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Mass layoffs struck the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA) late last week, throwing into jeopardy the core mission of the agency tasked with observing the skies and seas nationwideand a key piece of the federal disaster preparedness apparatus. In addition to hampering the day-to-day weather forecasting ability of its National Weather Service, cuts to NOAA will curtail efforts to protect endangered species, manage coastal regions, and prepare for climate change. When combined with the federal hiring freeze, recently terminated staff told Fast Company that the cuts put their organizations on a trajectory to “break.” The moves have drawn outrage from Democratic members of Congress and the general public. Thousands of people showed up to protest on Monday near the Colorado and Maryland NOAA campuses in support of the National Weather Service, which has a higher favorability rating than Taylor Swift. A rally in support of NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, on March 3, 2025. [Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images] Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen called the cuts an assault on our public safety. They are our eyes and ears, and so when you close your eyes and plug your ears, people will get hurt, he said at a virtual press conference shortly after the cuts were announced. Because the cuts were tied to federal employees with probationary status, the impact was haphazard and largely without regard to their specific job functions. In Miami, multiple hurricane researchers were let go. In Alaska, a member of the 24/7 National Tsunami Warning Center lost her job. Michigans Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory can no longer staff a communications team. More than 10% of the staff of the Maryland-based Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) were fired, dealing a significant blow to the ability of the U.S. to maintain and improve its weather forecasting capabilities. Accurate and timely weather forecast models maintained by the EMC and provided by the NWS not only power virtually all weather apps and television weather forecasts, they also underlie much of the U.S. economy and help it to function efficiently. The loss of EMC workers will be a slow-rolling catastrophe, said Larissa Reames, a meteorologist and computer scientist who was one of the EMC staff until last week. It’s going to be a massive communication breakdown. Computer weather models are a vastly complex assemblage of physics equations and data processing algorithms that constantly input weather observations from NOAAs fleet of satellites, radar, and weather stations around the world. Maintaining, improving, and tracking the performance of those models is the main goal of the EMC. By losing key staff members like Reames, who had decades of experience working with NOAAs weather models, Americas weather predicting abilities will likely suffer. Reames led a team of scientists working to unify and upgrade the core capabilities of a group of NOAAs primary weather forecasting models. On a day-to-day basis, that meant having lots of conversations with experts who have specific knowledge of the models subsystems and working to unify and streamline their input. As she describes it, getting the people who are actually doing the nitty-gritty part of the model development the right tools to understand what they can do better. For Reames, losing her job may mean an end to a 20-year career in computer weather modeling. Shes now considering a job doing software development in the private sector, but admits she has no idea what that might entail. It’s overwhelming to think about what I’m going to have to do, said Reames. I don’t know any of the languages they use, but I have the skills to learn them. The cuts to NOAA appeared to be made without regard to continuity of the services it provides. Hundreds of scientists, technicians, and support staff were given just two hours to vacate their workplaces and didnt have time to properly transition their roles to other colleagues. By diverting people like Reames to the private sector, institutional knowledge of how NOAAs weather models function will be lost. Other essential parts of federal disaster management, like FEMA and the agencies that manage public lands have also been hamstrung by staff cuts to probationary employees and strict spending limits. For many fired NOAA employees, the cuts brought a harsh conclusion to a lifelong dream of public service in the earth sciences. Francis Tarasiewicz grew up in southern New England, not far from Boston. He became a storm spotter, then an observer on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and worked in grad school with emergency managers to understand how they use weather information. Tarasiewicz had started work at the Boston NWS office only in January as a shift forecaster, responsible for liaising with emergency management officials during periods of severe weather. I grew up in foster care and have overcome a lot of obstacles just to live a normal life, let alone deeply serve the people of my community, Tarasiewicz said. It was like a one in a million chance there. The NWS as a whole lost about 10% of its staff last week, but those cuts werent made with regard to geography or the population each office serves. Boston was especially hard-hit. (In an email, an NWS spokesperson said they don’t comment on personnel or management issues.) After the departure of Tarasiewicz and three other colleagues, the NWS office in Boston is now down to just seven meteorologists, four fewer than are needed to run itaround the clock with even minimal staffing. That means meteorologists in Boston will need to perform the duties of multiple staff members at once. Since the NWS works around the clock, it will also mean performing those duties with fewer hours of rest in between shifts. The meteorologist in charge of my office had no idea this was coming, said Tarasiewicz. I’ve never seen a boss of mine break down in tears. If he cant get his job back at NWS, Tarasiewicz wants to work in climatebut is reluctant to consider a job in the private sector. He has honed his skill set specifically to assist government and public safety officials during inclement weather and feels discouraged at the thought that he might end up in a role with a narrower focus, as might be the case if he worked as a forecaster for a private company. The whole reason I decided to work for the weather service was to maximize my impact on the world, said Tarasiewicz. As severe as the cuts are, they could be just the beginning. Reports say Elon Musks so-called Department of Government Efficiency plans to cut NOAAs staffing by up to 50%, and has already moved to cancel key building leases in Oklahoma and at Marylands Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, where Reames worked.
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Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanians Seven Seven Six fund. They know this is an unlikely pairing. I really disliked you for a long time, Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had VC funding, was in Silicon Valley . . . This was the birth of the new web 2.0 era. And he was getting the press, he was getting the funding. The animosity was mutual. When I first heard about Reddit, I remember somebody was like, oh, there’s this site that does voting like you guys do, Rose recalled. And I went to the site, and I was like, oh, those motherfuckersthey just copied our shit. And I was pissed. Two decades later, Reddit is a publicly traded company with a $28 billion market capitalization and reigns supreme as the true front page of the internet, while Digg is a footnote in mid-aughts internet history. Rose has spent much of the time since Digg investing in companieshis fund has poured money into Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, among others. Over the years, however, Rose and Ohanian met and realized they had a lot in common and struck up a friendship. Now, Ohanian, who resigned from the Reddit board in 2020, is ready to help revive a company that he long warred with. He and Rose, along with Diggs new CEO, web3 entrepreneur Justin Mezzell, want to reimagine social media, creating what they describe as an online ecosystem with better vibes than todays combative platforms. Reviving Digg from obscurity Digg launched in 2004 where users could digg or bury contentsimilar to Reddits upvote and downvote systema crowdsourced way to determine what made the sites homepage. At its peak in 2009, Digg had about 44 million users and was a major driver of traffic to news organizations. After a messy redesign in 2010 alienated users, the site lost users and never really recovered. It was sold to the incubator Betaworks in 2012 for a reported $500,000 despite raising $45 million from venture capital. (Though LinkedIn bought its assets and patents for a rumored $4 million while the Washington Post hired much of its staff.) It was later sold to an adtech firm called BuySellAds in 2018 and then Money Group, which was its final steward before this sale. Despite numerous relaunches, Digg never recaptured its place in internet glory or its cultural relevance. Improving the internets vibe Rose and Ohanian share a common critique that todays social media landscape has become toxic and exhausting. They simply want to bring good vibes back to the social webif thats possible. Dude, its the vibes. Nostalgia is so hot right now, Ohanian told me. Were in our early 40s. Weve got kids. Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. I am nostalgic for the internet forums, essentially. Forums taught me how to fix my computer. Strangers on the internet when I was a dorky teenager were willing to teach me things with their time because of this very simple software. The internet he said was smaller and felt less broken. Rose wants to use artificial intelligence to handle the janitorial work of content moderation, freeing community members and leaders to handle more fulfilling tasks. They didnt expand on this vision, but content moderation has been a hot topic of late with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, aggressively rolling back its content moderation policies after Twitter, now X under Elon Musk, did the same. The dream is you can build a viable, healthy, great business with your users in a way that aligns their goals, their outcomes, Ohanian said. That is the dream scenario. An aggregator for a new era The new Digg will depart from social media conventions in several ways, though Rose is hesitant to disclose much of what the team is working on. He does share that the site wont have follower counts, an intention to move away from what he calls popularity contests that are common on social media. He also wants to give community members more ownership over their audiences, but didnt give specifics how. It’s insane to me that someone would spend five years of their life building up a community of millions of members and have basically no ownership over that community, he said. The site will ultimately have what Rose called good vibes, throwback, fresh coat of paint thats familiar to original Digg users but modernized for 2025. Digg will roll out invitations to the platform in the coming weeks and Rose said he wants to grow the sites user base, which he says currently stands at 600,000 monthly users, to 20 million before committing to a specific revenue model (Twitter competitor Bluesky managed to gain 30 million followers in roughly a year from launch.) Rose says until then, the company is well capitalized. Rose says he doesnt want to replace social media, but give a different experience and new ideaseven if theyre reminiscent of the past. This is not about you reading a headline three months from now that Digg has replaced Reddit, he says. Thats not the goal here. Its to reimagine whats possible. Ohanian adds that the intent is about more than just a nostalgia play. Even on day one, I hope someone who’s never been to Digg is like, this feels fun. The internet can be fun.
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On a boat, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and icebergs in shades of blue, Qooqu Berthelsen points to the breaking sea ice as a worrisome sign.Now, though, something is worrying him and many Greenlanders as much as the retreating ice that endangers their livelihood.“My concern,” says the 23-year-old hunter, fisher and tour company owner, “is that Trump will come and take Greenland.”He then repeats what has become a mantra for Greenlanders in the weeks since U.S. President Donald Trump pushed their Arctic homeland into the spotlight by threatening to take it over. That has ignited unprecedented interest in full independence from Denmarka key issue in a parliamentary election on March 11.“Greenlanders don’t want to be Danish. Greenlanders don’t want to be American,” Berthelsen says.“Greenland,” he says, “is not for sale.” It’s a rising argument about a strategic location You’ll hear this declared all over the land, from the prime minister and university students in Nuuk, the world’s northernmost capital, to hunters and fishermen in sparsely populated villages across the planet’s largest island. This is, after all, Kalaallit NunaatGreenlandic for the “Land of the People” or the “Land of the Greenlanders.”Most of those 57,000 Greenlanders are Indigenous Inuit. They take pride in a culture and traditions that have helped them survive for centuries in exceptionally rugged conditions. In their close link to nature. In belonging to one of the most beautiful, remote, untouched places on Earth.Many in this semi-autonomous territory are worried and offended by Trump’s threats to seize control of their mineral-rich homeland, even by force, because he says the U.S. needs it “for national security.”“How can a few words . . . change the whole world?” asked Aqqaluk Lynge, a former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and founder of the Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which governs Greenland. “It can because he’s playing with fire. We’re seeing another United States here with whole new ideas and wishes.”Greenland is vital to the world, though much of the world may not realize it. The U.S and other global powers covet its strategic location in the Arctic; its valuable rare earth minerals trapped under the ice needed for telecommunications; its billions of barrels of oil; its potential for shipping and trade routes as that ice keeps retreating because of climate change.Not even one of Trump’s most fervent fans in Greenlandwho proudly wears a MAGA hat, and a T-shirt emblazoned with Trump pumping his fist and the words: “American Badass”wants to be American.But like other Greenlanders, he wants stronger ties to the U.S. and to open for business beyond Denmark, which colonized them 300 years ago and still exercises control over foreign and defense policy.“When Trump came to office, he wanted to talk to Greenlanders directly without going through Denmark. He wants to negotiate with us and that’s why the Danish are very afraid,” said Jrgen Boassen, who has visited the White House and welcomed Donald Trump Jr. when he recently visited Nuuk.The American president’s comments set off a political crisis in Denmark. The prime minister went on a tour of European capitals to garner support, saying the continent faced “a more uncertain reality,” while her country moved to strengthen its military presence around Greenland. There’s consternation all around For some, it’s been dizzying, a rollercoaster of emotions since Trump’s threats, since his son landed in Nuuk in January in a TRUMP-emblazoned plane and since his father posted on social media: “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” with a message to Greenlanders: “We’re going to treat you well.”“When that was happening, I felt like I was hit in the stomach,” said Qupanuk Olsen, a mining engineer and social media influencer running in the election for the Naleraq party.Around her, supporters gathered at a bay filled with giant pieces of ice in Nuuk waving the red and white national flag that represents the sun and the ice that covers most of Greenland.“I could feel that the ground will no longer ever be the same again,” she said. “It’s as if we were on sea ice and it started to break, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”Journalists from afar have descended on Nuuk, asking locals what they think of Trump’s words. Pro-Trump media influencers known as the Nelk Boys arrived handing out MAGA hats and $100 bills to children in Nuuk’s streets.“Even though there are strong feelings of sadness, despair, confusion, I think we’re also stronger than ever. We’re fighting it for our people and that gives me hope,” said Aka Hansen, an Inuk filmmaker and writer. She is suspicious of Trump’s intentions but still thanks him for turning the world’s attention to her homeland.“We went through all the emotionsat first very funny, very light, then very serious,” said Hansen, who worked with Conan O’Brien when the comedian came to Nuuk in 2019 to shoot an episode poking fun at Trump’s idea of buying Greenland. “Now, with all the international press that’s been here, we’ve been given a voice that’s being taken seriously.”Like many other Greenlanders, she doesn’t want to be ruled by another colonial power. But she feels Trump’s rhetoric has increased the momentum for independence from Denmark.The former colonial ruler is accused of committing abuses against her island’s Inuit people, including removing children from their families in the 1950s with the excuse of integrating them into Danish society and fitting women with intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s and 1970sallegedly to limit population growth in Greenland.“It’s a historic moment for Greenland . . . compared to two months ago when nobody was talking about independence,” Olsen said. “Now, everybody’s talking about it.” Is autonomy the way? A former colony of Denmark, Greenland gained self-rule in 1979 and now runs itself through its parliament. A treaty with the United States, and a U.S. military base in Greenland, also gives Washington say over the territory’s defense.Greenland is massiveabout one-fifth the size of the United States or three times the size of Texas. Its land mass is in North America, and its Arctic capital city is closer to New York than to Copenhagen.“Denmark is just a middle man in that whole setup. And we don’t need that middle man anymore,” said Juno Berthelsen, a candidate in the election for Naleraq party. He says Trump has given Greenland leverage to negotiate with Denmark. “Our political goal is to have our own dfense agreement, so that we connect directly with the U.S. in terms of defense and security.”His party, he said, aims to invoke an article in a law that would give Greenland increased autonomy and eventually a path to full independence.Asked to describe Greenland’s moment, he said: “If I had to pick one word, it would be exciting. And full of opportunities.”In his first term in office, Trump began to talk about acquiring Greenland from Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally. Back in 2019, most dismissed it. But it had a ripple effect.“It was not taken that seriously back then as it is today. But it was important for Greenland because he, without wanting, did Greenlanders a favor,” said Ebbe Volquardsen, a professor of cultural history at the University of Greenland. “He underlined the value of being in a union with Greenland.”Greenland’s economy depends on fisheries and other industries as well as on an annual grant of about $600 million from Denmark. When Trump showed interest in buying Greenland because of its strategic location and mineral resources, he highlighted that annual sum as the amount of what other nations would be willing to pay to have a military or commercial presence in Greenland, Volquardsen said. With that, he gave Greenland leverage for more autonomy and possible reparations for abuses committed by its former colonial ruler.“That was important because the narrative in Denmark until that date . . . had been that Greenland is receiving this funding as a kind of aid or altruistic gift,” Volquardsen, said. Greenland awaits the next stepsof others Life in Nuuk seemed to go on as usual in mid-February, except for a “heat wave.” After weeks of subzero temperatures, it made the capital of Greenland several degrees hotter than Washington, D.C., the U.S. capital.Large chunks of powder blue ice were blown by winds, blocking boats on the harbor and creating a spectacle for residents who snapped photos under the pink light of a sunset. Some nights, the sky was lit up by spectacular streaks of green and other colors from the northern lights.You could almost forget that Greenland has become ground zero for a geopolitical showdownif, that is, you ignored the front pages of local newspapers featuring images of Trump and the ticker tape in downtown with his name and the Greenlandic word “Amerikamiut.”On a frigid day, a group of kindergarteners in fluorescent vests walked in line behind their teacher as they crossed a road covered in ice and snow. A few blocks away, teenagers played hockey on a frozen pond.On a hill next to a statue of the Danish-Norwegian missionary who founded the city in 1728, bells tolled, and a recently married couple laughed as family members threw rice on them for good fortune outside Nuuk’s wooden Lutheran cathedral. More than 90% of Greenlanders identify as Lutherans.After the wedding ceremony, guests converged at their home for a “Kaffemik,” a traditional celebratory gathering where they share coffee and baked goods.Some Greenlanders say they felt safe while being largely unknown to the world. Now, though, that feeling has dissipated.Sitting with her husband at a dinner table filled with families chatting and laughing, Tukumminnguaq Olsen Lyberth, said the wave of attention and polarizing comments prompted some friends to delete Facebook accounts.“We’re not use to having this big attention about us, so it’s overwhelming. Before, no one knew about us. Now, it’s a blitz of attention,” said Olsen Lyberth, 37, a cultural history student at the University of Greenland.“I feel like this is the longest January,” she said jokinglyin February. “It’s all of it. Everything feels too overwhelming.” Associated Press journalists Emilio Morenatti and James Brooks contributed to this report. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Luis Andres Henao, Associated Press
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