An innovative and potentially impactful new device can turn air into drinkable water, even in the driest climates.
The tool, which comes from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could be a huge step toward making safe drinking water worldwide a reality. The lack thereof impacts 2.2 billion people, per a study on the invention, which was recently published in the journal Nature Water.
The device was developed by Professor Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, and his colleagues. According to the study, the contraption is made from hydrogel, a material that absorbs water, and lithium salts that can store water molecules. The substance is enclosed between two layers of glass, and at night it pulls water vapor from the atmosphere. During the day, the water condenses and drips into tubes.
It is about the size of a standard window, but even in environments that are hot and dry, its able to capture water. Zhao’s team tested the tool in the driest environment in the U.S.Death Valley, California. Even in the ultradry conditions, the tool was able to capture 160 milliliters of water per day (about two-thirds of a cup).The success of the model has the scientists thinking on a bigger scale. We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible, says Zhao, per MIT News. He continued: Its a test of feasibility in scaling up this water-harvesting technology. Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact.
The new design addresses several issues that past similar devices have come up against. It’s better at absorbing water than metal-organic frameworks that can also capture water from air. The new design, which has a sophisticated composition and added materials, is also better at limiting salt leakage. During the experiment, that meant that the water collected met criteria for safe drinking water.
We imagine that you could one day deploy an array of these panels, and the footprint is very small because they are all vertical, Zhao says. Then you could have many panels together, collecting water all the time, at household scale.
Two key U.S. Republican senators agreed to a revised federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence to five years and to allow states to adopt rules on child online safety and protecting artists’ images or likelinesses.
Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz originally proposed securing compliance by blocking states that regulate AI from a $42 billion broadband infrastructure fund as part of a broad tax and budget bill.
A revised version released last week would only restrict states regulating AI from tapping a new $500 million fund to support AI infrastructure.
Under a compromise announced Sunday by Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a critic of the state AI regulatory moratorium, the proposed 10-year moratorium would be cut to five years and allow states to regulate issues like protecting artists’ voices or child online safety if they do not impose an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI.
Tennessee passed a law last year dubbed the ELVIS Act to protect songwriters and performers from the use of AI to make unauthorized fake works in the image and voice of well-known artists. Texas approved legislation to bar AI use for the creation of child pornography or to encourage a person to commit physical self-harm or commit crime.
It is not clear if the change will be enough to assuage concerns. On Friday, 17 Republican governors urged the Senate to drop the AI plan.
“We cannot support a provision that takes away states powers to protect our citizens. Let states function as the laboratories of democracy they were intended to be and allow state leaders to protect our people,” said the governors, led by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick voiced his support for the revised measure, calling it a pragmatic compromise. “Congress should stand by the Cruz provision to keep America First in AI,” Lutnick wrote on X.
Congress has failed for years to pass any meaningful AI regulations or safety measures.
Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, said the Blackburn-Cruz amendment “does nothing to protect kids or consumers. It’s just another giveaway to tech companies.” Cantwell said Lutnick could simply opt to strip states of internet funding if they did not agree to the moratorium.
By David Shepardson, Reuters
U.S. stocks are adding to their records on Monday as Wall Street nears the finish of a second straight winning month.
The S&P 500 was 0.3% higher in its first trading after completing a stunning rebound from its springtime sell-off of roughly 20%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 218 points, or 0.5%, as of 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% higher.
Stocks got a boost after Canada said its rescinding a planned tax on U.S. technology firms and resuming talks on trade with the United States. On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump had said he was suspending talks with Canada because of his anger with the tax, which he called a direct and blatant attack on our country.
One of the main reasons U.S. stocks came back so quickly from their springtime swoon has been the hope that Trump will reach deals with other countries to lower his stiffly proposed tariffs. Otherwise, the fear is that trade wars could stifle the economy and send inflation higher.
Many of Trump’s announced tariffs are currently on pause, and they’re scheduled to kick back into effect in a little more than a week.
In an interview with Fox News Channels Sunday Morning Futures, Trump said his administration will notify countries that the trade penalties will take effect unless there are deals with the United States. Letters will start going out pretty soon before the approaching deadline, he said.
The U.S. stock market being back at a record high could raise the risk of renewed escalations on tariffs, according to strategists at Deutsche Bank led by Parag Thatte and Binky Chadha. They point to the pattern in 2018 and 2019 of rallies for the market prompting escalations for tariffs, which then drove market pullbacks followed by relents on tariffs that then sparked rallies again.
Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, this dynamic looks alive and well, the strategists wrote in a report. In our view, beyond the market reaction, if negative impacts of tariffs on growth, earnings or inflation start to materialize, we will get further relents.
On Wall Street, Oracle’s 4.8% rise was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500. CEO Safra Catz said the tech giant is off to a strong start in its fiscal year and that it signed multiple large cloud services agreements, including one that could contribute over $30 billion in annual revenue two fiscal years from now.
Bank stocks were also strong after the Federal Reserve said on Friday that they are financially strong enough to survive a downturn in the economy. JPMorgan Chase climbed 1.8%, Wells Fargo rose 1.5% and Citigroup gained 1.1%.
GMS stock jumped 11.8% after the supplier of specialty building products said it agreed to sell itself to a Home Depot subsidiary in a deal that would pay $110.00 per share in cash. That would give it a total value of roughly $5.5 billion, including debt.
Less than two weeks ago, another company, QXO, said it was offering to buy GMS for $95.20 per share in cash. After the announcement of the Home Depot bid, QXOs stock rose 2.2%, and Home Depots stock slipped 0.8%.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise rallied 13.7% and Juniper Networks climbed 8.4% after saying they had reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that could clear the way for their merger go through, subject to court approval. HPE is trying to buy Juniper in a $14 billion deal.
In the bond market, Treasury yields eased a bit ahead of major economic reports later in the week. The highlight will be Thursdays jobs report. Its often the most anticipated economic data of each month, and it will come a day earlier than usual because of the Fourth of July holiday.
The job market has remained relatively steady recently, even in the face of tariffs, but hiring has slowed. Economists expect Thursdays data to show another slowdown in overall hiring, down to 115,000 jobs in June from 139,000 in May.
Such data has kept the Federal Reserve on hold this year when it comes to interest rates. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said repeatedly that its waiting for more data to show how tariffs will affect the economy and inflation before resuming its cuts to interest rates. Thats because lower rates can fan inflation higher, along with giving the economy a boost.
Trump, meanwhile, has been pushing for more cuts to rates and for them to happen soon. Two of his appointees to the Fed have said recently they could consider cutting rates as soon as the Feds next meeting in less than a month.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.26% from 4.29% late Friday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes dipped modestly in Europe following a more mixed finish in Asia.
Stocks fell 0.9% in Hong Kong but rose 0.6% in Shanghai after China reported its factory activity improved slightly in June after Beijing and Washington agreed in May to postpone imposing higher tariffs on each others exports, though manufacturing remained in contraction.
Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
There isnt a single element that carried Zohran Mamdanis campaignexcept, well, for Mamdani himself. However, there was one campaign artifact that became ubiquitous on New York City streets in the months ahead of the mayoral primary: his campaign poster. Taped up on storefronts, in apartment windows, and around light posts, it was impossible to miss. The mix of colors (Metrocard yellow, Mets blue, and fire-engine red); Mamdanis affable portrait; and a hand-drawn wordmark with an exaggerated drop shadow that alighted his head like a crown stood out in the cacophonous cityscape (and bland arena of the competitions branding). Could a single-term assemblyperson ascend to the highest political office in the United States most-populous city? The poster sure made it easy to envision.
Mamdanis aesthetics, from his fashion to his video filters, are a master class in the communication required for a 21st-century campaign to be successful. His branding, by the Philadelphia-based design cooperative Forge, was nimbly applied to social media, mailers, and merch and brought cohesion to the multi-platform campaign without veering into corporate territory. And for all the new media associated with Mamdani, his poster, one of the oldest tools in a candidates kit, encapsulated the innovative messaging at the heart of his campaign: It was fresh, welcoming, and specificand set a new gold standard for progressive, political design.
The poster was designed by Tyler Evans, a designer based outside of Washington, D.C., who was Bernie Sanderss design director and, as of three months ago, became Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs creative director, and was the first widely circulated printed matter rooted in the visual identity that Forge created for the campaign. We spoke to Evans and Aneesh Bhoopathy, a creative at Forge, about what makes Mamdanis poster design so compelling.
[Photo: Tyler Evans]
Rooted In New York
The poster is based on the design system Bhoopathy and the team at Forge created. The identity is grounded in New Yorks iconography and typographic legacy, Bhoopathy says, and features a primary color palette that pulls from Metrocards, taxi cabs, and even the New York Lottery logo.
While design systems trace their roots to corporate branding, Mamdanis avoids feeling contrived or stiff. Bhoopathy hand-drew Mamdanis wordmark, a nostalgic nod to the once-ubiquitous hand-painted signs that adorned bodega storefronts, and specified Unique Gothic, a sans-serif typeface, for all other text as a way to balance out the playfulness so the identity doesn’t get too Barnum and Bailey, he says. The colors, lettering, and levity help Mamdanis branding feel relatable. The nostalgia, the human touchthat is obviously different from a more corporate brand, Bhoopathy says. Its just the feeling of it being for everyone.
[Photo: Zohran for New York City]
A Handmade Look
Before designing Mamdanis mayoral campaign, Bhoopathy designed graphics for his assembly run and has also worked with New York State Senators Julia Salazar and Jabari Brisport. These experiences taught him that the branding for progressive candidates is often memedlike the famous Hot Girls for Zohran shirtswhich he welcomes.
One thing about working in leftist campaigns is knowing that people are going to remix, screen print, and make their own things, Bhoopathy says. And so you have to be comfortable with letting things take on a life of their own and not feel too precious about it, like you might be with a corporate brand.
A human touch is also important to Evans in poster design. In Democratic politics especially, there was a rush to kind of put a corporate sheen on things and to make things really nice and clean, he says. And it kind of forgets the fact that people are involved and people are messy. I don’t think people should be afraid of making things look a little rough, making things look handmade, or potentially even doing things handmade. The people element of politics cant be overlooked, and that follows through into visuals.
The campaign poster was the first project to test Forges flexible approach to the design system. The only constraints? Evans was asked to use a portrait Mamdanis team provided and to stick to the typefaces that Bhoopathy specified; everything else was open to interpretation.
[Photo: Zohran for New York City]
Not a Political Type
Evans designs political posters that dont look political. Its a strategic move the voters his candidates are vying for are distrustful of establishment politics. Usually this draws people in and makes them curious about what this person is about, Evans says.
In order to do this, Evans opts for expressive typography. There’s always got to be some mood, energy, and spirit present, he says. It has to feel alive.
The sensibility Evans likes is common in the sports and entertainment industry and, occasionally, in political design from the past, especially from the FDR and Lyndon B. Johnson eras. Baseball logos are frequent reference material; he used the Gothic font from the Pittsburgh Pirates in an Instagram poster for one of Bernies rallies in the Steel City; in an Instagram poster he designed to announce Bernies endorsement of Mamdani, he borrowed from the Brooklyn Dodgers logo for Sanderss name and from the Mets logo for Mamdani. (In addition to designing the printed campaign poster, Evans also designed multiple Instagram posters for the campaigns pivotal moments.)
The wordmark Bhoopathy designed has the gravitas Evans looks for. Evans riffed on the drop shadows found in Bollywood posters so it stands out even more. Somebody on the AOC campaign said [Zohrans poster] looked more like a concert poster for a singer than a political campaign poster, which I take as a compliment, he says.
[Photo: Kara McCurdy]
Brevity, for Legibilitys Sake
There is very little writing on Mamdanis poster and what words are there are efficient. They say exactly what he is running for and what his campaign platform is: A New York You Can Afford. And once the poster earns that attention, its respectful of it by being clear with what it saysno vague proclamations of Hope, which might have worked in Shepard Faireys 2008 poster for Obama, but isnt enough today. Thinking of people walking by on foot, you have probably two seconds max for people’s attention, Evans says.
Editing down the copy to the right amount was trial and error. Originally, the campaign wanted Mamdanis full name on the poster, but Evans eventually pared it back to Zohran. Additionally, when Evans began working on the poster, the campaign hadnt finalized its tagline; the working copy was Afford to Live and Afford to Dream, a phrase that appeared on a banner behind Mamdani when he gave his election night speech.
The back of the poster features Mamdanis platform: building affordable homes, making buses fast and free, and a rent freeze for all stabilized tenants. This campaign is uniquely disciplined and sharp, Bhoopathy says of the messaging.
In March, the campaign released a new version of the poster on Instagram, which was even more pared back.
Brief phrases also help with another key aspect of Mamdanis campaign: its multilingual. Mamdani frequently spoke to constituents in Spanish and filmed videos in Urdu/Hindi. His printed material was translated into 14 languages, some that are written in characters and some that are read right to left. The need to be nimble influenced the identity Forge designed and the poster Evans designed. Keeping the copy short and sweet lends itself to translations, Evans says.
[Photo: Zohran for New York City]
A Design Fit for the Candidate
But most importantly, the campaigns design fit Mamdani. No matter how good a visual identity might be, if it isnt authentic to the candidate, it just wont work. The candidate matters, Bhoopathy says. And Evans echoes a similar sentiment. Not to oversimplify it, but 95% is him.
To wit: Dianne Morales, a candidate for mayor in 2021, had distinctive gradient-inspired branding (and inventive merch), but her campaign spectacularly flopped after her staffers protested against poor working conditions. If you cant manage your campaign, it doesnt bode well for managing a city. Meanwhile, the branding for Kamala Harriss 2020 presidential campaign nodded back to Shirley Chisholms historic run for the countrys top office, but her For the People slogan was impotent against the chorus of Copmala memes.
Meanwhile, Mamdani understood how important branding is and had strong personal opinions about what his should look like. I admire his attention to detail, his belief in the power of design to communicate ideas, and his willingness to get creative with it, Bhoopathy says.
The classic funding announcement post is getting the Gen Z treatment.
More startups, especially those led by young founders, are moving away from LinkedIn posts or X threads and turning to viral TikToks and short-form videos to stand out, Business Insider recently reported.
With traditional media coverage harder to land and social posts quickly vanishing from feeds, founders are rethinking how they announce major milestones.
Cluely, the cheat on everything startup, recently raised $15 million and announced it with a shot-for-shot homage to The Social Network. Earlier this year, they also launched with a video that cost $140,000 to produce. The 90-second narrative short, posted to X, shows a man on a first date being fed lines in real time by Cluely. The investment paid off. The video went viral and crashed Cluelys servers, founder Chungin Roy Lee told Business Insider.
Cluely is out. cheat on everything. pic.twitter.com/EsRXQaCfUI— Roy (@im_roy_lee) April 20, 2025
For Hedra, a startup focused on digital avatars, the announcement video doubled as a product demo. Founder Michael Lingelbach appears in the clip as himself, as a Studio Ghibli character, a Pixar animation, and with a full tech bro makeover, complete with gold chain. Those viral baby podcast videos that were everywhere last month? That was them.
@hedra.labs We’re hooked on the baby podcasts, so we made our own with Character-3. #ai #babypodcast #aibaby #aivideo #chatgpt #hedra original sound – Hedra – Hedra
Not every announcement needs to be a high-budget production, though. British entrepreneur Grace Beverley turned to TikTok last year to announce two fundraises: one for her activewear brand TALA, and another for Retrograde, her AI-powered talent agency.
Sign my businesss series a funding round with me, read the caption of one TikTok, where she signed the 5 million deal with a pink fluffy pen. Just a few months later, she returned with a white fluffy pen to sign the 1.9 million round for Retrograde.
@gracebeverley a pinch me moment original sound – grace beverley
Instead of relying on blog posts or LinkedIn updates, startups navigating a saturated market may find that a viral video is more likely to attract new customersor even the right investor sliding into their DMs.
For many people, when a “For Sale” sign pops up in their neighborhood, one of the first questions that comes to mind is: how much will that place go for? This price curiosityfueled by house flipping shows on HGTV and doomscrolling on Zillowhas gone from idle neighborhood interest to multimedia obsession.
Now that experience is being turned into PropQwiz, a live daily trivia sweepstakes, and accurately guessing the listing price will give players a chance to win up to $350,000 to purchase a home, pay off a mortgage, or make a down payment.
[Photo: Popqwiz]
Like a mix of the defunct daily trivia game HQ Trivia and the real estate listings on Zillow, PropQwiz is a live game played through an app that uses actual real estate listings to quiz players on the likely selling price of homes around the U.S.
Every weekday at 3 p.m. (Eastern Time), the PropQwiz app will broadcast a three-minute video featuring one house currently on the market, offering five clues about the home, the property, the amenities, and the location, and then giving players 15 seconds to guess the listing price. The closer the guess, the more points a player receives, and each point counts as an entry into a periodic sweepstakes for the grand prize of $350,000 toward a home, or $175,000 in cash. According to PropQwiz’s rules, the first home giveaway will happen after the total number of plays on the daily game and other minigames within the app reaches 31 million. By comparison, HQ Trivia had 2.4 million concurrent users at its peak of popularity.
“The more people who play this game and the more games that are played, the more homes we get to give away,” says PropQwiz creator Jim Casey. “In the beginning, it might be a home a month. We’re looking to quickly turn that into a home a week, and perhaps even a home a day.”
A longtime television producer behind shows like Building Outside the Lines and The Dead Files, Casey says the idea for the game came from his own experience, walking his dogs in his Los Angeles neighborhood with his wife and quizzing each other on the prices of homes that were up for sale. “It was fun in our neighborhood, but we found that when we traveled and we were in unfamiliar areas, it was even more fun,” he says.
That guessing game turned out to be a common one among Casey’s friends, and as he looked into it, he realized that there is an even larger pool of people who browse real estate listings just for the fun of it. Research from 2021 found that more than a third of Zillow users were not actively in the market for housing but were just using the site casually. “People were doing this everywhere,” Casey says.
But there’s also a bleaker side to that stat, which is that many people are only casually looking at real estate listings because they can’t actually afford to buy a home on the market. For people in the Gen Z and millennial age range, more than half believe they’d need to win the lottery to be able to afford a home, according to research from Zillow. “So we thought, alright, let’s give them a lottery, or at least a form of the lottery,” says Casey. (Legally speaking, the game is a sweepstakes; PropQwiz is free to play, and is supported by ads.)
Ahead of PropQwiz’s first official live game on June 30, I tried my luck at a beta version of the game. I watched a three-minute video montage of a contemporary house while a narrator cheekily explained its stats and amenities: 5,200-square feet, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, walk-in pantry, saltwater pool, hot tub, all on three quarters of an acre. The final, and most important, cluelocation, location, locationis that the home is in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not knowing much about that particular housing market, and likely not ever being in the market for such a big house, I used my 15 seconds of guessing time to frantically suggest a listing price of $7.8 million. Within seconds, the true price was revealed: $3.45 million.
“So you were pretty far off there,” says PropQwiz COO Daniel Tibbets.
“But that’s okay,” he adds, noting that even a very bad guessone off by multiple millions of dollars, for exampleearns a player at least 100 points, or 100 chances to win. Somebody guessing closer to the $3.45 million mark would have racked up 5,000 points, vastly improving their odds of winning the ultimate sweepstakes.
In addition to the daily live game, PropQwiz also features what Casey and Tibbets call minigames, which are multiple-choice quizzes that show a home and as for its current listing price, or in a version called Time Machine, its price decades ago.
The homes featured in PropQwiz aren’t pulled from real estate listing aggregators like Zillow and Redfin but licensed from real estate photographers across the country. “They own the copyright on all these images,” Casey says. “So we ask them what are your favorite homes?” The PropQwiz team digs through thousands of images to find good candidate houses. Casey, the longtime television producer, says they aren’t always big expensive homes, but they do have to have some standout feature or unique quality. “We always want something that people are going to enjoy taking a tour of,” says Casey. “It needs to be something that’s either very relatable or very aspirational.”
And, hopefully, entertaining enough that people tune in repeatedly, and get others to as well. “You bring in more people to play, you play more games, you get to have fun playing a game, and we get to give away homes,” Casey says. “That’s the goal.”
Starting today, Costco is rolling out a new schedule that introduces exclusive hours for its Executive members.
The schedule was first announced in an email sent to members earlier this month, in which the big-box warehouse club detailed its plans to adjust its hours of operations to add some attractive new perks for its highest-paying members. The plan comes on the heels of a strong financial quarter for Costco: Per its third quarter 2025 earnings report, the company notched 8% year-over-year sales gains, from $57.39 billion last year to $61.96 billion this year.
Heres what to know about the updated schedule:
How are hours and membership perks changing?
Previously, Costcos hours at most locations were 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Today, the company is introducing an earlier start each day thats only available to its Executive tier. Throughout the week, Costco will now open at 9 a.m. for Executive members, giving those card-holders an additional hour of shopping Sunday through Friday, as well as 30 added minutes on Saturday. In addition, Costco will offer Executive members a monthly $10 credit for orders of $150 placed through the company’s “Same-Day” service or Instacart.
Outside of these Executive tier offerings, Costco also plans to expand its Saturday hours to a 7 p.m. closing time for all members starting on July 5.
Why is Costco making these changes?
To shop at Costco at all, customers need to purchase one of two membership plans: either the standard Gold Star Membership, which costs $65 per year, or the Executive Membership, which costs $130 per year.
In the past, Costco has primarily attracted its most loyal shoppers to the pricier Executive Membership with an annual 2% reward on qualified purchases, which can rack up a maximum of $1,250 in cash back per year. Now, though, the company is trying to sweeten the deal with an exclusive shopping experiencea strategy thats already in place at Sams Club, the retailers main rival.
Costcos adoption of the concept makes sense, given how central Executive members have become to its overall financial health. On a May 29 earnings call, Gary Millerchip, Costcos executive vice president and CFO, shared that the company now has 37.6 million Executive members, up 9% from the same quarter in 2024. He also noted that at the end of third quarter 2025, Executive members accounted for 47.3% of paid members but a whopping 73.1% of worldwide sales. Early access to the clubs inventory (and its popular food court) is one way for Costco to keep its biggest spenders coming back for more.
Many of the world’s nations are gathering starting Monday in Spain for a high-level conference to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor nations and try to drum up trillions of dollars needed to close it. The United States, previously a major contributor, pulled its participation, so finding funding will be tough.The four-day Financing for Development meeting in the southern city of Seville is taking place as many countries face escalating debt burdens, declining investments, decreasing international aid and increasing trade barriers.“Financing is the engine of development. And right now, this engine is sputtering,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his opening comments at the conference.“We are here in Sevilla to change course, to repair and rev up the engine of development to accelerate investment at the scale and speed required.”The U.N. and Spain, the conference co-hosts, believe the meeting is an opportunity to reverse the downward spiral, close the staggering $4 trillion annual financing gap to promote development, bring millions of people out of poverty and help achieve the U.N.’s wide-ranging and badly lagging Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.Even though the gathering comes amid global economic uncertainty and high geopolitical tensions, there is hope among the hosts that the world can address one of the most important global challengesensuring all people have access to food, health care, education and water.“The government of Spain believes that this summit is an opportunity for us to change course, for us to raise our voice in the face of those who seek to convince us that rivalry and competition will set the tone for humanity and for its future,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the delegates as he inaugurated the conference.
The ambitious package seeks to reverse decline in development
High-level delegations, including more than 70 world leaders, are attending in Seville, the U.N. said, along with several thousand others from international financial institutions, development banks, philanthropic organizations, the private sector and civil society.At its last preparatory meeting on June 17, the United States rejected the 38-page outcome document that had been negotiated for months by the U.N.’s 193 member nations and announced its withdrawal from the process and from the Seville conference.The rest of the countries then approved the document by consensus and sent it to Seville, where it is expected to be adopted by conference participants without changes. It will be known as the Seville Commitmentor Compromiso de Sevilla in Spanish.The document says the leaders and high-level representatives have decided to launch “an ambitious package of reforms and actions to close the financing gap with urgency,” saying it is now estimated at $4 trillion a year.Among the proposals and actions, it calls for minimum tax revenue of 15% of a country’s gross domestic product to increase government resources, a tripling of lending by multilateral development banks, and scaling up private financing by providing incentives for investing in critical areas like infrastructure. It also calls for a number of reforms to help countries deal with rising debt.U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan said recently that “development is going backward” and the global debt crisis has worsened.Last year, 3.3 billion people were living in countries that pay more interest on their debts than they spend on health or education and the number will increase to 3.4 billion people this year, according to Grynspan. And developing countries will pay $947 billion to service debts this year, up from $847 billion last year.She spoke at a press conference where an expert group on debt appointed by Guterres presented 11 recommendations that they say can resolve the debt crisis, empower borrowing countries and create a fairer system.
US objections to the document
While the U.S. objected to many actions in the outcome document, American diplomat Jonathan Shrier told the June 17 meeting: “Our commitment to international cooperation and long-term economic development remains steadfast.”He said, however, that the text “crosses many of our red lines,” including interfering with the governance of international financial institutions, tripling the annual lending capacity of multilateral development banks and proposals envisioning a role for the U.N. in the global debt architecture.Shrier also objected to proposals on trade, tax and innovation that are not in line with U.S. policy, as well as language on a U.N. framework convention on international tax cooperation.The United States was the world’s largest single founder of foreign aid. The Trump administration has dismantled its main aid agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, while drastically slashing foreign assistance funding, calling it wasteful and contrary to the Republican president’s agenda. Other Western donors also have cut back international aid.U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said last week that the U.S. withdrawal from the conference was “unfortunate,” stressing that “many of the recommendations you see cannot be pursued without a continuous engagement with the U.S.”After Seville, “we will engage again with the U.S. and hope that we can make the case that they be part of the success of pulling millions of people out of poverty.”
Lederer reported from the United Nations.
Joseph Wilson and Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press
Home Depot is buying specialty building products distributor GMS Inc. in a deal valued at approximately $4.3 billion.The Atlanta home improvement chain said Monday the transaction will help strengthen Home Depot’s relationship with professional contractors.GMS of Tucker, Georgia, is a distributor of specialty building products including drywall, ceilings, steel framing and other complementary products related to construction and remodeling projects in residential and commercial end markets.As part of the deal, a subsidiary of Home Depot’s SRS Distribution Inc. will start a cash tender offer to buy all outstanding shares of GMS for $110 per share. The total equity value of the transaction is approximately $4.3 billion. The deal is worth about $5.5 billion, including debt.Last year, Home Depot purchased SRS Distribution, a materials provider for professionals, in a deal valued at approximately $18.25 billion including debt. SRS provides materials for professionals like roofers, landscapers and pool contractors.The GMS transaction is expected to close by the end of fiscal 2025. Shares of the company jumped 11% in premarket trading. Home Depot shares slipped less than 1%.
Michelle Chapman, AP Business Writer
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling tied to birthright citizenship prompted confusion and phone calls to lawyers as people who could be affected tried to process a convoluted legal decision with major humanitarian implications.
The court’s conservative majority on Friday granted President Donald Trump his request to curb federal judges’ power but did not decide the legality of his bid to restrict birthright citizenship.
That outcome has raised more questions than answers about a right long understood to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution: that anyone born in the United States is considered a citizen at birth, regardless of their parents’ citizenship or legal status.
Lorena, a 24-year-old Colombian asylum seeker who lives in Houston and is due to give birth in September, pored over media reports on Friday morning. She was looking for details about how her baby might be affected, but said she was left confused and worried.
“There are not many specifics,” said Lorena, who like others interviewed by Reuters asked to be identified by her first name out of fear for her safety. “I don’t understand it well.”
She is concerned that her baby could end up with no nationality.
“I dont know if I can give her mine,” she said. “I also don’t know how it would work, if I can add her to my asylum case. I don’t want her to be adrift with no nationality.”
Trump, a Republican, issued an order after taking office in January that directed U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the U.S. who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order was blocked by three separate U.S. district court judges, sending the case on a path to the Supreme Court.
The resulting decision said Trumps policy could go into effect in 30 days but appeared to leave open the possibility of further proceedings in the lower courts that could keep the policy blocked. On Friday afternoon, plaintiffs filed an amended lawsuit in federal court in Maryland seeking to establish a nationwide class of people whose children could be denied citizenship.
If they are not blocked nationwide, the restrictions could be applied in the 28 states that did not contest them in court, creating “an extremely confusing patchwork” across the country, according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
“Would individual doctors, individual hospitals be having to try to figure out how to determine the citizenship of babies and their parents?” she said.
The drive to restrict birthright citizenship is part of Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, and he has framed automatic citizenship as a magnet for people to come to give birth.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our country under birthright citizenship, and it wasn’t meant for that reason,” he said during a White House press briefing on Friday.
WORRIED CALLS
Immigration advocates and lawyers in some Republican-led states said they received calls from a wide range of pregnant immigrants and their partners following the ruling.
They were grappling with how to explain it to clients who could be dramatically affected, given all the unknowns of how future litigation would play out or how the executive order would be implemented state by state.
Lynn Tramonte, director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance said she got a call on Friday from an East Asian temporary visa holder with a pregnant wife. He was anxious because Ohio is not one of the plaintiff states and wanted to know how he could protect his child’s rights.
“He kept stressing that he was very interested in the rights included in the Constitution,” she said.
Advocates underscored the gravity of Trumps restrictions, which would block an estimated 150,000 children born in the U.S. annually from receiving automatic citizenship.
“It really creates different classes of people in the country with different types of rights,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, a spokesperson for the immigrant rights organization United We Dream. “That is really chaotic.”
Adding uncertainty, the Supreme Court ruled that members of two plaintiff groups in the litigationCASA, an immigrant advocacy service in Maryland, and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Projectwould still be covered by lower court blocks on the policy. Whether someone in a state where Trump’s policy could go into effect could join one of the organizations to avoid the restrictions or how state or federal officials would check for membership remained unclear.
Betsy, a U.S. citizen who recently graduated from high school in Virginia and a CASA member, said both of her parents came to the U.S. from El Salvador two decades ago and lacked legal status when she was born.
“I feel like it targets these innocent kids who haven’t even been born,” she said, declining to give her last name for concerns over her family’s safety.
Nivida, a Honduran asylum seeker in Louisiana, is a member of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and recently gave birth.
She heard on Friday from a friend without legal status who is pregnant and wonders about the situation under Louisiana’s Republican governor, since the state is not one of those fighting Trumps order.
“She called me very worried and asked whats going to happen,” she said. “If her child is born in Louisiana . . . is the baby going to be a citizen?”
Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke, Reuters
