then asked to pay taxes on every item at full sticker value.
“Imagine you win. You won it all, you did it,” Carr said. “And then they’re like, ‘Here’s your prizes,’ and you can’t afford them because you have to pay taxes on it.”
Critics hated it, but 9 million viewers a season tuned in anyway. So was it ever feminist? “The answer is no,” Carr said.
"There was so much judgment about why the women participated, and then all of us collectively judged them about their reveal and had they done the work," she said. "So it was about unlearning all that, and then, how do I make a documentary that doesn't just re-injure everyone who was exploited in television?"
Fox canceled The Swan after two seasons, but nothing really changed. From the Kardashians to Real Housewives, women getting things pulled and plucked on camera is more popular than ever.
“I can’t stand to not point out my own hypocrisy,” she said. “We live in the world that The Swan built, in ways that we like to have outrage about and then comply with.”
Carr's final documentary interview question was the most surprising. She asked every woman if she'd do it again.
“I expected everybody to be like, ‘Hell no,’ in different tones,” Carr said. “And every single interview[ee] said, ‘I would do it again.’”
Why?
“They found each other,” she said. “For one of the first times in their life, they felt special and chosen because it was drilled into their head by Nely [Galán, the show’s creator], by producers, by Fox. ‘You were picked out of 200,000 women. We chose you.’ And what is more uniquely satisfying than feeling chosen? It is the American dream.”
H. Alan Scott is a Newsweek senior editor and host of The Parting Shot podcast. Follow them everywhere @HAlanScott
A new podcast explores why a debunked myth persists
-
From the Poltergeist curse to the Munchkin who supposedly died by suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz, Hollywood is built on urban legends. But no legend has been snickered about more than the one involving Richard Gere and a gerbil.
Yes, a gerbil.
(This is a respectable magazine, so let's just say that in this legend, which has no basis in fact, Gere and the gerbil got to know each other very well at some point in the 1970s or '80s.)
Gerbil, a new 12-episode investigative podcast from The
Hollywood Reporter's Allen Salkin, digs into where the rumor came from and why it refuses to die.
“Many, many people heard this,” Salkin tells Newsweek. “And the rumor has never died. I’m very skeptical that it’s true. It’s also an investigation of why. What can we learn from the durability of this rumor?”
Gere has only referenced the rumor in passing. But as Salkin points out, Gere's silence may be exactly what's kept this thing running on its wheel. "Crisis communications PR was not in the '80s what it is now," Salkin says. "There's almost a playbook now, and ignoring it is not usually a good idea."
It may also have something to do with Gere's reputation. "Richard Gere is a wonderful humanitarian," Salkin says. "Much to be admired, and I admire him. But when he was young, he was a d\*\*\*."
As for who started it, Salkin won't say. That answer arrives in episode 12. But the rumor about that rumor has long pointed to Sylvester Stallone, briefly Gere's co-star in 1974's The Lords of Flatbush. Stallone told Ain't It Cool News in 2006 that Gere was fired from the film after clashing with him.
Salkin says he's “very skeptical” that it was just one person who started the rumor, “like Sylvester Stallone,” he says. “I really do think I know the answer.”
However it started, thanks to Gerbil, this rumor isn't burrowing away anytime soon. —H. Alan Scott
Trixie Mattel picks up Elvira's mantle as TV abandons Halloween
Remember when October meant Halloween episodes of your favorite sitcoms? When Elvira popped up hosting every spooky special on TV? When artists put out Halloween music? These days you'd be hard-pressed to find any of it, and you can largely thank the slow death of network TV. But fear not. (Actually, in the spirit of the season, be very afraid.)
Network sitcoms used to air weekly, so writers had to reckon with a late October episode. That's how we got Halloween classics from The Office, Roseanne and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. When a streaming season drops all at once, no episode lands on Halloween, so nobody bothers dressing up for it.
It gets scarier. Elvira has all but hung up her beehive, leaving a Mistress of the Dark-sized void every fall. Enter Trixie Mattel.
The RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars winner just released “Till Death Do Us Part, a Halloween LP led by the single “Ghost on the Moon.” She’s also keeping up her tradition of a Halloween special on YouTube.
"It's a heartfelt marriage of spooky synths and acoustic love-strumming," Mattel said in a statement of the record.
TV may have abandoned Halloween, but at least someone is picking up the spooky mantle Elvira made famous. —H. Alan Scott
[Kainar-AKB] BUILDING ON 50 YEARS OF INDUSTRIAL EXPERTISE
By Frank Coldwell
Kazakhstan entered the second half of 2026 with one of Central Asia's strongest growth stories still intact. The International Monetary Fund said in June that "economic growth remains robust," supported by domestic demand, investment and high oil prices, and projects real GDP growth of about $4.6\%$ for the year. Manufacturing has also been a bright spot, with official data showing industrial activity continuing to expand
as the country looks beyond hydrocarbons and builds a broader production base.
Kazakhstan's automotive industry is also expanding rapidly, providing a strong domestic market for battery and component manufacturers. In January–July 2026, the country produced 111,115 vehicles and other automotive equipment, up 33.3% from the same period a year earlier, according to the Kazakhstan Automobile Union, citing the Bureau of National Statistics. Automotive manufacturing now accounts for 40.5% of Kazakhstan's mechanical-engineering sector. With new vehicle plants, greater localization and a growing requirement for locally made components, the environment is creating new opportunities for established industrial suppliers.
Few companies reflect Kazakhstan's industrial evolution as clearly as Kainar-AKB, one of Central Asia's leading automotive battery manufacturer. The Taldykorgan-based battery producer traces its history to 1976, when the plant began production and Chief Executive Officer Yerbol Azhmagambetov's father joined the newly launched operation as a young process engineer. He later became director and ran one of the country's most successful privatization processes. From output of roughly 300,000 batteries a year in 2001, Kainar-AKB has grown to an installed annual capacity of around four million batteries, with current production of about three million depending on demand. In the early 2000s, the 22-hectare industrial business was valued at only about \$300,000; by 2008, it had secured roughly \$35 million in financing.
Kainar-AKB's business model perfectly reflects the full cycle manufacturer: the company produces starter batteries for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and agricultural machinery, manufactures its own plastic battery cases, and operates a recycling business that recovers lead and plastic from used batteries while neutralizing electrolyte. Its plastics operation alone can produce between 4.5 million and five million cases annually. Recovered lead can return to battery production, while recycled plastic can be reused internally or supplied elsewhere, giving Kainar-AKB greater control over inputs while turning used products back into industrial raw material.
Much of the company's scaling took place as it invested heavily in modernization. The CEO sees those years as the period that defined what the company Kainar-AKB became today. "We effectively transformed a Soviet-era plant into a modern industrial facility operating according to international standards. We used that period to lay the foundations for the company we have today," says Azhmagambetov. That combination of long industrial experience and modernized production remains one of the company's defining strengths.
The next phase of growth is increasingly industrial. Kainar-AKB already supplies batteries for railway and telecommunications applications and is expanding toward backup-power solutions for banks, data centres, oil and gas companies, metallurgical groups and other infrastructure users across Central Asia. It is here where the CEO sees smart partnership opportunities. "A Western company could bring technology and experience to Kazakhstan, while we could contribute our manufacturing capabilities, knowledge of the regional market and local industrial expertise. Each side would have something meaningful to offer the other," Azhmagambetov says. The company is also studying lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies as it considers future opportunities in electric mobility and energy storage.
For Azhmagambetov, the wider case for cooperation begins with the country itself. "Kazakhstan can give new momentum to an investor. A project here may not always generate enormous profits immediately, but it can offer knowledge, experience and a different perspective, all of which can culminate in significant long term gains. Our country has many success stories and interesting business cases from which international investors can learn."
Exports are already central to Kainar-AKB's business, accounting for roughly 60–70% of revenue. Its principal markets remain in the post-Soviet region, but the company has also explored opportunities in Europe and the Middle East, including Dubai. Traditional routes into markets such as Poland, Germany and Italy have become more complicated, increasing the importance of alternative corridors and regional hubs. Geography can make logistics difficult for a landlocked exporter, yet it also places Kazakhstan between China, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and the Middle East. Expanding that reach will depend on new routes, commercial relationships and partners able to open additional markets.
As Kainar-AKB marks its 50th anniversary, the company is looking beyond its traditional automotive base toward industrial batteries, energy storage, new export markets and international technology partnerships. Its five decades of manufacturing experience provide a strong foundation for that next stage, while its position in Kazakhstan gives potential partners access to local production capabilities and knowledge of the wider Central Asian market. "We are willing to help international leaders and major companies bring their values, achievements and technologies to Kazakhstan and, through cooperation, to other markets as well," says Azhmagambetov. For Kainar-AKB, the opportunity ahead is not simply to sell more batteries, but to become a stronger industrial partner connecting international expertise with Kazakhstan's growing manufacturing base.
Grammy-winning artist and producer Wyclef Jean is going back to his roots with his first jazz album, Q Theory. Blending Caribbean, Latin American, African and Middle Eastern influences, the Fugees member also draws on Haiti's traditional rara street music. Songs like "Lady Havana" and "Sugarcane & Watermelon"
Is it just me, or does it feel like Saturday Night Live has been gone forever? Thankfully, SNL returns for its 52nd season with a fresh, timely slate of hosts. Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson kicks things off as a first-time host, followed by returning favorites Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis, then Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette. And with the midterms around the corner, we need SNL back on our screens now more than ever.
Leave it to Ryan Murphy to turn American Horror Story into his very own all-stars season. Season 13 brings back icons Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett and Sarah Paulson. On Live With Kelly and Mark, Lange gave one condition: "I'll come back if I can do all four characters." Naturally, Murphy obliged. And according to Lange, "everybody is a returning character, pretty much." Frankly, I'm screaming.
Are celebrities just as messy as us? Fans speculate Channing Tatum might be, after noticing the same Instagram account (“bidness\_nonya”) commenting in support of Tatum under posts about his ex Zoë Kravitz with her fiancé Harry Styles. Tatum denied the rumors that he was running a burner account, but some fans were happy to give props to a fellow petty poster.
Salzburg, Austria, is alive with the sound of music. And now the city has opened its first-ever museum
starring Julie Andrews. At Hellbrunn Palace, fans can marvel at movie props, costumes and the iconic gazebo from “Sixteen Going
on Seventeen." The museum, which distinguishes between the film and the real-life von Trapp family, is guaranteed to be one of your favorite things on your next trip to Austria.
Grupo Poma has carried a century of Salvadoran enterprise across the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. A fourth generation carries it further, on one conviction: discipline builds what haste cannot.
BARTOLOMÉ POMA, WHO FOUNDED THE FAMILY'S AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS IN EL SALVADOR IN 1919.
Four Generations of Growth
The story began in 1919: Bartolomé Poma, a Spanish mechanic from Barcelona, founded an automotive business in El Salvador. It grew into one of Central America's most established family groups.
His son Luis Poma added Chevrolet and, in 1953, Toyota, making the family the automaker's first partner in the Americas, second worldwide after Taiwan. Then came workshops and spare parts; then industry, real estate and hospitality — the foundations of the group's businesses.
Luis's son Ricardo Poma led Grupo Poma for more than four decades, taking it across the Americas — deepening each business, adding global brands and forging long-term relationships, including one with Bain Capital, dating back to its earliest days.
Today the group operates five companies — Excel, Grupo Roble, Real Hotels & Resorts, Autofácil and Solaire — in 10 countries, with more than 12,000 employees. In a recent interview in El Salvador, Fernando Poma, a member of the fourth generation and Ricardo Poma's eldest son, said: "We have been around for 107 years in El Salvador, and now operate in 10 countries. We have a very long-term vision."
Grupo Poma's defining strategy is knowing where it can win — and declining everything else, however tempting. Diversification has meant geography: extending the same five businesses into new countries, where experience compounds — never into industries the family does not understand. The filter is exacting: enter only businesses that are predictable not one year out, but 10 or 20 years out; protect capital before chasing returns, because losing half means doubling just to recover. Profits go back into widening competitive advantages, not out the door. Execution belongs to what Poma calls “gente 10”: 10-out-of-10 talent, given direction and room to work.
“We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know,” Poma said. “We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.”
That aggression shows at Real Hotels & Resorts, where Poma has spent a quarter-century building partnerships with Choice Hotels International, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Hyatt: a Grand Hyatt underway in Panama City and the JW Marriott San Salvador rising at home will lift the portfolio — 24 hotels in 10 countries — to 26, and the group is constantly looking to expand. Excel, led by Andrés Poma, Fernando's brother, is Central America's largest automotive company, with 19 brands and 42 franchises across five countries, from Toyota and Chevrolet to BMW, Nissan, Kia and Mitsubishi Motors. Grupo Roble's real estate platform, led by Alberto Poma, spans eight countries, with 20 shopping centers and 60,000-plus homes delivered, alongside corporate and mixed-use developments.
The long horizon extends beyond business — education, health, opportunity.
«We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know. We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.»
«We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know. We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.»
FERNANDO POMA
ESEN, the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios, is a university founded in 1993 so that financial circumstances never keep a capable student from a first-rate education. Two in three students receive financial aid; more than 2,600 professionals have graduated.
The Salvadoran American Humanitarian Foundation (SAHF), established in Miami by Luis Poma in 1983, has channeled more than \$900 million in aid to El Salvador. FUSAL, the family's own foundation on the ground, now led by Alejandro Poma, advances child nutrition and early development in its most vulnerable communities.
Fundación Renacer has given more than 450 abandoned young adults hands-on training in fields matched to their interests, followed by a job at a participating company.
“We don’t train them to get a job; we guarantee them a job,” Fernando Poma said. “Our ultimate goal is to improve the lives of abandoned and vulnerable young adults through dig-
Behind the businesses lies another continuity — family unity. Across four generations, preserving harmony has mattered more than any single deal. That principle underpins orderly succession: six members of the fourth generation currently work across the group's companies, in different roles.
That conviction guides the next cycle of investment. “Our objective is not scale alone but differentiation — products and services with advantages durable enough to defend,” Poma explained. The family calls the standard “pride of ownership”: invest more than the market asks to build something unique. Success, Poma likes to say, demands a rare pairing: a dreamer and a doer at once.
After 107 years, the proposition remains what it was in that first workshop, now written across the Americas: build to last, and stay true to the country, people and values that built the enterprise.
A White House media ban makes great headlines. Quieter constraints on press freedom rarely do
BY
CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS
YET ANOTHER NEWSWEEK READER, ROBYN T. ELLIOTT, IS FURIOUS WITH US. AFTER PRESIDENT DONALD Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, Elliott wrote that it was
“shameful that you agree with the censoring of the fourth pillar of democracy,” adding that if Newsweek didn’t believe in press freedom, perhaps we should “rebrand as entertainment news.” Ouch.
Yet our article hadn't agreed with Trump. We reported what he did, quoted his critics and defenders, and let readers judge via our Fairness Meter. Seventy-two percent said the article was fair, 9 percent left-leaning and 19 percent right-leaning. Still, Elliott's email raises a question worth applying rather
more widely. Trump's attack on the press is easy to see. A correspondent arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and a guard says their badge no longer works. The president has made the reason clear, announcing that their employer is being excluded for its “FAKE NEWS” reporting.
Other presidents have preferred paperwork. President Barack Obama's administration brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight alleged leakers of classified information, compared with three under all previous administrations combined, per the Committee to Protect Journalists. His Justice Department also secretly seized two months of records from more than 20 Associated Press phone lines used by more than 100 journalists.
Trump's first administration did the same. His Justice Department secretly obtained phone records for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times reporters while probing leaks. President Joe Biden's prohibited compulsory demands for journalists' records, with limited exceptions. Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed that in 2025, letting the government seek reporters' records and testimony to identify leakers. This year, the department issued, then withdrew, subpoenas to
Wall Street Journal, Post and Times journalists. But the White House ban is just the tip of the iceberg. The federal FOIA backlog grew from 115,080 requests in 2016 to 339,671 in 2025. Requests also surged, so the backlog cannot be pinned on one president. But it illustrates the point quite well. A confiscated badge makes good TV. A delayed FOIA request does not.
If press freedom is the principle, the test cannot be whether we like the president when they restrict it. George Washington detested newspaper attacks, Abraham Lincoln suppressed the press during the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt popularized “muckraker” to describe journalists and Richard Nixon called
the press “the enemy.” That’s part of the deal. So is keeping the front door open for the Fourth Estate, and not putting up barriers round the back.
Christopher Roberts is Newsweek's vice president, publishing & subscriber strategy. Email him at c.roberts@newsweek.com
Airline technology that opens the world of e-commerce shipping.
Every online shopping site is looking for reliable solutions for fast delivery of their products.
Airlines and their supply-chain partners own the assets to meet the growing demand for speed in delivery by e-commerce retailers worldwide.
Connecting this demand with an airline's supply of capacity can bring a nice revenue increase via air cargo.
SmartKargo provides the technology and know-how to help airlines and their partners connect from the desktop to the doorstep.
Learn more
Contact us at hdq@smartkargo.com or scan the QR Code below to read a case study.
Tomorrow's smart infrastructure for a connected world won't be built using disconnected legacy systems.
Tomorrow's smart infrastructure for a connected world won't be built using disconnected legacy systems.
The US government is investing trillions of dollars in capital programs.
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Newsweek INTERNATIONAL
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What happens when a new technology becomes a political issue faster than the Beltway can digest it
How AI Rocked the Midterms Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard Data Center Fights Winning the Race Against China A Youth Revolt Over AI
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"This is not yet following the typical polarized political dynamics of so many other issues."
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[FEATURES] 22 How AI Ate DC
Newsweek's AI policy scorecard shows that artificial intelligence took over Washington's agenda faster than the parties could decide what to do with it.
by Adam Mills and Alex J. Rouhandeh
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36 World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026
Buyer Beware
Online reviews can help shoppers, but they don't always tell the whole story.
by Charlotte Grainger
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IN FOCUS
05 Geopolitics
Face the Facts
07 Take Five
Stories From
Around the World
09 Number of the Week
107,677
Conventional Wisdom
UNGA-monium
10 The Newsweek Archives 1998
11 Uncommon Knowledge AI Force Without Power?
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12 Military These Boots Aren't Made for Walking
17 The 1600
Mamdani Is Running the
Democratic Party Now
18 Geopolitics
Power Steering
20 Society Generation Gain
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CULTURE
42 Documentary
The Cruelest Makeover
46 The Register
What's on Our Radar
This Week
48 On the Contrary
Free Press, Free Pass?
COVER
Illustration by Brian Stauffer for Newsweek
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Newsweek
October 09, 2026 | Vol. 187 No. 10
Editor-in-Chief
Jennifer H. Cunningham
Vice President, Digital Publishing & Subscriber Strategy
Chris Roberts
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EDITORIAL
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FACE THE FACTS
The flags were flown, the red carpets rolled out and the photo ops scheduled. All President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping had to do was spend a few days demonstrating the “truly great friendship” Trump says they have forged, with the U.S. president adding: “America is very happy about this visit.” But despite the grand welcome, state dinner and warm words at their Washington, D.C. summit from September 23-25, every encounter appeared forced: compressed lips, rigid postures, handshakes conducted with the warmth of a hostage exchange. The Chinese leader’s trip ended without any movement on AI, chips, rare earth minerals or Taiwan, with Xi saying competition should be “healthy” and “kept within bounds,” resembling “a race of catching up” rather than one producing a winner. A soothing account of two superpowers wrestling for economic and technological supremacy. Neither leader showed his hand and both looked like they would rather be anywhere else.
POLITICS 1
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Not Everyone's Feeling Trumpapalooza
At the Republican Party's "Trumpapalooza" convention, President Donald Trump urged supporters to vote as though his name were on the ballot. But away from the show of unity, a number of Republican candidates are taking positions that diverge from the administration.
California Representative Young Kim removed references to Trump and “America First” branding from prominent parts of her campaign website, while
Florida candidates Mike Beltran and Casey Askar scaled back Trump-focused language on theirs. Kim's campaign denied claims that the changes represented a break with the president, and Beltran's campaign said the edits did not reflect any
Husted has called for an end to the Iran war
weakening of support, but the changes nevertheless mark a shift in campaign messaging.
Others, meanwhile, have openly questioned policies. In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall questioned the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations were conducted, arguing that federal agents should coordinate more closely with local
authorities. “Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone,” he wrote on X. Marshall’s comments come amid wider Republican unease over immigration enforcement. Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar warned that some of Trump’s immigration policies had “gone too far.” In Texas, Representative Monica De La Cruz featured a DACA recipient whose release from ICE custody she helped secure, in a campaign
ad praising her for putting “people over politics.” Former Maine Governor Paul LePage, now running for Congress, also criticized a deportation case involving a relative who held a work permit, calling the situation “not right.”
In Ohio, Senator
Jon Husted called for an end to the Iran war “as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” Republican Iowa Senate nominee Ashley Hinson and Republican Michigan nominee Mike Rogers also called for the conflict to end. While most remain broadly supportive of Trump, signs of strain are beginning to emerge.
POLITICS 2
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Can Gen Z Flip the Lone Star State?
For years, Texas Democrats have treated statewide victory like a mirage, always out of reach. But Texas' young voters may end up holding the key to flipping the deep-red state's marquee Senate seat.
"I am incredibly proud to have students across our state... fight[ing] for the future of Texas."
As Newsweek recently reported, Democrats have focused this cycle on building the infrastructure previous campaigns lacked. Young voters may now supply the energy to test it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent the summer courting them, launching “Students for Paxton” chapters and touting a new generation of conservative activists. “I am incredibly proud to have students across our state stepping up to fight for the future of Texas,” he said.
Yet the political payoff has been elusive. A new survey from Texas Southern University's Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center found Democratic state Representative James Talarico leading Paxton 76 percent to 18 percent among likely voters under 35, a sharp widening from July, when Talarico led 59 percent to 29 percent.
The youth gap is striking, with the same poll showing Talarico ahead by just a point, 47 percent to 46 percent. Political strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek that Talarico's frequent appearances on podcasts and online shows popular with young men have helped his rise. "He's on these platforms," Madrid said. "He's very popular and well received by the hosts and presumably the audience."
Texas could elect its first Democrat statewide in over three decades, reshaping politics far beyond the state.
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TAKE FIVE
ITALY
STORIES FROM AROUND
THE WORLD
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CLASSROOM CULTURE
Italy has joined a long-running debate over integration, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announcing plans to ban burqas and niqabs in schools and limit foreign students in classes. The measures, which would include Italian language requirements for migrant parents, echo policies elsewhere in Europe, including France. Backers say they encourage cohesion; opponents warn they could deepen alienation and stigmatize communities.
HAITI
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PRESIDENTIAL PLOT
More than five years after
gunmen stormed his
residence, the assassination
of Haiti's President Jovenel
Moïse remains unresolved.
Now, 18 suspects, including
former Colombian soldiers
and former Haitian Ministry
of Justice employee Joseph
Badio, have been extradited
to the United States to
face proceedings in Florida.
The move comes as Haiti
continues to battle instability
and gang violence.
TANZANIA
The deaths of 10 lions in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area have put a spotlight on the dangers confronting one of Africa's most iconic species. Authorities suspect the animals were poisoned, though a probe is ongoing. It underscores the fragile balance between wildlife conservation and human activity in East Africa, where lion populations face multiple pressures beyond protected reserves.
IRELAND
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FRAGILE KINGDOM
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DATA TRAIL
Google has been hit with a 403 million euro (\$463 million) fine by Ireland's privacy regulator after authorities found the company breached EU data protection rules in its handling of location data between 2018 and 2020. The ruling highlights concerns about the commercial value of information generated by people's daily movements and online activity. Google says the case relates to historical policies and that it has significantly evolved its location data practices.
INDONESIA
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CRUDE CALCULATION
Indonesia is keeping Russian crude oil on the table, despite the growing risk of U.S. penalties for buyers of Moscow's energy exports. With a second procurement phase under way, officials say future purchases will depend on economic viability and compliance with international rules as Jakarta seeks to bolster energy security. It reflects a broader challenge for import-dependent economies navigating increasingly politicized global energy markets.
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[RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR] The Machines Have Landed
Drones have transformed the war in Ukraine from above. Now they are changing how attacks unfold on the ground. During Operation Vivaldi, Ukraine's counteroffensive around Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region, heavy bomber drones carried explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian lines. Once on the ground, the smaller machines were used to disrupt defenses before Ukrainian troops advanced.
"Our heavy bomber drones deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers [six miles] into the enemy's rear," said Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps. He called it the world's first airborne deployment of ground-based robotic systems. Ukrainian media noted that ground robots had previously been carried by air, but not explosive models over such a distance. The tactic illustrates the growing sophistication of unmanned warfare. Aerial drones are becoming more than surveillance platforms or weapons: they can now transport other machines and place them where soldiers would face the greatest risk. Ukraine said Operation Vivaldi had liberated two settlements, secured a third and reclaimed about 19 square miles. Military analyst Mick Ryan said: "We may be approaching, or in the midst of, a shift to a new phase of this war."
DIPLOMACY
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The Political Power of an Empty Room
A half-empty chamber is supposed to communicate isolation. In diplomacy, absence is judgment: the speaker is no longer worth hearing. But modern populism has made that symbolism unstable. Condemnation can be repackaged as persecution, while an establishment's refusal to listen becomes evidence that its opponent is saying what it cannot bear to hear.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands this grammar well. As he began his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 24, dozens of delegates walked out, leaving much of the chamber empty. He immediately absorbed their protest into his own argument. “If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left the hall, please do so now,” he said.
The diplomats intended their absence as a rebuke. Yet once the cameras captured the walk-out, the empty seats acquired another political life. For Netanyahu's supporters, isolation can signify not abandonment but steadfastness: the solitary defender refusing to bend before a hostile world. The larger the chorus against him becomes, the easier it is to present resistance as authority. Visually, the diplomats became the supporting cast in the story they meant to reject. That does not make their protest meaningless. Diplomatic estrangement can bring policy changes and weakened alliances that rhetoric cannot dissolve. But the scene captured a central tension in modern politics: humiliation and validation can occupy the same image.
The delegates withheld their attention. In doing so, they gave Netanyahu something politicians usually have to manufacture: visible opposition.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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AI Deepfakes Are Now Calling Grandpa
A familiar voice used to be proof of identity. Now it can be manufactured from a few seconds of audio. Scammers are using AI to impersonate relatives in distress, reviving the “family emergency” con with fake pleas for bail, ransom or urgent help. Americans aged 55 and older who fall victim to phone scams lose an average of \$1,298 per incident, according to voice-security company Hiya.
The U.S. faces an identity-fraud crisis accelerating faster than systems can track, Jordan Burris, head of public sector at the identity verification platform Socure, recently told the House Oversight Committee.
Deepfakes now mimic gender, accent, speaking style and even mood. “They can sound super happy and bubbly... [or] aggressive and demanding,” Officer Matthew Pesta of the Garland Police Department, Texas, told NBC.
In March, one in four Americans said they had received a deepfake voice call in the previous year. Dark-web ads for voice-cloning services rose 82 percent in 2025 and another 75 percent till July this year, according to a NordVPN report
Now a call can raise the question at the heart of sci-fi thriller Total Recall: How do you know what's real when evidence can be manufactured?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 2
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Flying's Next Leap of Faith
Remember when planes were falling out of the sky last year? News of plane crashes in the air and on the tarmac, while rare, doesn't help people who already need a pill and a prayer to make it through a commercial flight from New York to Chicago. And now the Federal Aviation Administration wants to smooth operations with a new AI tool.
The Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART, aims to move the FAA “from a reactive approach to a predictive one” by anticipating demand, weather and airspace constraints days in advance.
Major airline CEOs are on board, but will flyers be?
In the first two months of 2025 alone, there were 188 aviation accidents. By the end of the year, the Aviation Safety Network Safety Database reported a seven-year high in aviation fatalities, up 30 percent from 2024. That came as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cut around 400 aviation jobs—some of which were directly involved in safety measures.
The Harris Poll found that 65 percent of Americans reported being more nervous about flying after the string of incidents in early 2025. And more than one-third said their fears of flying led them to change their travel plans.
This year, there have already been over 1,000 airplane accidents in the U.S. Virginia Democratic Representative Don Beyer said airlines were reportedly “privately panicking” over the rollout of SMART, and that air traffic controllers were not consulted on the system’s design or trained on it before it was implemented. And with Americans growing increasingly skeptical of AI and its impact on our future, a Xanax prescription might not be enough to quell flight anxiety.
Japan's centenarian population has exceeded 100,000 for the first time, setting a national record after decades of steady growth. The country has more people aged 100 or older than anywhere else in the world, and nearly 88 percent of those are women.
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CONVENTIONAL WISDOM UNGA-monium
The United Nations General Assembly runs on speeches, but what counts is who gets a meeting, a visa or a seat.
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Delcy Rodríguez
Nearly nine months after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's interim president met Donald Trump, flashed a peace sign and thanked him from the podium. Trump had declared, "To the victor belong the spoils." The spoils include Maduro's understudy.
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María Corina Machado
Venezuela's Nobel-winning opposition leader failed three times in two days to get home from Panama. Rodríguez got a General Assembly seat; Machado couldn't get one on a Beechcraft.
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Andy Burnham
Trump told Britain's new prime minister relations were better “than they were with your last prime minister” and called him a “natural business-person.” Burnham built his career in politics, not business; Labour will wonder what he sold.
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Zohran Mamdani
New York's mayor used his third friendly meeting with Trump to pitch a \$21 billion plan for 12,000 homes over a Queens rail yard. Trump once called him a “100 percent Communist Lunatic,” but this pinko speaks fluent Queens real estate.
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Mette Frederiksen
After nearly two years of annexation threats, Denmark's prime minister gave Trump access to bases a 1951 treaty already allowed. She kept Greenland by letting the Americans reopen a base they closed themselves.
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Rebeca Grynspan
The Costa Rican economist retook the lead for U.N. secretary-general with nine Security Council votes of encouragement, exactly enough. But discouraging votes have climbed from 1 to 5. Two more, and the magic nine stops being possible.
IMAGE DEBATE
K-pop singer Karina
featured in an ad that drew
accusations of racism.
SOCIETY
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Converse and the Return of a Familiar Script
\- Converse's decision to pull an advert featuring K-pop star Karina after accusations of racist imagery has sparked a debate beyond the image itself.
Some said lighting on the singer's skirt resembled a Ku Klux Klan hood, and that the positioning of a pair of sneakers recalled lynching imagery. Others pointed to the controversy as evidence that reports of the demise of “Woke 1.0” may have been exaggerated.
Converse apologized and removed the campaign, but the episode has fed into a broader argument about whether the dynamics associated with Woke 1.0 are still operating.
The term is often used to describe an era when social media activism could turn cultural disputes into corporate crises,
THE ARCHIVES
1998 leaving brands little choice but to apologize and retreat or risk being canceled.
That question has taken on new relevance following reactions to a recent essay by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. It fueled arguments that some of the assumptions underpinning the height of progressive activism are being re-examined, raising the possibility that woke idealism is giving way to a more skeptical outlook.
The Converse dispute, however, followed a familiar script: competing interpretations of an image, a social media firestorm and a company deciding that withdrawal was the
least risky option.
Whatever viewers saw in the advert, it's probably too soon to write a eulogy for Woke 1.0.
INFOCUS
SOCIAL MEDIA
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The Algorithm's Double Verdict
"Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference... was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated."
TikTok's treatment of the Lindsay Clancy case fits a recurring pattern. From Gabby Petito to Karen Read, the platform has turned tragedies into content economies: hashtags, merchandise, sponsored commentary and amateur juries reaching verdicts long before the real one arrives. More than 164,400 videos carried the #clancy hashtag during her murder trial over the deaths of her three children—which ended in a mistrial—as conspiracy theories swirled.
Criticism of TikTok is deserved, but it isn't the whole picture. During the trial, Wisconsin mom Brandee Mulligan launched a GoFundMe for Clancy's parents, raising more than \$1.2 million. More striking was the response to the case from women who saw themselves in it. Aaisha Alvi wrote for Postpartum Support International: "Lindsay Clancy was me. The only difference...was that I was fortunate enough to eventually be diagnosed and treated for...postpartum psychosis. If not for the sixth provider I saw, my daughter and I would not be here today."
Roughly one in five mothers experience a maternal mental health condition, and about three-quarters go untreated, according to Maternal Mental Health Leadership
Alliance. None of this excuses the harm. A grieving father faced unfounded accusations, and the case's algorithmic churn has often rewarded speculation over fact.
But TikTok didn't only make things worse. For every conspiracy theory, there was a woman finally saying the quiet part aloud.
“The best way to grasp this is to see the economic events of the past 15 months as a set of dominoes that, as they tumbled, have imperiled U.S. production and profits—and frayed Americans’ confidence,” Newsweek wrote after a series of international economic crunches—including the Asian and Russian financial crises, which led to the collapse of one of the largest U.S. hedge funds at the time—caused the stock market to slide almost 17 percent in less than three months and drove recession fears. This confidence was important, as consumer buying made up two-thirds of the U.S. economy at the time. Twenty-five years later, the GDP is just as reliant on consumers. However, if Americans’ confidence was shaken then, it’s at rock bottom now. U.S. consumer sentiment has dropped almost 16 percent since the start of the Iran war, renewing worries of a spending pullback that could tip the dominoes again.
FOOTBALL
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Not in Front of the Children, Tom
If you tuned into the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys game on September 20, you may be eligible for financial compensation—in the form of a dollar from a swear jar. Ex-pro quarterback and FOX Sports NFL analyst Tom Brady dropped the s-bomb during the live broadcast of the prime-time game while watching the gruesome slow-mo footage of Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels dislocating his elbow. Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark—for both Daniels and Brady.
The commentator immediately realized his mistake and apologized, but the damage was already done. Brady's on-air slip of the tongue could cost upward of \$500,000 in an FCC fine for violating the agency's indecency rules, which basically prohibit broadcast television and radio from airing anything you wouldn't want your sweet little grandmother hearing or seeing.
The amount is pocket change for FOX. The real cost is the reputational damage from viewers who had to explain what adult words were to their children. But considering many children are consuming far worse content on their iPhones nowadays—albeit with increasing regulation—the need for such strict rules becomes a little blurrier.
Parents are becoming laxer about their children cursing. Just under half say it's never OK to curse, according to a University of Michigan poll.
Is this shift the result of a growing cultural acceptance of swearing, or has the test for what is profane changed? Standards elsewhere have shifted—ads of models in lingerie and swimwear barely register; many are now just shy of fully nude. And advanced technology has made gore and violence look all the more realistic on the big screen. Even our politicians are cursing more. Is this just the direction we're headed in?
What is clear is that profanity has become a signal for authenticity. Though some questioned Brady's professionalism, most laughed off his unfiltered outburst—and his later description of a pass as a “p\*\*\* missile”—as evidence that he was finally becoming comfortable on-air. Brady, only in his third season behind the mic, signed the richest deal in broadcasting history in 2022: 10 years, \$375 million. His debut drew complaints of being “vanilla” and lacking the charisma that defined his playing career. But as one fan put it after the s-bomb: “I hate Tom Brady but that’s about the only thing that makes him interesting.”
UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE
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AI Force Without Power?
-
AI is already at war. During the first 24 hours of this year's conflict with Iran, the U.S. used the AI-powered Maven system to help identify and strike more than 1,000 targets. Yet President Donald Trump has proposed an “AI Force” and an AI czar, arguing America must accelerate AI development. At nearly the same moment, the administration floated an AI incident hotline with China. Together, those moves highlight the central tension of AI policy: Washington wants to oversee a technology it also believes it must race to develop faster than Beijing.
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The Familiar Story
The debate is now well established. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar want a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence. Sanders has urged Trump to seek a treaty with China limiting AI development, warning that a superintelligent system would threaten all of humanity, not just one country. Some industry leaders have voiced similar concerns. Others, including Trump allies such as former AI czar David Sacks, argue existing laws governing fraud, privacy and liability already provide sufficient oversight. Public confidence remains low. Pew found majorities distrust both the federal government's ability to regulate AI and companies' ability to develop it responsibly.
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What's Really Going On
The real question is not whether AI should move faster or slower. It is who actually controls it. Trump's Space Force analogy offers one answer. Congress turned Space Force from an idea into an institution with legal authority, personnel and funding. An AI Force currently has none of those. Markets are another force entirely. Goldman Sachs estimates AI-related investment will exceed \$1 trillion globally in 2026, including roughly \$581 billion in the United States. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates data centers could consume 11.8 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has already integrated AI into military operations through Maven, and the international race is shaped by China, whose decisions Washington cannot control.
That leaves a narrow role for any future AI Force. It may advise, coordinate and advocate. But unless it gains authority over law, military systems, investment and international agreements, the forces most shaping AI will remain elsewhere.
NEWS, OPINION + ANALYSIS
MILITARY
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THESE BOOTS AREN'T MADE FOR WALKING
A high number of U.S.-made combat boots failed Marines during NATO training in the Arctic, putting them at risk of frostbite and hypothermia. Fresh legislation on military procurement could make the problem worse
BY
ELLIE COOK
I T TOOK ONLY A FEW FRIGID FEBRUARY DAYS OF TRUDGING through Norwegian snow and ice for several United States Marines to notice something was wrong. First, they found holes in the leather of their often brand-new military-issue boots. Next, gaps opened up in the soles of the shoes that let in freezing cold water as they hiked and skied, weighed down by the packs strapped to their backs, according to a Pentagon official and U.S. military records reviewed by Newsweek.
The failures occurred during training for Cold Response 2026, a Norwegian-led NATO exercise involving more than 25,000 personnel in the Nordic country, and more than 7,000 others in Finland. Among those taking part were roughly 3,000 U.S. Marines. Most of them were deployed with the II Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, according to the Marine Corps, to Norwegian training grounds above the Arctic Circle in early 2026.
The boot issues have raised questions about the quality of military-issued footwear and about the Better Outfitting Our Troops (BOOTS) Act, a congressional proposal to expand U.S.-made boot requirements by limiting troops' access to some foreign-made footwear permitted under existing rules. Currently, Pentagon funds can only be used to buy military boots if they're made in the U.S. (subject to certain limited exceptions). The intention was to give U.S. companies a boost and reduce dependence on foreign supply chains, but critics say service members are suffering because they're being forced to wear poor-quality footwear and, ultimately, rack up costs when they need to buy replacements.
Failures in cold weather clothing and footwear can expose troops to frostbite, hypothermia and other life-threatening conditions, particularly during prolonged operations in the depths of Arctic winter.
It comes as NATO turns its attention to the Arctic, wary of Russia's expanding presence and growing Chinese interest, and follows President Donald Trump's long-running fixation with exerting greater U.S. control over Greenland, a self-governing territory of fellow alliance member Denmark.
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Exposing Flaws
The Cold Response exercises were part of the “Arctic Sentry” drills NATO unveiled in February, through which the alliance says it is making its presence known in the austere region, getting soldiers and marines accustomed to an unforgiving climate where Moscow’s troops are far more comfortable.
The exercises were intended to showcase how U.S. forces could operate alongside other NATO countries in some of the toughest
PERISCOPE
conditions they could face. And in many ways, they did—but not always in a good way.
Marines were pulled off the icy Norwegian fields during the exercises with their boot soles peeling away, or part of the plastic heel digging into their tendons, the Pentagon official—granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly—told Newsweek. For others, the heel cup wore quickly through the lining or the eyelets became loose.
The Marine Corps has confirmed that the concerns involved Intense Cold Weather Boots manufactured by Belleville Boot Co. It said Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel observed the problems firsthand in Norway.
“Enormous sets of issues started coming up” with the U.S.-made footwear, the Corps said.
According to the Pentagon official, the Norwegian military helped the U.S. Marines source M/77 boots manufactured by the Nordic country's Alfa company, which developed the footwear with Norway's army back in the 1970s. Some pairs of replacement boots were bought directly from nearby stores. The Pentagon official said critical provisions had to be taken off a U.S. resupply ship so the vessel could be reloaded with more American-made boots and rerouted to Norway.
A joint statement provided to Newsweek by Lt. Col. Kurt Stahl, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Europe and Africa, said U.S. forces had used an established Host Nation Support mechanism to procure locally available footwear with U.S. funds.
“Commanders and logisticians took action to meet Marines’ equipment needs and sustain training during the exercise,” the statement said. “We are not aware of any Norwegian forces purchasing or donating boots on behalf of U.S. Marines.”
The statement described Host Nation Support as a standard sustainment process that enables forces to obtain specialized or locally available equipment without requiring every item to be shipped from the U.S.
Stahl disputed the Pentagon official's account of the resupply ship, saying there was no rerouted ship that provided replacement boots to the Marines.
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Footwear Faults Assessed
A U.S. military assessment from early 2026, seen
by Newsweek, described “significant defects” in the specialist boot, and said the problems were discovered during the training in Norway from late February.
The assessment referenced a brief given in fall 2025 which said an unspecified vendor “did not identify poor craftsmanship and unacceptable materials” before shipping boots to the Marines. Two photos beneath these judgments show boots overlaid with the Belleville logo. There were “ongoing quality failures” between fall 2025 and spring 2026 with the boots approved for the U.S. Marines to hand to their service members, including the Belleville ones, the briefing says.
The problems did not end when the troops left Norway. After the failures emerged, the Marines returned to their warehouses and inspected additional stockpiles, finding more examples of faulty boots at Camp Lejeune, the Pentagon official said.
The Marine Corps said that Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps personnel subsequently conducted three inspections of Intense Cold Weather Boots at the base. The initial inspection took place one week after the team returned to the U.S., with subsequent inspections conducted in April and July
this year, with representatives for Belleville and Defense Logistics Agency present.
A spokesperson for the DLA—which is responsible for buying
clothes, shoes and equipment for service members—separately confirmed that it supplied the Belleville boots through what they described as a commercial, off-the-shelf contract vehicle to meet a Marine Corps requirement.
“We are aware of the issues with the boots and have been assisting the Marine Corps with inspections,” the spokesperson told Newsweek.
The early 2026 assessment said the vendor, which wasn't explicitly named, was scheduled to inspect 5,000 pairs of boots at Camp Lejeune because “initial sampling” at the warehouse found a roughly 50 percent defect rate. This statement came directly under a description of defects in Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots.
Faulty boots were later identified in other Marine Corps bases, including in Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan, the Pentagon official said. It's
not clear how many boots in total were affected. Newsweek did not view records detailing the number or type of defective boots identified at those additional locations.
A separate presentation from summer 2026, seen by Newsweek, said the inspection had taken place “following widespread failures during Cold Response 2026.”
The information on the slide also said Marines had been pulled from the field because of faulty boots that had all been worn for
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COLD REALITY
Troops attend a military exercise on March 12, 2026, at the Bardufoss Airbase in Norway. Cold Response 2026, which began in the Nordic country a month earlier, exposed failures in U.S. Marines' boots.
fewer than 30 days, and that the corps then had “to buy replacements from the local economy.”
The presentation called the April findings “an alarming rate of defective pairs.” It said the follow-up inspection in July “revealed a substantially higher incidence of defects, indicating a notable deterioration in product quality between the two inspection periods.”
According to the presentation, inspectors examined 2,642 Belleville Intense Cold Weather Boots at Camp Lejeune in April and found 183 with defects, a failure rate of 6.93 percent. In July, 1,781 boots were inspected and 355 were found to have defects, a failure rate of 19.93 percent. Combined, 4,423 boots were inspected and 538 were found to have defects, an overall defect rate of 12.16 percent.
The briefing said the industry norm was between a 2 and 3 percent failure rate.
The Marine Corps confirmed that the inspections identified 538 “out-of-the-box workmanship failures.” It said the findings produced a corrective action plan for Belleville to replace affected boots on a one-for-one basis.
Belleville describes its military footwear as “built with the uncompromised craftsmanship, quality and dependability required by warfighters around the globe.”
In a statement to Newsweek, the company said it had been working directly with the Marines to address their concerns and ensure it delivered the quality of combat footwear the service required.
“Belleville is committed to continuous quality improvements and works to quickly resolve any issues,” the company said.
Belleville said it consistently exceeds DLA performance expectations and receives the highest ratings under the agency's Supplier Risk Performance System, which it said measures on-time delivery and product quality.
The company, founded in 1904, described itself as the country's oldest and largest manufacturer of American-made military boots and said it had supplied footwear to the U.S. military since World War I.
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The BOOTS Act Debate
The controversy around the equipment has renewed scrutiny of rules that favor American-made military footwear and the push to tighten them further.
The defective boots were military-issued footwear. The proposed BOOTS Act would apply to a related but distinct category: optional combat boots that service members acquire themselves and are permitted to wear with their uniforms.
Because of the decades-old Berry Amendment, Pentagon funds generally cannot be used to buy foreign-made footwear or other covered clothing unless an exemption applies. These exemptions include purchases not exceeding \$200,000, certain emergencies, and cases in which American-made products cannot be obtained when needed in satisfactory quality and sufficient quantity at U.S. market prices.
The BOOTS Act would introduce further restrictions. The House version would require the defense secretary to prohibit service members from wearing optional combat boots as part of a required uniform unless the boots were manufactured entirely in the U.S. from American-grown, reprocessed, reused or produced materials and domestically manufactured components.
The legislation would limit the Marine Corps' Optional Boot Program, which allows service members to wear approved models that are not manufactured in the U.S. as long as they comply with applicable trade rules.
A favored option among service members is footwear made in Cambodia by U.S.-registered company OTB. Three types of boots made by OTB can be worn by Marines.
"THE RESULT IS THAT THE WAR-FIGHTER DOESN'T GET THE BEST PRODUCT."
But the prospect of closing this loophole makes many troops shudder. Not because they oppose the idea of wearing only U.S.-made boots, but because they think the change will harm U.S. Marines and shoemakers won't be able to keep up with the demand.
"The U.S. manufacturers aren't keeping up with quality or quantity," the Pentagon official said. "Just because it is American-made, doesn't mean we're seeing quality."
There's concern even among the current manufacturers about what the BOOTS Act could mean. Chris Perrotti, the head of manufacturing tasked with overseeing quality control and production at Danner—a Belleville competitor—said there was “frustration” among Berry-compliant bootmakers for the U.S. military that the
descriptions handed down by the DLA are based on using certain types of products to build the boots, rather than what will work best.
"The result is that the warfighter doesn't get the best product," Perrotti said in an email seen by Newsweek that was sent to another major U.S. military contractor in November 2025.
It is too expensive for U.S.-based suppliers to scale up their manufacturing to a point where they could support more boots being made, Perrotti said, meaning American companies “can’t support a military ramp up.”
Newsweek emailed Perrotti for further comment.
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Burgeoning Demand
In mid-2024, Washington-based defense and national security think tank CNA published its results of a report commissioned by the DLA. The point, the
report said, was to work out the vulnerabilities and problems with the U.S.'s production of items like Marines' boots, and how it could change during wartime.
In this scenario, the DLA would need to buy an additional 456,000 boots for its service members each year. Industry participants in this war game said this would only be possible with significant investment before a conflict started and caused demand for footwear to surge, as they can only produce a maximum of 525,000 boots currently each year. The additional purchases would put annual production at 981,000.
A separate internal military examination concluded in April this year that U.S.-based vendors could not keep up with demand for boots for U.S. service members, with up to 4.2 million pairs needed across the branches each year in peacetime, Newsweek understands.
The average life span of U.S. military boots is assessed within the armed forces to be between one and two years. Each service member is required to have at least two pairs at any one time.
The BOOTS Act was ultimately removed from the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act outlining the Pentagon's priorities for the 2027 fiscal year, according to information reviewed by Newsweek. Language from the proposal was reintroduced in the Senate in July, leaving open the possibility that it could return as lawmakers resume work on the legislation.
Its backers hope its scope could extend beyond the U.S. military to the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon official said.
That could add millions of pairs of boots to the order books of a limited number of authorized manufacturers. DHS includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. ICE said its ranks had grown by more than 120 percent to 22,000 officers and agents in one year.
The question facing lawmakers is therefore larger than whether one model of boot failed inspection. They must decide whether stricter domestic manufacturing rules would encourage the investment needed to strengthen the American footwear industry, as supporters contend, or restrict access to alternative boots before U.S. companies can reliably supply the necessary quality, performance and volume.
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Carlo VERSANO
Mamdani Is Running the Democratic Party Now
CONTROVERSIAL TAKE INCOMING. NEW YORK CITY MAYOR Zohran Mamdani is the current leader of the Democratic Party. Full stop.
But how could a political neophyte in his first year as a mayor, who has a hard ceiling on his ambitions, since he's not U.S.-born and can't run for president, become the de facto face of a main political party? Partly, there's no one else rising to the occasion, and politics abhors a vacuum. Also, he's just that talented.
This past month, President Donald Trump made a pit stop at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, during a visit to New York City—their third in-person sit-down of the year. Trump just loves this guy. He told reporters at their joint press conference that Mamdani had “great potential,” then patted him on the arm and lingered in the background while the mayor took questions. Mamdani then made a point of calling on CNN, Politico and MSNBC—the three outlets Trump had just banned from the White House.
The irony is that Mamdani is, quite literally, everything Trump used to falsely say about President Barack Obama: Muslim, African-born, socialist. But something closer to a father-son dynamic is developing between these two. The president meeting with an avowed democratic socialist weeks before national elections his own party is trying to frame as a referendum on socialism is not
an ideal look. Trump doesn't care. Game recognizes game. I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani. Both are outer-borough strivers the elites wrote off as jokes before proving everybody wrong. Both have built personality cults around themselves. And Mamdani has that charisma that Trump used to have.
So what if Trump likes guys who remind him of himself? If you're a Republican running for reelection this fall, it gets hard to sell socialism as a bogeyman when the leader of your own party is palling around with an actual socialist. But the more interesting story is what Mamdani is doing for Democrats. He wasn't a nationally known figure when he took office; now he's among the most popular Democrats anywhere. That's rare. Politicians typically lose popularity as they govern. Not Mamdani. Why? It's part social media instinct. Some is his governing record, which has landed closer to the center than his politics suggest, particularly on crime, where he's mostly let the NYPD do its job. And some of it is that charisma.
Mamdani gets away with regular meetings with a president his party's base considers the devil. There's been no real backlash from the DSA wing for sitting down with the man they call Orange Hitler. Compare that to Hakeem Jeffries, who is still taking heat from Democrats for taking a single meeting with Jared Kushner. The difference is charisma. Jeffries doesn't have it. So much of
politics comes down to that. You either have it, like Trump, Mamdani, Obama and Clinton, or you don't, like Vance, Harris, Biden, and Jeffries.
Before the Trump meeting, Mamdani spoke at a U.N. summit of global mayors and made a nuanced argument about his governing philosophy I found compelling: that the left has ceded "I think Trump genuinely sees a piece of himself in Mamdani."
issues like fraud, efficiency and quality of life to the right, and once an issue gets coded right-wing, Democrats get too scared to touch it. That's how you end up with a CVS where you need to push a button to get toothpaste, or a subway commute where you're stepping around someone in a psychiatric crisis on the way to drop your kid at school. It's a relief to hear a Democratic elected official say you're not a fascist for wanting something better than that.
Call it Nixon-in-China. Mamdani can take on these issues from the left without triggering a backlash, just as Nixon opened relations with China because his anti-communist credentials were beyond reproach.
As a New Yorker, I'm still not sold on Mamdani as a mayor. I have real complaints about how the city is being run right now. But on the national political stage, he's doing the Democratic Party's work for it: principled without being obstinate, telegenic without the plastic polish of a Gavin Newsom, fluent in social media without sounding like he was raised online. He throws red meat to the base when it suits him—calling for the arrest of Benjamin
Netanyahu, say—and pivots to statesman mode just as easily. He’s willing to touch the third rails of progressive politics that everyone else avoids. The African-born, Muslim, socialist mayor of America’s largest city is showing Democrats a path forward. Whether they take it is another question.
SCAN HERE
to watch The 1600
podcast
Carlo Versano is director of politics and culture at Newsweek. Email him at c.versano@newsweek.com
PERISCOPE
GEOPOLITICS
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POWER STEERING
Newsweek examines an alleged influence campaign that coincided with Canada's decision to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles
BY
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
A BUSINESSMAN WITH LINKS TO CHINA'S united front influence network urged Canada to rethink its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles just days before Ottawa slashed the levy, a dossier provided to Newsweek alleges.
Officials announced during Prime Minister Mark Carney's trip to China in January that 49,000 Chinese-made EVs would be allowed into the country at a 6.1 percent tariff—replacing a 100 percent surtax imposed in 2024 under his predecessor Justin Trudeau. The deal was part of a broader trade agreement that included tariff relief from China for Canadian agricultural exports.
But it marked a break with the United States, which continues to restrict Chinese EVs, and raised the temperature around national security concerns in North America over Chinese-made automotive technology.
According to the Canadian source who provided the dossier, a policy paper seeking “a structural rethink of Canada’s 100 percent surtax on Chinese electric vehicles” was delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office and to members of parliament shortly before Carney left for Beijing. The person and the association behind the proposal are not registered lobbyists, according to a search of Canada’s lobby registry.
When Newsweek contacted the prime minister's office seeking confirmation and comment, the Privy Council Office responded, directing the question to Global Affairs Canada, which did not reply to a request for comment.
The dossier identifies the businessman as Shui Shousong, president of the Sino-Canada Entrepreneurs Association, also known as SinoCann. Chinese-language reports reviewed by Newsweek describe Shui as having been a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which is a key part of China's united front system, a Chinese Communist Party network that builds ties with non-party groups, business leaders, diaspora communities and other organizations in support of Beijing's political objectives. The reports included one by Zhejiang Minjian, a magazine affiliated with the United Front in Zhejiang province.
Shui and SinoCann did not respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The United Front Work Department is the CCP body responsible for overseeing much of that work. Western governments and security agencies have scrutinized united front-linked organizations over concerns that they are advancing Beijing's political and economic objectives abroad.
The Canadian source, who asked not to be named because of sensitivities around strained U.S.-Canada ties, said Shui had “a very extensive footprint of united front membership and activity” and had appeared at events with Canadian municipal and federal politicians, including one “where a Chinese consular official openly praised the host organization for advancing ‘reunification’ work,” citing Chinese-language reports. That means “reunification” with Taiwan, which is a core political goal of the CCP and its united front work.
In August, Shui gave a speech at the launch of a new Canada-China EV association and the unveiling of a service center to build a “transnational industrial cooperation platform” between the two countries, according to a report by Victoria Media, a Chinese-language outlet in Canada. Shui is the president of the Canada-China Business Council that hosted the event, according to Chinese-language media reports.
Sitting and retired members of the Canadian Parliament also spoke at the
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"NO ONE IN CANADIAN MEDIA ASKED THE OBVIOUS QUESTION OF WHO HAD BEEN PUTTING THEIR CASE TO THE PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE BEFOREHAND."
TRADE DEAL
Carney at a press conference in Beijing during his January trip.
launch, which was attended by municipal government members and diplomats from the Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in Toronto, Victoria Media reported. Newsweek requested comment from the Chinese consulate in Toronto and the embassy in Ottawa but did not hear back.
“No one in Canadian media asked the obvious question of who had been putting their case to the Prime Minister’s Office beforehand, or on whose behalf,” the source said, and characterized the episode as an example of a potential influence channel that may have gone unexamined.
“That is the finding,” the source said. “Not a covert operation but an unexamined one: access obtained through ordinary channels, in daylight, by a figure whose affiliations were a matter of public record in two languages, with no registry entry, no reporting, and no evidence that any Canadian body looked [into the matter].”
Chinese EVs have become a major issue in North American trade and security policy. Washington has kept Chinese EVs out of the U.S. market, warning about loss of manufacturing strength in core products and technologies, and has warned that connected vehicle technology could create security vulnerabilities. China's EV industry, led by companies such as BYD, has expanded rapidly overseas, intensifying concerns in Western capitals, particularly in Germany, about industrial capacity, supply chains and data security.
In September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy sent a sharply worded letter to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley expressing “profound concern”
about Ford's ties to Chinese companies and technology. The Department of Transportation cited Ford's use of licensed battery technology from China's CATL, a partnership involving Hangzhou-based Geely, and other China-linked supply chain issues.
"While DOT recognizes the intense competitive pressures of the global market, the Company's recent strategic decisions paint a troubling picture of a foundational American brand actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises," Duffy wrote. Ford rejected the criticism, calling the letter "wrongheaded." The company said it supports U.S. efforts to advance American innovation and manufacturing.
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Newsweek's senior correspondent, international affairs. Email her at d.tatlow@newsweek.com
PERISCOPE
SOCIETY
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[GENERATION GAIN] Young workers are earning more and facing lower unemployment than millennials did at the same age, complicating the familiar perception of Gen Z
BY
SUZANNE BLAKE
GEN Z HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF NOT WANTING to work. But behind the familiar complaints about entitlement and poor work ethic, the numbers tell a different story.
Gen Z workers are entering the labor market under strikingly different conditions than millennials did, and new data suggests it is paying off. Despite lower labor force participation, Gen Z adults are facing lower unemployment and are earning more than millennials did at the same age, according to a new labor market report from resume platform Zety.
“Every generation remembers how hard we worked when we were young. We remember the long hours and the struggle. Somehow we’re a little less good at remembering all the complaining we did at 22,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek.
“Gen Z isn’t lazy. They’re different. They’re more willing to question whether the old bargain of ‘work hard, keep your head down and eventually you’ll be rewarded’ still makes sense.”
Zety's Early Career Labor Market Report analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data on adults ages 20 to 24 during two comparable periods: millennials from 2005 to 2008 and Gen Z from 2021 to 2024. Median weekly earnings for full-time Gen Z workers averaged about \$756, versus \$674 for millennials after adjusting for inflation, a gap of roughly 12.3 percent. Unemployment averaged 7.5 percent for Gen Z, compared with 8.9 percent for millennials at the same age.
The Market Did the Heavy Lifting "One could argue that with fewer Gen Z workers participating in the traditional workforce, the lower supply of available workers means wages have to be a bit higher to attract them," Kevin Thompson, CEO of 9i Capital Group and host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek.
“For years, we’ve heard a repeated stereotype from older Americans that Gen Z
"FOR YEARS, WE'VE HEARD A REPEATED STEREOTYPE... THAT GEN Z DOESN'T WANT TO WORK, BUT THIS DATA SUGGESTS OTHERWISE."
doesn't want to work, but this data suggests otherwise," said Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin to Newsweek.
Gen Z's advantage comes despite lower overall workforce participation: 71.1 percent, versus 74.5 percent for millennials at the same age. The employment-population ratio also trailed, at 65.8 percent versus 67.9 percent. Fewer Gen Zers are working or looking for work, but those who are tend to come out ahead.
“Gen Z has allowed themselves to fight back against lower-than-average wages and, in some cases, will accept going into debt or forgoing purchases rather than chasing materialism simply for the sake of it,” Thompson said. “I don’t think that means they are unmotivated. Their motivation just doesn’t seem to be centered around money in the same way it may have been for previous generations.”
So why is this happening? Unlike millennials, who entered the workforce ahead of the Great Recession, Gen Z came of age in a historically tight, post-pandemic labor market, with employers battling shortages across industries and younger workers finally holding real leverage.
"Some of that advantage reflects very different economic circumstances. Millennials entered adulthood around the Great Recession, while Gen Z benefited from a post-pandemic labor market that produced unusually strong wage growth," Beene said. "Gen Z isn't necessarily working harder or millennials less effectively. Young people are approaching a fundamentally different labor market, and those succeeding in it are doing considerably better financially than the familiar 'lazy Gen Z' narrative would suggest."
Digital fluency hasn't hurt either. A generation raised on technology and social media aligns neatly with what employers now want. Add retiring Baby Boomers and a wave of vacancies, and conditions tilt further in young workers' favor.
“Give any cohort of workers a tight market and they’ll command, and get, higher pay. Hand them a recession and they’ll spend a decade, or a lifetime, digging out,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek. “The only variable that matters here is the balance of power between employers and workers, and employers spend billions doing everything they can to keep it tilted their way.”
---
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No Victory Lap Yet
None of this means Gen Z has it easy. Soaring housing costs and living expenses remain real burdens, while affordability and career stability still top the list of anxieties for young workers, even with fatter paychecks than their predecessors had.
“Gen Z has lower unemployment among people participating in the labor force, but fewer young adults are participating or employed overall. So this isn’t a clean victory lap,” Ryan said. “To me, the bigger lesson is that generations respond to the economy they’re handed. Millennials adapted to one labor market. Gen Z is adapting to another.”
Whether that advantage holds is an open question. A cooling labor market could erode Gen Z's gains, while AI may reshape entry-level work altogether in the years ahead.
“I’m seeing the tide move,” Driscoll said. “The market is cooling and employers are clawing back, spending more on lobbying than what it would cost to just pay people more and cover benefits. What we’re seeing is the reality of concessions, extracted under pressure, now retreating. Workers only keep what we can defend.”
Gen Z wasn't handed an easier path, just a different one. So far, they're working it smarter, not harder.
Suzanne Blake reports for Newsweek on consumer and social trends. Email her at s.blake@newsweek.com
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HOW AI ATE DC
NEWSWEEK'S AI POLICY SCORECARD SHOWS THAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOK OVER WASHINGTON'S AGENDA FASTER THAN THE PARTIES COULD DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT
BY
ADAM MILLS AND ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
● ● ● ● ●
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THE PACE OF AI? American politicians. In the space of two years, artificial intelligence has gone from a committee-room curiosity to one of the most contested issues of the 2026 midterms. President Donald Trump claims to have directed more than \$2.7 trillion into the AI industry. The lobbying dollars have followed: 11 of the largest technology and AI companies and their trade associations spent \$41.8 million lobby-
ing the federal government in the first six months of 2026, according to Issue One, roughly 10 percent more than a year earlier. This past spring, more than \$27 million from groups linked to OpenAI and Anthropic poured into a single Democratic congressional primary in Manhattan. The sudden emergence of AI as a political issue has turned zoning fights over data centers into attack ads. And it has pushed a question that once belonged to science fiction—will humanity be wiped out by killer robots?—into cable news bookings.
What artificial intelligence hasn't done, unlike nearly every other topic in the
public discourse in the year 2026, is sort itself cleanly into the two parties. “There’s been a total scrambling of partisan politics on this,” Evan Roth Smith, a pollster and founding partner at Sling-shot Strategies, told Newsweek. “We have seen AI have an impact in just about every way that an issue can impact an election.”
That leaves voters heading to the polls on November 3 with an unusual problem. On abortion, guns or immigration, a party label tells you most of what you need to know about a candidate. On AI, it tells you less.
Some members of Congress have told reporters they've used AI only a handful of times; others say their offices rely on it. Some lawmakers abhor data centers while others see them as vital. Some think AI should be regulated by the states, others that it ought to be a purely federal matter. Instead of a party line, AI policy is a patchwork that shifts from
district to district and state to state.
sponsorship from the soon concluding 119th Congress, as well as a wide review of public statements made in speeches, interviews, press releases and social media posts.
The Booster end describes the agenda the hyperscalers and the investors financing the buildout have pressed on Washington: minimal regulation for the sake of technical progress, safety risks as engineering problems to be solved later, vast economic gains worth the job displacement, urgent data center construction at scale, and a race with China that is America's existential national security challenge of
its time. A Skeptic answers no on all five counts.
Between them sits nearly everyone, in combinations no party platform describes, which is why the five category scores matter as much as the overall grade. A single number makes hundreds of lawmakers comparable. The categories show which parts of the agenda each one accepts and which they reject.
It's a system designed to bring some order to a complicated and quickly moving policy debate around AI. “Very few leaders in this debate are ‘skeptics’ of AI’s potential,” Brendan Parets, general counsel for Public First Action, which advocates for stronger safeguards, told Newsweek. “There are, however, many in the ‘race forward’ camp who are publicly skeptical that AI poses serious risks to our national security, families and communities that
To map where lawmakers actually stand, Newsweek built the AI Policy Scorecard. It positions all 537 sitting members of Congress, including senators, representatives and nonvoting House delegates, on a scale from AI Skeptic (1) to AI Booster (5). That score is based on the stances each member has taken in five areas: Regulation & Governance, Data Centers & Energy, Jobs & Economy, Safety & Privacy, and National Security & China. The scores draw on the official record: roll-call votes and bill
"THIS IS NOT
YET FOLLOWING THE
TYPICAL POLARIZED
POLITICAL DYNAMICS
OF SO MANY
OTHER ISSUES."
necessitate robust regulation."
---
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Lopsided, Not Polarized
SEVERAL FINDINGS FROM THE AI POLICY Scorecard stand out. The extremes are, as extremes tend to be, highly polarized, but Congress does not sort itself on AI policy along familiar partisan lines. The extremes are also nearly empty. Only 18 members score as AI Skeptics, all of them in the Democratic caucus, and only 10 as AI Boosters, all Republicans. Those 28 members are 5 percent of Congress.
As a whole, each party leans in opposite directions: The average Democrat
SLOW IT DOWN
The 10 biggest AI Skeptics in Congress whose records most consistently favor slowing AI down, tougher safety protections and more caution about jobs and the economy
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Bernard Sanders | VT | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.3 | 1.3 | Sen. Tina Smith | MN | D | - | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.3 | Sen. Jeff Merkley | OR | D | 1 | 2 | - | 1.8 | 1 | 1.4 | Sen. Alex Padilla | CA | D | 1 | - | - | 2 | - | 1.5 | Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand | NY | D | 2 | 1 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Mazie K. Hirono | HI | D | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Peter Welch | VT | D | 2 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.7 | 1 | 1.5 | Sen. Raphael G. Warnock | GA | D | - | 2 | - | 2 | 1 | 1.7 | Rep. Frederica S. Wilson | FL-24 | D | 1 | 1.8 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 | Sen. Edward J. Markey | MA | D | 1.3 | 1.5 | 2 | 2 | - | 1.7 |
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FULL SPEED AHEAD
The 10 biggest AI Boosters in Congress whose records most consistently favor faster AI development, fewer rules and more data centers
● ● ● ● ● |
| PARTY | REGULATION & GOVERNANCE | DATA CENTERS & ENERGY | JOBS & ECONOMY | SAFETY & PRIVACY | NATIONAL SECURITY | OVERALL | Sen. Alan Armstrong | OK | R | - | 5 | - | - | - | 5.0 | Sen. Dan Sullivan | AK | R | 5 | - | - | - | 5 | 5.0 | Sen. Kevin Cramer | ND | R | - | 4.7 | - | - | 4.5 | 4.6 | Sen. Deb Fischer | NE | R | - | - | 4 | 4 | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. James E. Risch | ID | R | 3 | 5 | - | - | 5 | 4.3 | Sen. Jim Banks | IN | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.8 | 4.3 | Sen. John Thune | SD | R | 4.5 | 4 | - | - | - | 4.3 | Sen. Joni Ernst | IA | R | 4 | - | - | - | 4.5 | 4.3 | Sen. Mike Rounds | SD | R | 4 | - | 4 | - | 4.5 | 4.2 | Sen. Ted Cruz | TX | R | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4.8 | 4.2 | scores 2.60, Lean Skeptic, while the average Republican scores 3.26, Lean Booster. More than half of Democrats, 137 of 262, fall in the Lean Skeptic band, and more than half of Republicans, 137 of 266, fall in Lean Booster. But the distance between the parties—0.66 points on a scale that runs 1 to 5—is relatively small.
And there is also a lot of overlap. Nine Democrats score Lean Booster and 25 Republicans score Lean Skeptic. Together, these 34 members have AI records closer to the opposing party's average than to their own. Another 191, more than a third of Democrats and a third of Republicans, land in Mixed, the scorecard's
narrowest band reserved for records that balance right at the center.
Dig deeper into the data and those differences mask a lot of similarities, with the two parties agreeing on many of the questions at the center of the AI debate: how dangerous (or not) the technology is, and how much it matters to beat China in the AI race (a lot). The primary issue where Republicans and Democrats
SCAN HERE
to see all the data from our study and read a detailed methodology.
do break decisively is the one, not surprisingly, that has received the most attention in midterm campaigns: data centers. On Safety, the mean score for both Republicans and Democrats is 2.1, a low Lean Skeptic score. On National Security, the mean is 4.4 Booster for Republicans and 3.9 Lean Booster for Democrats. But on Data Centers, the parties show a 1.7-point gap from the 3.5 Lean Booster for Republicans and 1.9 Lean Skeptic for Democrats.
Individual member combinations are where the scores gets especially interesting. Representative Andy Barr, a Kentucky Republican, scores 3.7, in the middle of Lean Booster territory.
He's taken Booster positions, advocating in June that U.S. policy should be to “win the race for artificial intelligence dominance,” and argued that competing would require more data centers, semiconductor production and power generation. Yet he has also sounded Skeptic notes, leaving the question of where that infrastructure gets built to local communities.
"Some communities are going to want those projects, some communities are not," Barr said. "The people should be in charge of those decisions."
Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, scores 2.6, Lean Skeptic, and his record displays the complexity behind the labels. In April, Lieu partnered with Republican Representative Jay Obernolte on the bipartisan American Leadership in AI Act, a package aimed at strengthening U.S. leadership through research, standards, federal adoption and workforce development. Three months later, he backed the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require developers of the most powerful systems to retain the ability to slow or shut them down if they pose catastrophic risks.
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Agreement on Both Sides
"THIS IS NOT YET FOLLOWING THE TYPICAL POLARized political dynamics of so many other issues," Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School, who co-leads the American Political Science Association's task force on AI and politics, told Newsweek.
The coalitions outside Congress are just as unfamiliar. Lauren McFerran, executive director of the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, said labor leaders now sign on to the same letters as conservative religious leaders on some AI issues, drawn together by anxiety over jobs, safety and the direction of the technology.
“You really see some interesting bedfellows here,” she said.
The anxiety McFerran hears most is about work, which is another place the AI Policy Scorecard shows bipartisan agreement: the means of both
"WE'VE GOT THIS
RISK OUT THERE THAT
WE KNOW IS REAL
OF ONE OF THESE
MODELS BECOMING
THE TERMINATOR."
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THE DATA CENTER ELECTION
A nationwide backlash is forcing candidates onto unfamiliar ground
BY
ALEX J. ROUHANDEH
IN THE SIX YEARS JON HUSTED SPENT AS OHIO'S lieutenant governor, he celebrated bringing data centers to the state as part of an economic development push that handed operators tens of millions in tax breaks. In 2025, the year Husted was
tapped to fill JD Vance's Senate seat when he became vice president, Ohio's sales tax exemption for data centers cost the state almost \$1.6 billion in foregone revenue.
Two years ago, Husted's record would have been regarded as a sterling Republican credential. But heading into the midterms and fighting to keep his seat, Husted is finding that record is a political liability he is trying to legislate his way out of.
His opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has put the record Husted built at the forefront of his campaign. “Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs,” Brown said, “and Ohioans—not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends—should get to decide if data centers are built in their community.”
That reversal is visible across the Republican caucus. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, Republicans in Congress average a 3.64 Lean Booster score on Data Centers while Democrats are Lean Skeptics at 1.97—the only topic of the five scored questions where party predicts a member's stance, unlike the scores for Safety, Jobs & Economy and National Security, where the two parties are more closely clustered together.
Much of the reason for the split on data centers is that these scores record positions taken over the past two years, a period in which the politics of data centers has changed dramatically. When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, flanked by tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, Republican support for tech company buildouts was a natural fit.
Today, Trump remains one of the biggest public boosters for data centers, lending his dominance over the news cycle to their cause. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
But public opinion has moved the other way. In opinion polls, local opposition to data centers is broad and rising. A Gallup survey released in May found roughly seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community—more than oppose the idea of a nearby nuclear plant. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August put opposition to a local data center at 61 percent, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents against. It is one of the few AI questions where majorities of voters in both parties are firmly in agreement.
“Whether you come at this from the existential risk, geopolitical concerns, labor force impacts or the actual economics and climate and energy issues related to data centers, it is the physical manifestation of AI,” Nathaniel "I AM RESPONDING
TO WHAT THE
VOTERS WANT. THEY
WANT THE DATA
CENTERS TO BE
HELD ACCOUNTABLE
FOR THE COSTS
OF NEW
ELECTRICITY AND
INFRASTRUCTURE.
AND MY BILL
DOES THAT."
Persily, who researches AI at Stanford Law School, told Newsweek. "It is literally a concrete building where you can then channel your anxieties and frustrations."
Congressional Republicans have demonstrated an awareness of
their vulnerabilities on this issue. In the House, Republicans rallied around the Ratepayer Protection Act, which aims to prevent consumers and small businesses from footing the bill for electrical grid upgrades required by AI data centers. Democrats overwhelmingly joined them when the bill passed September 16 with a 417-3 vote. Before it becomes law, however, the bill must pass the Senate, where it is stalled.
The senator who first introduced the measure in the chamber? Jon Husted of Ohio. The day after the bill passed the House, he took to the floor to urge the Senate to pass it by unanimous consent. “I am responding to what the voters want. They want the data centers to be held accountable for the costs of new electricity and infrastructure. And my bill does that,” he told Newsweek.
But the move was blocked by Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, who said he doesn't think it goes far enough. "Rather than voluntary pledges or suggestions to states, Congress needs to pass real legislation, with real teeth," Heinrich said, urging passage of his own bill. That measure, the GRID Savings Act, would require large data center operators
and other industrial users to finance the grid infrastructure they need, instead of asking states to consider it. “If hyperscalers and other Big Tech developers need expensive new facilities and more energy, they should pay for it,” he said.
The bill's fate now sits at the intersection of two campaigns. Husted, who says he's always believed data center development should be a local decision, needs a record of data center skepticism he can point to. But Heinrich and other Democrats have no reason to hand vulnerable Republican incumbents an accomplishment ahead of November 3. "Democrats proved that they're more interested in playing politics than they are at responding to the needs of the American people. They don't really care about affordability when it comes to electricity and data centers. They care about having a political issue. And so they own it now," Husted said.
Ultimately, what neither party is offering is a way to stop the buildout. In Ohio, 78 percent of residents favor a moratorium on new data center construction while more information can be gathered, per a Bowling Green State University poll. Husted doesn't support one. Neither does Brown, who promises instead to make operators pay their full electricity costs, protect water supplies and give communities a say in approvals. However, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, at least 138 Ohio communities have put active data center moratoriums on their books.
That is also why the issue travels so well. Wider grievances against tech companies found a target in data centers: a windowless building on the edge of town, a transmission line, a tax abatement the county already approved.
Husted's arc is the whole shift in miniature: a lieutenant governor who cut the deals is now the senator asking colleagues to protect voters from the bills those deals helped run up. He is not alone, only earlier and more exposed than most. Whether he corrected course fast enough is a question Republicans everywhere will see answered on November 3.
parties land in Mixed, with Republicans at 3.0 and Democrats at 2.8. Some 72 percent of Americans said it was a bad time to find a job, per a Gallup poll published in March.
"The rubber is going to hit the road here when it comes to job security," McFerran said. She pointed to two especially exposed groups: young people trying to enter the workforce and workers in clerical and administrative jobs that have traditionally offered a route into the middle class without a college degree. Protecting workers, she argued, doesn't have to mean resisting technology. Employees often understand where a new system could fail and what would make it useful. "It's who's in the room to make the decision," she said.
"IF CONGRESS ACTS HASTILY BEFORE THE TECHNOLOGY IS UNDERSTOOD, CONGRESS RISKS KILLING INNOVATION AND SETTING THIS TECHNOLOGY BACK DECADES."
Smith of Slingshot sees the same convergence among voters, but arriving by different routes. A Democrat worried about AI might focus on concentrated wealth and the power of technology executives, he said. A Republican might see an elite class acquiring new authority over ordinary life. Independents often bring a deeper suspicion of centralized power. These different worldviews can end up at the same conclusions.
AI has taken off politically “faster than just about any issue in recent memory,” Smith said, because it reaches people through so many parts of their lives. Slingshot’s polling found that people can be comfortable using AI themselves and still fear the “systemic impacts” of what it could do to the economy and society around them. “People are skeptical and apprehensive,” Smith said.
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Existential Angst
IT STARTED WITH A RESIGNATION. JACOB Coxon, a researcher leaving Anthropic,
posted a note accusing frontier labs of “gambling with our lives” that was viewed more than 173 million times on X. Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s alignment science team, amplified the alarm. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he posted.
A September Politico poll found that 63 percent of Americans believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity.
On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. OpenAI’s Sam Altman quickly agreed (“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier”) and so did Elon Musk (“Dario is right”).
Amodei's case for slowing down rests on the same three premises Congress holds. The technology, he wrote, “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” But slow down too much, “then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” he added, warning of giving China’s ruling Communist Party an advantage.
Persily puts the stakes in similar terms. "When [Claude] Mythos first came out, we were living in a world that had never existed before where an American company could basically take down almost any government in the world if it wanted to," he said. "Things are moving so fast that we kind of forget where we are and where we've been."
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AGREEMENT...TO A POINT
The average Democrat scores as a Lean Skeptic while the average Republican is a Lean Booster. But on four of the five questions in Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, the parties sit close together. Each dot shows the caucus' average on each issue from 1 (Skeptic) to 5 (Booster). Only data centers truly divide them
Democratic Caucus
2.60
Republican Caucus 3.26
Holding both convictions at once has not produced much legislation. On September 16, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, tried to fast-track a bill requiring AI developers to build shutdown mechanisms into advanced systems. “We’ve got this risk out there that we know is real of one of these models becoming the Terminator,” Kennedy said.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, blocked it. “If Congress acts hastily before the technology is understood,” Paul said, “Congress risks killing innovation and setting this technology back decades.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, has backed legislation to ban superintelligence outright. Republican senators including Kennedy, Rick Scott of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri have declined to support it; Hawley has pushed instead to hold companies legally liable for what their systems do.
The White House, for its part, has staked out a position to the booster side of the AI industry's own leaders. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High
IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote on Truth Social on September 14, accusing Amodei of "now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'"
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The Exception
ONE ISSUE BREAKS THE PATTERN: DATA CENTERS. The Newsweek AI Policy Scorecard reflects the past two years of public record, and the events of the last two years go a long way toward explaining the split. In the wake of Trump's 2024 election victory, marked by a sharp turn toward Trump in the technology industry, backing data centers became a Republican position: the physical infrastructure for the race with China and a source of jobs and investment. Trump continues to make the case himself on Truth Social.
Democrats, for the most part, did not follow. Then public opinion turned. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey released in August found that 61 percent of Americans opposed construction of a new data center in their area, 12 percentage points higher than earlier in the year. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents were opposed.
Persily calls data centers the “physical manifestation of AI,” a place where anxieties about jobs, geopolitics, energy or the technology itself suddenly acquire a
target: land, transmission lines, water use, tax breaks and an electricity bill.
Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of the Republican polling firm Cygnal, said data centers began surfacing unprompted in his focus groups toward the end of 2025. By the later primaries, candidates were attacking opponents over their records on data centers and the tax incentives that came with them.
“Nobody’s explaining why we need more of them,” Buchanan said. The fight, he argued, has become a stand-in for something larger: “It’s a proxy issue of, ‘Is this person in the pocket of special interest or is this person for people like me?’”
The record is now moving in real time. On September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, introduced by Representative Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, by a vote of 417 to 3. The bill requires technology companies to pay for new energy infrastructure serving data centers rather than passing those costs on to other customers. Several Republicans in competitive races signed on as cosponsors in the weeks before the vote. The
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BEIJING LOOMS LARGE OVER AMERICAN AI POLITICS
Competition with China drives unusually broad consensus across Capitol Hill
BY
TOM O'CONNOR
● ● ● ● ●
MUCH LIKE THE RACE FOR SUPREMACY IN NUCLEAR arms and space exploration during the Cold War, the United States once again finds itself contending with a communist rival with vast capabilities in a cutting-edge field likely to define the world for gen-
erations to come. AI, however, in many ways poses an even more complex set of challenges as the U.S. and China move to set and advance their agendas.
As the debate over AI policy plays out in Washington, no issue animates support for an aggressive AI buildout more than the national security implications. In Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard, 86 members received the highest Booster score of 5 in National Security for their positions on AI issues tied to national security and competition with China. That's more than the other four questions covering regulation, data centers, jobs and safety. The caucuses sit closer here than on any other question in the scorecard—Democrats average 3.9, Republicans 4.4.
“China is increasingly being invoked to justify differing policy positions on AI regulation,” Kyle Chan, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center who specializes in U.S.-China relations and emerging technologies, told Newsweek. “We can all agree that China is the elephant in the room for AI regulation, but we don’t agree on what’s the best approach for dealing with China.”
“In general, people looking for some kind of unifying force behind the AI debate are looking to China,” Chan said. “There’s an effort to find common ground on AI issues in the face of so much division.”
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The Skeptics
AI INDEED REMAINS A DIVISIVE ISSUE IN CONGRESS. THE LARGEST share of lawmakers—191—received a Mixed score of between 2.8 and 3.2, while Skeptics outweigh the Boosters at 162 to 146, according to the AI Policy Scorecard data. But even among those who aim to rein in AI at home through stricter regulation, some lawmakers stand out as prominent proponents of the narrative that the field constitutes a powerful tool in the superpower contest with China.
In the Democratic camp, they include Senators Dick Durbin and Amy Klobuchar, each of whom has a 5 in the national security and China component of AI policy while scoring under 2 in the other categories concerning domestic policy, indicating a track record of seeking more stringent checks and balances on AI at home.
Among Republicans, Senator Josh Hawley emerges as one of the most prominent proponents of curbing unbridled AI expansion at home while pushing for supremacy against China in this field.
Seth Center, former State Department acting special envoy for critical and emerging technologies who co-led the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in 2024, argued the two positions may ultimately collide.
“You cannot hold a ‘beat China in AI consensus’ and a ‘slow down AI development and stop AI infrastructure projects’ view domestically forever without contradictions emerging sooner rather than later,” Center told Newsweek. “There is a synthesis, but politics seems to be making it less likely.”
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The Boosters
ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT GROUP OF LAWMAKERS GENERALLY PREFER boosting AI proliferation in the U.S. rather than imposing guardrails as the way to meet the challenge from Beijing.
Republicans within this faction include Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York, who is retiring from the House, Jodey Arrington of Texas, Richard McCormick of Georgia, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
Meanwhile, the lead Democrat in this group is Representative Jared Golden of Maine, also retiring at the end of this term, who ranks second behind Pennsylvania's Senator John Fetterman as the top ranked AI boosters in his party.
Jessica Brandt, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center, pointed to “a broad consensus that AI could transform the balance of military and economic power globally for decades to come and have profound consequences for the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world.”
“That shared understanding creates a simple, unifying
Yet she argued that “the consensus breaks down over what ‘winning’ actually means,” as goals remain ill-defined by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And given Beijing's notable advances in AI, Brandt argued that time was of the essence for outlining U.S. objectives and concrete strategies to pursue them.
"A year ago, the dominant conversation was: How can we beat China in the race to the frontier?" Brandt said. "Now the conversation is shifting to: How, if at all, can we pace the frontier without China?"
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The Shared Challenge
MEANWHILE, IN BEIJING, A PARALLEL DEBATE IS PLAYING OUT among policymakers observing the same growing chorus of warnings from experts about the potential risks posed by runaway AI advances. After all, if models indicate AI could one day render humanity obsolete, unchecked proliferation could also theoretically challenge the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, which Brandt defines as one of the top motivations coloring China's discussions on safety.
But there are risks for Washington in this scenario as well, serving as yet another factor bringing both U.S. parties together on the links between AI and China policies.
If China doesn't get AI safety under control, the consequences are swift and global, R. David Edelman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project on Technology, the Economy & National Security, told Newsweek: "The geopolitical risks of a cavalier approach to AI in Beijing could break out into a shooting war far quicker than many would care to admit.
“So regardless of what motivates lawmakers—whether they are concerned about advanced AI as an existential risk to humanity, as a critical way to grow the economy amidst global competition or as a risk to our national security in another country’s hands—all of those policies demand a thoughtful approach to China,” Edelman said.
There is also some logic to seeking cooperation.
“Both governments have an interest in regular channels for flagging and fixing vulnerabilities before they become crises,” Jessica Chen Weiss, former U.S. State Department official who serves as faculty director of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for America, China and the Future of Global Affairs, told Newsweek.
"As China bets on open-weight models, its companies have a growing stake in sharing threat information and best practices," Weiss said. "Technical dialogues could make both countries safer, starting with a common enemy: the ransomware gangs that exploit shared vulnerabilities."
In fact, there is precedent for such collaboration.
Weiss pointed out that when California-based cybersecurity firm Calif used AI to detect a bug that could allow illicit access to accounts associated with popular Chinese messaging platform WeChat, the findings were reported to Shenzhen-based parent conglomerate Tencent.
“That is the kind of disclosure both governments should want more of,” Weiss said.
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“IT’S NOT QUITE CLEAR WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A REPUBLICAN ON AI OR A DEMOCRAT ON AI.” POLITICIANS... ARE “FIGURING THIS OUT ON THE FLY.”
scorecard rates the measure a 2, Lean Skeptic, and that single vote moved a number of House Republicans' scores.
Democrats voted for it too—and argued it was not enough. Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, called the bill “only the beginning.” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said it “falls short.” As of press time, there have been no signs of advancing to a Senate vote since the House passage.
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Much Talk, Little Action
WITH THE COALITIONS UNSETTLED, THE FIGHT OVER what counts as a reasonable response to AI carries extra weight, and the industry is spending heavily to shape it. The \$41.8 million in federal lobbying “captures what’s on paper at the federal level,” said Isabel Sunderland, policy lead for technology reform at Issue One, which co-authored the analysis. It leaves out money flowing through super PACs into campaigns.
Among the biggest lobbying fights is over whether federal rules should preempt state and local AI laws. Craig Albright, senior vice president for U.S. government relations at the Business Software Alliance, told Newsweek that a national framework for risk management and transparency would serve companies and customers better than a patchwork of state rules, but only if it is strong enough to “earn the preemption.” He added, “Regulation isn’t all bad by nature.”
The companies also hold an information advantage. Social media, whatever its flaws, mostly happened in public, noted Joshua Tucker of New York University, who co-leads the American Political Science
Association's AI task force with Persily. “Where we're going to have an enormous blind spot is actually how people are using these models, because the vast, vast, vast majority of interactions that people have with chatbots are in one-on-one circumstances, which is an essentially private conversation,” he said.
Policymakers can't see how these systems are used at anything like the scale the companies can.
Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, sees that imbalance as a form of political power. “This is an incredibly opaque industry—everything we know is pieced together through investigations by journalists, researchers and lawmakers,” she said.
Training data, internal risk evaluations, release decisions and government contracts all remain largely out of view, though Congress, she noted, has subpoena power and other tools that could force more of it into public view.
"The opacity in this industry is about them holding technical expertise and access close," she said, "but even more so it's about the narratives that disempower even political leaders from thinking anyone but the industry can do anything about these problems. That's what shrinks the policy conversation down to whatever the companies are willing to offer."
Whether any of this decides elections is still unclear. In New York's 12th District, the June Democratic primary became a proxy war over the state's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, which requires AI providers to publish harm incidents within 72 hours and goes into effect on January 1, 2027. Groups linked to OpenAI, which opposed the measure, and Anthropic, which supported it, ended up spending millions on both sides of the bill's sponsor Alex Bores, who was running to replace the retiring Representative Jerrold Nadler.
In the end, the race was a high-dollar draw: Bores finished second, 35 percent to 39 percent, to Assemblymember Micah Lasher who had co-sponsored the same law.
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A Snapshot of a Moving Target
ULTIMATELY, THE AI POLICY SCORECARDS CAPTURE Congress at a particular moment: AI has become important enough to move votes, money, campaigns and local politics, but neither party has settled on what supporting or opposing it is supposed to mean.
"It's not quite clear what it means to be a Republican on AI or a Democrat on AI," said Tucker. Politicians, he said, are "figuring this out on the fly."
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THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT
The generation expected to love AI may become its toughest critic
BY
LAUREN GIELLA
● ● ● ● ●
WHEN NEW TECHNOLOGIES EMERGE—FROM CDS to the internet to mobile phones—the familiar pattern has been that young people are the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. With AI, only half that pattern is holding.
This year, for the first time, a majority (55 percent) of American adults under 30 told the Pew Research Center they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. In 2021, that figure was 31 percent. Over the same period, the share who are more excited than concerned fell from 25 percent to 11 percent.
It's not that young people aren't using AI—66 percent of adults under 30 have used a chatbot, and 31 percent use one daily, according to Pew—the problem is that the longer and more they use it, the less they like it.
"I think the older generation is dramatically underestimating how much Gen Z hates AI," Amita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an AI-powered surplus inventory management platform, told Newsweek.
Bhasin, who is also an OpenAI ChatGPT Futures honoree and was featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2026, said youth antipathy to AI is driven by fears of its impact on their present and future, from deepfakes to job losses.
Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who focuses on law & technology, privacy and regulation, said the perception of AI among young people has “cratered” in the nearly four years since ChatGPT hit the market.
A Gallup poll fielded earlier this year found that half of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) use generative AI weekly or daily, roughly unchanged from a year earlier. But everything else in their survey moved: Excitement fell to 22 percent, down 14 points. Anger rose nine points to 31 percent. The share saying AI's risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace climbed from 37 percent to 48 percent and 80 percent said they worry about AI hindering their ability to learn. While familiarity with new technologies has often been the path to acceptance, with AI and young people, it's producing hostility.
Those views are already hardening into policy preferences. In an August poll of adults aged 18 to 34 published by CNBC/Generation Labs, 60 percent said data center construction should slow down, 40 percent said the government should regulate AI and 45 percent expected AI to hurt their own careers. Millennials view the issue of AI differently from their Gen Z peers. In the Pew survey, 48 percent of adults under 30 said they expect AI to have a negative effect on society, compared with 39 percent of those aged 30 to 49, even though both groups use chatbots at similar rates.
Author and generational futurist Ryan Vet attributes part of this split to the way millennials experienced quick changes. They saw flip phones evolve into smart phones and witnessed social media eat the world. The technological evolution Gen Z has witnessed is the iPhone becoming a slightly better iPhone.
AI is outpacing those older technological shifts in terms of evolution and adoption—it took years for more than half of U.S. adults to adopt social media, while it took ChatGPT just two months to accountability because the plan needs to be a combination of the public and the private sector."
It will be a while before a significant bloc of Gen Z is walking the halls of Congress, with the average age of a House or Senate member around 60 years old and millennials currently accounting for about 15 percent of Congress. But Gen Z will become a rising share of voters. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagements at Tufts University, nearly 49 million young people aged 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterms, 8 million more Gen Z voters than were eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
According to a report from Brookings this summer, “the evidence suggests that Gen Z’s reservations about AI are more than superficial or based on public narratives.” Earning Gen Z’s trust in AI will require specific protective policies, not voluntary pledges from tech companies.
The trajectory of Facebook is instructive here: In the 2010s, Facebook was going to change the world, improve education, rally political support for change and shatter loneliness. Today, schools are banning iPhones, governments are issuing age restrictions for social media and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta reached a \$17 billion settlement in a suit alleging it was selling kids an addictive product that harmed their mental health.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are probably going to be the pressure testers or victims of this first, and then I think it's going to be a minute before they are the decision-makers,” Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, told Newsweek. “It takes a number of years to get into a place where you feel like running for a political office that has the capacity to regulate this happens.”
The National Center for Youth Law in 2024 called for an up-to-date policy to govern AI, but also for lawmakers to listen and learn from the “most tech-involved generation” because “never before in all of human history have the sleek threads of technology been
reach over 100 million users—but with less clarity of where the transformation is headed. Vet calls this a velocity gap: "Technology is accelerating faster than human wisdom can keep up."
"[Gen Z] have grown up in a world where content is just prolific everywhere and being constantly generated, and so they're already in the mindset of 'verify then trust,'" Vet said. "And I think the previous generations were in [the mindset] 'trust but verify.'"
And they are not giving AI providers any benefit of the doubt. In the CNBC/Generation Labs poll, 69 percent said they don't trust OpenAI's Sam Alt-
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"IT'S NOT THAT YOUNG PEOPLE AREN'T USING AI... THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE LONGER AND MORE THEY USE IT, THE LESS THEY LIKE IT."
man, 70 percent said the same of Elon Musk and 71 percent of Mark Zuckerberg.
“AI leaders need to take accountability for the fact that their technology is really disrupting everything, and they don’t have a plan,” Bhasin said. “But I think the government also needs to take so tightly woven into the tender fabric of a child's daily existence."
Looking ahead, Guggenberger said this all points to a trend in the U.S. toward more regulation of AI. That might come through localized policies on data center construction, restrictions on use for minors and labor protections.
“We have seen people that are underrepresented in the formal halls of politics express their views and exert influence through other channels, through civil society or just through spontaneous organization,” Guggenberger said. “One shouldn’t discount
those avenues of influence."
Lawmakers are writing the first rules for a technology whose politics have not stopped moving, for people who will have to live with the results of those rules long after their terms in office have expired.
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NO PARTY LINES HERE
Each dot on this map is a U.S. House district, shaded by its representative's overall score on Newsweek's AI Policy Scorecard. Skeptics and Boosters share states, regions and sometimes neighboring districts
● ● ● ●
KEY
Skeptic
Lean Skeptic
Mixed
Lean Booster
Booster
REP. GABE EVANS (CO-08) 3.4 LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican in this suburban Denver district has been touting his authoring of the Ratepayer Protection Act as a signature accomplishment: a bill aimed to prevent increased consumer energy costs tied to data center development. His opponent, progressive state Rep. Manny Rutinel, has been outspoken regarding AI regulation and has aired ads trumpeting Evans' support for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included tax breaks that benefited data center operators.
REP. VICENTE GONZALEZ (TX-34)
2.9
MIXED
The incumbent Democrat was a victim of Governor Greg Abbott's redistricting push, giving a leg up to his Republican challenger, military veteran Eric Flores. But amidst a brewing data center backlash in the Lone Star State, Gonzalez has turned the issue on Abbott, calling him “the biggest flip-flopper in America” to pull off the improbable and save his seat.
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REP. MARCY KAPTUR (OH-9)
3.0 MIXED
The 22-term incumbent Democrat has defied political odds by winning her red district near Toledo election after election. She's going after her latest Republican challenger, state Rep. Derek Merrin, for backing data center tax incentives in a 2017 legislative vote, long before AI emerged as a political issue.
REP. RYAN MACKENZIE
(PA-7)
LEAN BOOSTER
The Republican's Allentown district is a top Democratic target, and his opponent Bob Brooks, a former firefighter, boasts the credentials to flip this blue-collar area. With local opposition to a Lehigh Valley data-center complex and Governor Josh Shapiro's executive order restricting data center permitting, Mackenzie has backtracked from his previous votes in favor of tax breaks to data centers and is now campaigning on holding them to account.
REP. MIKE LAWLER
(NY-17)
MIXED
The Republican, whose district in New York's lower Hudson Valley voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, put out an ad tying his Democratic challenger Cait Conley to data centers and the AI industry and asked whether she supports a data center moratorium. Conley fired back that she already backed such a pause and pointed to Lawler's comments that the moratorium sent a message to businesses to stay out of New York state.
TIERNEY L. CROSS/GETTY; JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY; ROBERTO SCHMIDT/GETTY; JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY; ALEX WONG/GETTY
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World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026
Buyer
Beware
Online reviews can help shoppers, but they don't always tell the whole story
BY CHARLOTTE GRAINGER
READ MORE
Scan the QR code for the full ranking
hoppers today have more choice than any prior generation, all at their fingertips. Type a size and style, and thousands of results appear in seconds—a far cry from walking into a store with a curated inventory.
To help shoppers sort through the search results, Google and shopping websites put product reviews front and center. A dishwasher that earns a three-star rating averaged by 781 reviews is shown next to those that earn five stars based on three reviews.
But can you really trust those reviews?
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The Trouble With 'Real' Reviews
Consumer survey data from Kinsta found that more than 70 percent of shoppers have suspected a product review was fake or AI-generated. That skepticism exists even as the star rating, review count and comment stream keep signaling trust the way they always have.
While shoppers may doubt what they're reading, they often buy anyway. Star Kashman, founding partner at Cyber Law Firm, warns consumers to be more choosy about which reviews to trust.
“Fake and incentivized reviews do not affect consumer trust as much as it likely should,” Kashman told Newsweek. “On marketplaces like Amazon where purchases can be cheap, impulsive and rapid, consumers can see a 4.8-star rating with thousands of reviews and make a decision to trust that product in seconds without investigating” their source.
Understanding the prevalence of fake or bought reviews matters, too. Beyond the odd AI-generated post, some retailers may be actively misleading buyers with an avalanche of fake reviews. Rebecca Wang, associate professor of marketing at Lehigh University, names the risk hiding in plain sight. “A fabricated review, one bought from a review farm where a seller can purchase hundreds or even thousands of glowing reviews, is obviously a serious, unethical and even illegal issue,” Wang told Newsweek.
“But even genuine reviews can become systematically skewed depending on how companies solicit them.”
What You Don't See Decides What You Buy
The order in which reviews show up can also impact how you view a product. While some platforms list reviews chronologically, others use algorithms based on shoppers' search and viewing history. "The problem with algorithmic ordering is that most consumers are not going to read five pages of reviews," Kashman explained. "If the first reviews they encounter are overwhelmingly positive, while newer complaints about defects or safety issues present in a new batch of lower quality product are buried deeper, consumers will walk away with a distorted impression of the product."
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How To Trust a Review
But don't give up on reviews altogether. Kashman advises, slow down before hitting "buy."
“Shoppers should not blindly trust online reviews,” Kashman said. “They should be checking multiple resources, doing their research, understanding the review platform’s vetting process and reliability.” She also recommends sorting reviews to see both positive and negative posts.
“Reviews are incredibly useful,” Wang added. “But consumers should look beyond the stars, the words and the pictures. Believe the reviews, but pay attention to the context.”
Siemens
Methodology
n the corporate world, maintaining trust among customers, employees and investors is paramount for success in a competitive
landscape. The World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026 ranking aims to highlight the companies that are most trusted in the 20 target countries included in this study. Trust can have several characteristics and be viewed from different perspectives. Recognizing this, Newsweek and Statista developed a methodology which takes several aspects into account.
The Most Trustworthy Companies were selected based on a holistic approach. The three primary pillars of trust we considered in our evaluation: customer trust, investor trust and employee trust.
The analysis followed a three-step process: 1. Scope: All stock-listed companies headquartered in one of the target countries with a revenue of over \$500 million were considered in the longlist of the project.
2. Extensive survey: The basis of the analysis was an independent survey from a sample of more than 65,000 participants from the target countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States). The participants rated companies they knew and that were headquartered in the respective country in terms of the three dimensions of trust. A total of 200,000 company evaluations were submitted.
3. Social Listening: For each company that received a sufficient number of evaluations, a social listening analysis was conducted. This involved researching what was said about a company across various media segments to determine whether the public sentiment toward a company was positive, neutral or negative. In total, over 320,000 mentions were gathered. Additionally, all companies that were involved in any recent scandals or lawsuits relevant to trust were excluded from the analysis.
The overall score was composed of 80 percent from the survey results and 20 percent from social listening analysis.
The 1,000 companies with the highest score have been awarded as World's Most Trustworthy Companies 2026. The final list is categorized by industry, with the top 10 in each category appearing in print. The full list is available online.
Statista R is a world leader in the creation of company, brand and product rankings and top lists, based on comprehensive market research and data analysis: Statista R recognizes the best. With a team of over 100 expert analysts and in cooperation with more than 40 highprofile media brands across all continents, Statista R creates transparency for consumers and business decision-makers and helps companies build trust and recognition across a plethora of industries and product categories. Visit r.statista.com for further information about Statista R and our rankings.
Statista R is a division of Statista. The leading data and business intelligence portal provides an extensive collection of statistics, reports and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries. Find out more at statista.com.
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Appliances & Electronics
1 Samsung Electronics
SUWON, SOUTH KOREA
2 LG Electronics
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
3 Sony TOKYO
4 Siemens MUNICH
5 Hamilton Beach Brands
GLEN ALLEN, VA
6 Legrand
LIMOGES, FRANCE
7 Breville
ALEXANDRIA, AUSTRALIA
8 Canon TOKYO
9 Makita
ANJO, JAPAN
10 Panasonic
KADOMA, JAPAN
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Automotive & Components
1 Hyundai Motor
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
2 Harley-Davidson
MILWAUKEE
3 Toyota Motor
TOYOTA, JAPAN
4 Tata Motors
MUMBAI, INDIA
5 Brembo
BERGAMO, ITALY
6 BRP
VALCOURT, CANADA
7 Ferrari
MARANELLO, ITALY
8 Gentex
ZEELAND, MI
9 Porsche
STUTTGART, GERMANY
10 Goodyear
AKRON, OH
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Banks
1 DBS
SINGAPORE
2 Itaú
SAO PAULO
3 ICICI Bank MUMBAI, INDIA
4 SBI Shinsei Bank
TOKYO
5 Standard Chartered
LONDON
6 Bank BCA
JAKARTA, INDONESIA
7 Bank of Hawaii
HONOLULU
8 State Bank of India (SBI)
MUMBAI, INDIA
9 Nubank
SAO PAULO
10 Lloyds
LONDON
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Business & Professional Services
1 Tata Technologies
PUNE, INDIA
2 IDP
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
3 SIA Engineering Company
SINGAPORE
4 Infosys
BENGALURU, INDIA
WORLD'S MOST TRUSTWORTHY COMPANIES 2026
Newsweek
statista
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ZOOMING AHEAD
Ferrari said it expects to bring in about \$8.7 billion (7.6 billion euros) in revenue in 2026.
5 ADT
BOCA RATON, FL
6 Wipro
BENGALURU, INDIA
7 GoodRx
SANTA MONICA, CA
8 Diploma PLC
LONDON
9 YouGov LONDON
10 Target Hospitality
THE WOODLANDS, TX
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Global Focus
CANADA & UNITED KINGDOM
The United States accounts for the largest share of companies, though its count declined from 378 to 346, while Japan, India, Canada and the United Kingdom remain strongly represented.
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Conglomerate | 1 | Samsung C&TSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | SK Inc.SEOL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | HanwhaSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | FujifilmTOKYO | 5 | Reliance IndustriesMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Astra InternationalJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 7 | Hankyu HanshinIKEDA, JAPAN | 8 | ItaúsaSÃO PAULO | 9 | WesfarmersPERTH, AUSTRALIA | 10 Hitachi TOKYO
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Construction & Building Materials | 1 | TotoKITAKYUSHU, JAPAN | 2 | SIGJAKARTA, INDONESIA | 3 | Galliford TryUXBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM | 4 | GeberitJONA, SWITZERLAND | 5 | Saint-GobainCOURBEVOIE, FRANCE | 6 | TrexWINCHESTER, VA | 7 | LX HausysSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 8 | North American ConstructionACHESON, CANADA | 9 | BRCK GroupBRACKNELL, UNITED KINGDOM | 10 RVNL
NEW DELHI
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Consumer Goods
1 The Clorox Company
OAKLAND, CA
2 Energizer
ST. LOUIS
3 FILA
PERO, ITALY
4 e.l.f. Beauty
OAKLAND, CA
5 L'Oréal
CLICHY, FRANCE
6 Jamieson Wellness Inc.
TORONTO
7 YETI
AUSTIN, TX
8 Hasbro PAWTUCKET, RI
9 Princes
LIVERPOOL, UNITED KINGDOM
10 Procter & Gamble
CINCINNATI
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Energy & Utilities
1 Tata Power MUMBAI, INDIA
2 ONGC
NEW DELHI
| 3 | Siemens EnergyMUNICH | 4 | Enterprise Products PartnersHOUSTON | 5 | Canadian SolarKITCHENER, CANADA | 6 | Georgia PowerATLANTA | 7 | Canadian NaturalCALGARY, CANADA | 8 | PembinaCALGARY, CANADA | 9 | American StatesWater CompanySAN DIMAS, CA | 10 | Engie BrasilFLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL |
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Financial Services & Investment | 1 | Nationwide Building SocietySWINDON, UNITED KINGDOM | 2 | ChallengerSYDNEY | 3 | T. Rowe PriceBALTIMORE | 4 | ComputershareABBOTSFORD, AUSTRALIA | 5 | QuilterLONDON | 6 | DeluxeMINNEAPOLIS | 7 | B3SAO PAULO | 8 | SGXSINGAPORE | 9 | AllfundsLONDON | 10 | WiseLONDON | Stanley Black & Decker | 5 | KrogerCINCINNATI | 6 | Sainsbury'sLONDON | 7 | FamilyMartTAIPEI, TAIWAN | 8 | Grocery OutletEMERYVILLE, CA | 9 | Casey'sANKENY, IA | 10 | Sprouts Farmers MarketPHOENIX |
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Food & Beverage | 1 | The Campbell's CompanyCAMDEN, NJ | 2 | General MillsMINNEAPOLIS | 3 | OtokiANYANG, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | HersheyHERSHEY, PA | 5 | J.M. Smucker CompanyORRVILLE, OH | 6 | Grupo BimboMEXICO CITY | 7 | Nissin FoodsTOKYO | 8 | Keurig Dr PepperBURLINGTON, MA | 9 | Nisshin Seifun GroupTOKYO | 10 | SuntoryTOKYO |
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Grocery & Convenience Stores | 1 | TescoWELWYN GARDEN CITY, UNITED KINGDOM | 2 | Natural GrocersLAKEWOOD, CO | 3 | InglesBLACK MOUNTAIN, NC | 4 | Sheng SiongSINGAPORE |
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Health Care & Life Sciences
1 Cochlear
SYDNEY
4 Carl Zeiss Meditec
JENA, GERMANY
5 Siemens Healthineers FORCHHEIM, GERMANY
6 ICU Medical
SAN CLEMENTE, CA
7 American Oncology Network
FORT MYERS, FL
8 Rovi MADRID
9 GE HealthCare
CHICAGO
10 Bio-Rad
HERCULES, CA
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Insurance
1 Porto
SAO PAULO | 2 | Samsung Life InsuranceSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 3 | BeazleyLONDON | 4 | COFACEBOIS-COLOMBES, FRANCE | 5 | HDFC LifeMUMBAI, INDIA | 6 | Globe LifeMCKINNEY, TX | 7 | Central ReTAIPEI, TAIWAN | 8 | LemonadeNEW YORK CITY | 9 | SBI LifeMUMBAI, INDIA | 10 | CAIXA SeguridadeBRASILIA, BRAZIL |
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Machines & Industrial Equipment
1 WEG
JARAGUÁ DO SUL, BRAZIL
2 Rolls-Royce
LONDON
3 Thales
MEUDON, FRANCE
4 Rockwell Automation
MILWAUKEE
5 Embraer
SAO PAULO
6 Stanley Black & Decker
NEW BRITAIN, CT
WORLD'S MOST TRUSTWORTHY COMPANIES 2026
FORGING AHEAD
Stanley Black & Decker is putting \$1 billion into building better tools by 2028, split evenly between research and U.S. production.
10 Graco
MINNEAPOLIS
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Materials & Chemicals |
Materials & Chemicals | 1 | LindeWOKING, UNITED KINGDOM | 2 | Sherwin-WilliamsCLEVELAND | 3 | PoongsanSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 4 | Hyundai Heavy IndustriesULSAN, SOUTH KOREA | 5 | NutrienSASKATOON, CANADA | 6 | Royal GoldDENVER | 7 | WD-40 CompanySAN DIEGO | 8 | Air LiquidePARIS | 9 | GerdauSAO PAULO |
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Media & Entertainment | 1 | NintendoKYOTO, JAPAN | 2 | PearsonLONDON | 3 | ScholasticNEW YORK CITY | 4 | Bandai NamcoTOKYO | 5 | CapcomOSAKA, JAPAN | 6 | iHeartMediaSAN ANTONIO | 7 | RokuSAN JOSE, CA | 8 | Formula 1ENGLEWOOD, CO | 9 | MondadoriSEGRATE, ITALY |
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Real Estate & Housing | 1 | GoodmanROSEBERY, AUSTRALIA | 2 | Alexandria Real Estate EquitiesPASADENA, CA | 3 | Singapore LandSINGAPORE | 4 | CAPREITTORONTO | 5 | Apple Hospitality REITRICHMOND, VA | 6 | MERLIN PropertiesMADRID | 7 | SavillsLONDON | 8 | Champion Homes IncTROY, MI | 9 | British LandLONDON | 10 | American Healthcare REITIRVINE, CA | Retail | 1 | Academy Sports and OutdoorsKATY, TX | 2 | Tractor SupplyBRENTWOOD, TN | 3 | ChewyPLANTATION, FL | 4 | DunelmSYSTON, UNITED KINGDOM |
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WELL-TAILORED
Marks & Spencer operates in over 70 international markets, with more than 380 stores, bringing its business to over 400 million customers globally.
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Industry Leaders
Food & Beverage remains the most represented industry with 88 companies (up from 86 in 2025), followed by Energy & Utilities with 72 companies, and Retail and Materials & Chemicals with 63 each. | 5 | Ulta BeautyBOLINGBROOK, IL | 6 | Pets at HomeHANDFORTH, UNITED KINGDOM | 7 | CostcoISSAQUAH, WA | 8 | Lowe'sMOORESVILLE, NC | 9 | Autosports GroupLEICHHARDT, AUSTRALIA | 10 | M&SLONDON |
Software & Telecommunications | 1 | Samsung SDSSEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | 2 | IBMARMONK, NY | 3 | GammaLONDON | 4 | RakutenSETAGAYA, JAPAN | 5 | Palo Alto NetworksSANTA CLARA, CA | 6 | SAPWALLDORF, GERMANY | 7 | TCSMUMBAI, INDIA | 8 | NaverSEONGNAM, SOUTH KOREA | 9 | VeriSignRESTON, VA | 10 | 3DSVELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, FRANCE |
The Swan promised women a golden ticket in the early days of reality TV. Erin Lee Carr's new documentary reveals the fine print they never saw
BY
H. ALAN SCOTT
THE EARLY DAYS OF REALITY TELEVISION WERE THE WILD West. Regular people across the United States signed up for unknown experiences. From castaways on Survivor to aspiring supermodels on America's Next Top Model, thousands auditioned to be part of something brand new. And in 2004, thousands of women applied for a Fox show that promised to turn “ugly ducklings” into manufactured beauties. It was called The Swan.
Now, a new Hulu documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror, examines what the show did to the women who lived it. Director Erin Lee Carr, who as a teen viewer “felt fairly ugly on the outside,” bought the pitch for the reality series until the cracks started to show.
"It [The Swan] became what was supposed to be about female empowerment, then moved into this slow-moving car crash of how much can we do to these women," Carr told Newsweek's Parting Shot podcast. "To subject them to a transformation that we want for them versus of their own choice."
Over three months, contestants were cut off from friends and family while undergoing intense cosmetic surgery and fitness regimens. Carr calls it “a literal Willy Wonka golden ticket.” The catch? Most of them had no idea what was waiting at the end.
"When they signed people up for [The Swan], they didn't know about the pageant," Carr said. "So, 'Oh, you're gonna transform my life, amazing, great. Wait, part of that ticket is that I have to get in public in my lingerie that you picked for me?"
Even the crown came with fine print. Carr said the season 2 winner was handed a haul of prizes, including a necklace billed at \$100,000 that was actually worth about \$30,000, and was then asked to pay taxes on every item at full sticker value.
“Imagine you win. You won it all, you did it,” Carr said. “And then they’re like, ‘Here’s your prizes,’ and you can’t afford them because you have to pay taxes on it.”
Critics hated it, but 9 million viewers a season tuned in anyway. So was it ever feminist? “The answer is no,” Carr said.
"There was so much judgment about why the women participated, and then all of us collectively judged them about their reveal and had they done the work," she said. "So it was about unlearning all that, and then, how do I make a documentary that doesn't just re-injure everyone who was exploited in television?"
Fox canceled The Swan after two seasons, but nothing really changed. From the Kardashians to Real Housewives, women getting things pulled and plucked on camera is more popular than ever.
“I can’t stand to not point out my own hypocrisy,” she said. “We live in the world that The Swan built, in ways that we like to have outrage about and then comply with.”
Carr's final documentary interview question was the most surprising. She asked every woman if she'd do it again.
“I expected everybody to be like, ‘Hell no,’ in different tones,” Carr said. “And every single interview[ee] said, ‘I would do it again.’”
Why?
“They found each other,” she said. “For one of the first times in their life, they felt special and chosen because it was drilled into their head by Nely [Galán, the show’s creator], by producers, by Fox. ‘You were picked out of 200,000 women. We chose you.’ And what is more uniquely satisfying than feeling chosen? It is the American dream.”
H. Alan Scott is a Newsweek senior editor and host of The Parting Shot podcast. Follow them everywhere @HAlanScott
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The Tale That Lingers
A new podcast explores why a debunked myth persists
-
From the Poltergeist curse to the Munchkin who supposedly died by suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz, Hollywood is built on urban legends. But no legend has been snickered about more than the one involving Richard Gere and a gerbil.
Yes, a gerbil.
(This is a respectable magazine, so let's just say that in this legend, which has no basis in fact, Gere and the gerbil got to know each other very well at some point in the 1970s or '80s.)
Gerbil, a new 12-episode investigative podcast from The
Hollywood Reporter's Allen Salkin, digs into where the rumor came from and why it refuses to die.
“Many, many people heard this,” Salkin tells Newsweek. “And the rumor has never died. I’m very skeptical that it’s true. It’s also an investigation of why. What can we learn from the durability of this rumor?”
Gere has only referenced the rumor in passing. But as Salkin points out, Gere's silence may be exactly what's kept this thing running on its wheel. "Crisis communications PR was not in the '80s what it is now," Salkin says. "There's almost a playbook now, and ignoring it is not usually a good idea."
It may also have something to do with Gere's reputation. "Richard Gere is a wonderful humanitarian," Salkin says. "Much to be admired, and I admire him. But when he was young, he was a d\*\*\*."
As for who started it, Salkin won't say. That answer arrives in episode 12. But the rumor about that rumor has long pointed to Sylvester Stallone, briefly Gere's co-star in 1974's The Lords of Flatbush. Stallone told Ain't It Cool News in 2006 that Gere was fired from the film after clashing with him.
Salkin says he's “very skeptical” that it was just one person who started the rumor, “like Sylvester Stallone,” he says. “I really do think I know the answer.”
However it started, thanks to Gerbil, this rumor isn't burrowing away anytime soon. —H. Alan Scott
Trixie Mattel picks up Elvira's mantle as TV abandons Halloween
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Be Afraid. Very Afraid
-
Remember when October meant Halloween episodes of your favorite sitcoms? When Elvira popped up hosting every spooky special on TV? When artists put out Halloween music? These days you'd be hard-pressed to find any of it, and you can largely thank the slow death of network TV. But fear not. (Actually, in the spirit of the season, be very afraid.)
Network sitcoms used to air weekly, so writers had to reckon with a late October episode. That's how we got Halloween classics from The Office, Roseanne and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. When a streaming season drops all at once, no episode lands on Halloween, so nobody bothers dressing up for it.
It gets scarier. Elvira has all but hung up her beehive, leaving a Mistress of the Dark-sized void every fall. Enter Trixie Mattel.
The RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars winner just released “Till Death Do Us Part, a Halloween LP led by the single “Ghost on the Moon.” She’s also keeping up her tradition of a Halloween special on YouTube.
"It's a heartfelt marriage of spooky synths and acoustic love-strumming," Mattel said in a statement of the record.
TV may have abandoned Halloween, but at least someone is picking up the spooky mantle Elvira made famous. —H. Alan Scott
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ORLANE PARIS
EXTRAORDINAIRE.
YOUTH IS BACK.
firmer skin 97%
wrinkles fade 88%
moisturized skin 97%
ORLANE PARIS
B21
EXTRAORDINAIRE
RÉINITIALISATION JEUNESSE
YOUTH RESET
radiant skin 97%
PATENTED
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[Kainar-AKB] BUILDING ON 50 YEARS OF INDUSTRIAL EXPERTISE
By Frank Coldwell
Kazakhstan entered the second half of 2026 with one of Central Asia's strongest growth stories still intact. The International Monetary Fund said in June that "economic growth remains robust," supported by domestic demand, investment and high oil prices, and projects real GDP growth of about $4.6\%$ for the year. Manufacturing has also been a bright spot, with official data showing industrial activity continuing to expand
as the country looks beyond hydrocarbons and builds a broader production base.
Kazakhstan's automotive industry is also expanding rapidly, providing a strong domestic market for battery and component manufacturers. In January–July 2026, the country produced 111,115 vehicles and other automotive equipment, up 33.3% from the same period a year earlier, according to the Kazakhstan Automobile Union, citing the Bureau of National Statistics. Automotive manufacturing now accounts for 40.5% of Kazakhstan's mechanical-engineering sector. With new vehicle plants, greater localization and a growing requirement for locally made components, the environment is creating new opportunities for established industrial suppliers.
Few companies reflect Kazakhstan's industrial evolution as clearly as Kainar-AKB, one of Central Asia's leading automotive battery manufacturer. The Taldykorgan-based battery producer traces its history to 1976, when the plant began production and Chief Executive Officer Yerbol Azhmagambetov's father joined the newly launched operation as a young process engineer. He later became director and ran one of the country's most successful privatization processes. From output of roughly 300,000 batteries a year in 2001, Kainar-AKB has grown to an installed annual capacity of around four million batteries, with current production of about three million depending on demand. In the early 2000s, the 22-hectare industrial business was valued at only about \$300,000; by 2008, it had secured roughly \$35 million in financing.
Kainar-AKB's business model perfectly reflects the full cycle manufacturer: the company produces starter batteries for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and agricultural machinery, manufactures its own plastic battery cases, and operates a recycling business that recovers lead and plastic from used batteries while neutralizing electrolyte. Its plastics operation alone can produce between 4.5 million and five million cases annually. Recovered lead can return to battery production, while recycled plastic can be reused internally or supplied elsewhere, giving Kainar-AKB greater control over inputs while turning used products back into industrial raw material.
Much of the company's scaling took place as it invested heavily in modernization. The CEO sees those years as the period that defined what the company Kainar-AKB became today. "We effectively transformed a Soviet-era plant into a modern industrial facility operating according to international standards. We used that period to lay the foundations for the company we have today," says Azhmagambetov. That combination of long industrial experience and modernized production remains one of the company's defining strengths.
The next phase of growth is increasingly industrial. Kainar-AKB already supplies batteries for railway and telecommunications applications and is expanding toward backup-power solutions for banks, data centres, oil and gas companies, metallurgical groups and other infrastructure users across Central Asia. It is here where the CEO sees smart partnership opportunities. "A Western company could bring technology and experience to Kazakhstan, while we could contribute our manufacturing capabilities, knowledge of the regional market and local industrial expertise. Each side would have something meaningful to offer the other," Azhmagambetov says. The company is also studying lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies as it considers future opportunities in electric mobility and energy storage.
For Azhmagambetov, the wider case for cooperation begins with the country itself. "Kazakhstan can give new momentum to an investor. A project here may not always generate enormous profits immediately, but it can offer knowledge, experience and a different perspective, all of which can culminate in significant long term gains. Our country has many success stories and interesting business cases from which international investors can learn."
Exports are already central to Kainar-AKB's business, accounting for roughly 60–70% of revenue. Its principal markets remain in the post-Soviet region, but the company has also explored opportunities in Europe and the Middle East, including Dubai. Traditional routes into markets such as Poland, Germany and Italy have become more complicated, increasing the importance of alternative corridors and regional hubs. Geography can make logistics difficult for a landlocked exporter, yet it also places Kazakhstan between China, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and the Middle East. Expanding that reach will depend on new routes, commercial relationships and partners able to open additional markets.
As Kainar-AKB marks its 50th anniversary, the company is looking beyond its traditional automotive base toward industrial batteries, energy storage, new export markets and international technology partnerships. Its five decades of manufacturing experience provide a strong foundation for that next stage, while its position in Kazakhstan gives potential partners access to local production capabilities and knowledge of the wider Central Asian market. "We are willing to help international leaders and major companies bring their values, achievements and technologies to Kazakhstan and, through cooperation, to other markets as well," says Azhmagambetov. For Kainar-AKB, the opportunity ahead is not simply to sell more batteries, but to become a stronger industrial partner connecting international expertise with Kazakhstan's growing manufacturing base.
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THE REGISTER
MUSIC
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CLEF NOTES
WHAT'S ON OUR RADAR
THIS WEEK
Grammy-winning artist and producer Wyclef Jean is going back to his roots with his first jazz album, Q Theory. Blending Caribbean, Latin American, African and Middle Eastern influences, the Fugees member also draws on Haiti's traditional rara street music. Songs like "Lady Havana" and "Sugarcane & Watermelon"
feel like sipping a cold rum punch on the beach.
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[COMEDY] COLD OPEN
Is it just me, or does it feel like Saturday Night Live has been gone forever? Thankfully, SNL returns for its 52nd season with a fresh, timely slate of hosts. Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson kicks things off as a first-time host, followed by returning favorites Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis, then Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette. And with the midterms around the corner, we need SNL back on our screens now more than ever.
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"I'LL COME BACK IF I CAN DO ALL FOUR CHARACTERS."
JESSICA LANGE
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[TELEVISION] SCREAM TEAM
Leave it to Ryan Murphy to turn American Horror Story into his very own all-stars season. Season 13 brings back icons Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett and Sarah Paulson. On Live With Kelly and Mark, Lange gave one condition: "I'll come back if I can do all four characters." Naturally, Murphy obliged. And according to Lange, "everybody is a returning character, pretty much." Frankly, I'm screaming.
Frankly, I'm screaming.
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[CELEBRITY] PETTY POSTER
Are celebrities just as messy as us? Fans speculate Channing Tatum might be, after noticing the same Instagram account (“bidness\_nonya”) commenting in support of Tatum under posts about his ex Zoë Kravitz with her fiancé Harry Styles. Tatum denied the rumors that he was running a burner account, but some fans were happy to give props to a fellow petty poster.
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[MUSEUMS] OUR FAVORITE THINGS
Salzburg, Austria, is alive with the sound of music. And now the city has opened its first-ever museum
starring Julie Andrews. At Hellbrunn Palace, fans can marvel at movie props, costumes and the iconic gazebo from “Sixteen Going
on Seventeen." The museum, which distinguishes between the film and the real-life von Trapp family, is guaranteed to be one of your favorite things on your next trip to Austria.
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A Century of Conviction — Grupo Poma
Grupo Poma has carried a century of Salvadoran enterprise across the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. A fourth generation carries it further, on one conviction: discipline builds what haste cannot.
BARTOLOMÉ POMA, WHO FOUNDED THE FAMILY'S AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS IN EL SALVADOR IN 1919.
Four Generations of Growth
The story began in 1919: Bartolomé Poma, a Spanish mechanic from Barcelona, founded an automotive business in El Salvador. It grew into one of Central America's most established family groups.
His son Luis Poma added Chevrolet and, in 1953, Toyota, making the family the automaker's first partner in the Americas, second worldwide after Taiwan. Then came workshops and spare parts; then industry, real estate and hospitality — the foundations of the group's businesses.
Luis's son Ricardo Poma led Grupo Poma for more than four decades, taking it across the Americas — deepening each business, adding global brands and forging long-term relationships, including one with Bain Capital, dating back to its earliest days.
Today the group operates five companies — Excel, Grupo Roble, Real Hotels & Resorts, Autofácil and Solaire — in 10 countries, with more than 12,000 employees. In a recent interview in El Salvador, Fernando Poma, a member of the fourth generation and Ricardo Poma's eldest son, said: "We have been around for 107 years in El Salvador, and now operate in 10 countries. We have a very long-term vision."
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Discipline Creates Scale
Grupo Poma's defining strategy is knowing where it can win — and declining everything else, however tempting. Diversification has meant geography: extending the same five businesses into new countries, where experience compounds — never into industries the family does not understand. The filter is exacting: enter only businesses that are predictable not one year out, but 10 or 20 years out; protect capital before chasing returns, because losing half means doubling just to recover. Profits go back into widening competitive advantages, not out the door. Execution belongs to what Poma calls “gente 10”: 10-out-of-10 talent, given direction and room to work.
“We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know,” Poma said. “We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.”
That aggression shows at Real Hotels & Resorts, where Poma has spent a quarter-century building partnerships with Choice Hotels International, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Hyatt: a Grand Hyatt underway in Panama City and the JW Marriott San Salvador rising at home will lift the portfolio — 24 hotels in 10 countries — to 26, and the group is constantly looking to expand. Excel, led by Andrés Poma, Fernando's brother, is Central America's largest automotive company, with 19 brands and 42 franchises across five countries, from Toyota and Chevrolet to BMW, Nissan, Kia and Mitsubishi Motors. Grupo Roble's real estate platform, led by Alberto Poma, spans eight countries, with 20 shopping centers and 60,000-plus homes delivered, alongside corporate and mixed-use developments.
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Investing in People
The long horizon extends beyond business — education, health, opportunity.
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«We have a very clear strategic discipline to know what we know and know what we do not know. We are very aggressive if we find opportunities within our core competence.»
FERNANDO POMA
ESEN, the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios, is a university founded in 1993 so that financial circumstances never keep a capable student from a first-rate education. Two in three students receive financial aid; more than 2,600 professionals have graduated.
The Salvadoran American Humanitarian Foundation (SAHF), established in Miami by Luis Poma in 1983, has channeled more than \$900 million in aid to El Salvador. FUSAL, the family's own foundation on the ground, now led by Alejandro Poma, advances child nutrition and early development in its most vulnerable communities.
Fundación Renacer has given more than 450 abandoned young adults hands-on training in fields matched to their interests, followed by a job at a participating company.
“We don’t train them to get a job; we guarantee them a job,” Fernando Poma said. “Our ultimate goal is to improve the lives of abandoned and vulnerable young adults through dig-
nified employment."
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Family as a Foundation
Behind the businesses lies another continuity — family unity. Across four generations, preserving harmony has mattered more than any single deal. That principle underpins orderly succession: six members of the fourth generation currently work across the group's companies, in different roles.
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Rooted at Home
Growth abroad has never diluted the family's Salvadoran identity. El Salvador remains the center of its commitment and giving.
“We love El Salvador. We’ve been here for 107 years,” Poma said. “We believe in the people of El Salvador.”
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Pride of Ownership
That conviction guides the next cycle of investment. “Our objective is not scale alone but differentiation — products and services with advantages durable enough to defend,” Poma explained. The family calls the standard “pride of ownership”: invest more than the market asks to build something unique. Success, Poma likes to say, demands a rare pairing: a dreamer and a doer at once.
After 107 years, the proposition remains what it was in that first workshop, now written across the Americas: build to last, and stay true to the country, people and values that built the enterprise.
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FREE PRESS, FREE PASS?
A White House media ban makes great headlines. Quieter constraints on press freedom rarely do
BY
CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS
YET ANOTHER NEWSWEEK READER, ROBYN T. ELLIOTT, IS FURIOUS WITH US. AFTER PRESIDENT DONALD Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, Elliott wrote that it was
“shameful that you agree with the censoring of the fourth pillar of democracy,” adding that if Newsweek didn’t believe in press freedom, perhaps we should “rebrand as entertainment news.” Ouch.
Yet our article hadn't agreed with Trump. We reported what he did, quoted his critics and defenders, and let readers judge via our Fairness Meter. Seventy-two percent said the article was fair, 9 percent left-leaning and 19 percent right-leaning. Still, Elliott's email raises a question worth applying rather
more widely. Trump's attack on the press is easy to see. A correspondent arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and a guard says their badge no longer works. The president has made the reason clear, announcing that their employer is being excluded for its “FAKE NEWS” reporting.
Other presidents have preferred paperwork. President Barack Obama's administration brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight alleged leakers of classified information, compared with three under all previous administrations combined, per the Committee to Protect Journalists. His Justice Department also secretly seized two months of records from more than 20 Associated Press phone lines used by more than 100 journalists.
Trump's first administration did the same. His Justice Department secretly obtained phone records for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times reporters while probing leaks. President Joe Biden's prohibited compulsory demands for journalists' records, with limited exceptions. Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed that in 2025, letting the government seek reporters' records and testimony to identify leakers. This year, the department issued, then withdrew, subpoenas to
Wall Street Journal, Post and Times journalists. But the White House ban is just the tip of the iceberg. The federal FOIA backlog grew from 115,080 requests in 2016 to 339,671 in 2025. Requests also surged, so the backlog cannot be pinned on one president. But it illustrates the point quite well. A confiscated badge makes good TV. A delayed FOIA request does not.
If press freedom is the principle, the test cannot be whether we like the president when they restrict it. George Washington detested newspaper attacks, Abraham Lincoln suppressed the press during the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt popularized “muckraker” to describe journalists and Richard Nixon called
the press “the enemy.” That’s part of the deal. So is keeping the front door open for the Fourth Estate, and not putting up barriers round the back.
Christopher Roberts is Newsweek's vice president, publishing & subscriber strategy. Email him at c.roberts@newsweek.com
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Build a better tomorrow with Aurigo Masterworks Cloud
BUILD FASTER | BUILD SMARTER | BUILD STRONGER
Aurigo Masterworks, the leading capital planning and construction project management software, empowers America to build smarter for tomorrow. Easy to use and configure, it's the power at your fingertips that helps you plan, build and maintain your community's infrastructure and facilities.
