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Senate Majority Leader John Thune is rejecting Democratic demands on health care as unserious but says a government shutdown is still “avoidable” despite sharp divisions ahead of Wednesday’s funding deadline.“I’m a big believer that there’s always a way out,” the South Dakota Republican said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. “And I think there are off-ramps here, but I don’t think that the negotiating position, at least at the moment, that the Democrats are trying to exert here is going to get you there.”Thune said Democrats are going to have to “dial back” their demands, which include immediately extending health insurance subsidies and reversing the health care policies in the massive tax bill that Republicans passed over the summer. Absent that, Thune said, “we’re probably plunging forward toward the shutdown.”It’s just the latest standoff in Washington over government funding, stretching back through several administrations. President Donald Trump was the driving force behind the longest shutdown ever during his first term, as he sought money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. This time it is Democrats who are making demands as they face intense pressure from their core supporters to stand up to the Republican president and his policies.Democrats have shown little signs of relenting, just before spending runs out Wednesday. Their position remained the same even after the White House Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday released a memo that said agencies should consider a “reduction in force” for many federal programs if the government closes meaning thousands of federal workers could be permanently laid off.Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the OMB memo was simply an “attempt at intimidation” and predicted the “unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back.”Thune stopped short of criticizing the White House threat of mass layoffs, saying the situation remains “a hypothetical.” Still, he said no one should be surprised by the memo as “everyone knows Russ Vought,” the head of the Office of Management and Budget, and his longtime advocacy for slashing government.“But it’s all avoidable,” Thune said. “And so if they don’t want to go down that path, there’s a way to avoid going down that path.”One way to avoid a shutdown, Thune said, would be for enough Democrats to vote with Republicans for a stripped-down “clean” bill to keep the government open for the next seven weeks while negotiations on spending continue. That’s how Republicans avoided a shutdown in March, when Schumer and several other Democrats decided at the last minute to vote with Republicans to great political cost when Schumer’s party then revolted.A seven-week funding bill has already passed the House.“What would eight Democrats be willing to support?” Thune asked. “In terms of a path forward, or at least understanding what that path forward looks like.”Republicans in the 100-member Senate need at least seven Democrats to vote with them to get the 60 votes necessary for a short-term funding package, and they may lose up to two of their own Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky both opposed it in preliminary votes last week. A competing bill from Democrats also fell well short of 60 votes.Thune suggested some individual bipartisan bills to fund parts of the government for the next year could be part of a compromise, “but that requires cooperation from both sides,” he said.Democrats say they are frustrated that Thune hasn’t approached them to negotiate and that Trump abruptly canceled a meeting with Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York that had been scheduled for this week. Trump wrote on social media, “I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive.”Thune said he “did have a conversation with the president” and offered his opinion on the meeting, which he declined to disclose. “But I think the president speaks for himself, and I think he came to the conclusion that that meeting would not be productive,” Thune said.Still, he says he thinks Trump could be open to a negotiation on the expanded health care subsidies that expire at the end of the year if Democrats weren’t threatening a shutdown. Many people who receive the subsidies through the marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act are expected to see a sharp rise in premiums if Congress doesn’t extend them.Some Republicans have agreed with Democrats that keeping the subsidies is necessary, but Thune says “reform is going to have to be a big part of it.” Democrats are likely to oppose such changes.By Monday, when the Senate returns to session, lawmakers will have just over 24 hours to avoid federal closures.Thune said he intends to bring up the bills that were rejected last week. “They’ll get multiple chances to vote,” he said, before a government shutdown begins at midnight Wednesday.He said he hopes “cooler heads will prevail.”“I don’t think shutdowns benefit anybody, least of all the American people,” Thune said. Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press
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The last thing you want when dealing with a hot oven is any added burn risk. But some owners of Osters countertop ovens have experienced just that. Osters parent company, Sunbeam Products, is recalling over a million units of Oster French Door Countertop Ovens due to its doors unexpectedly closing. The company has received 95 reports of this occurring, leading to burn injuries, two of which were second-degree burns. Where and when was the product sold? According to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the recall includes about 1,290,000 units in the United States and another approximately 104,195 units in Canada. In the U.S., the ovens were sold nationwide in stores such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Costco, and Walmart. The products were sold from August 2015 to July 2025 for $140 to $250. They were also available online through Amazon.com and Overstock.com during this time. Four model numbers are included in the recall: TSSTTVFDXL TSSTTVFDDG TSSTTVFDMAF TSSTTVFDDAF The model number is available on the original packaging or on the back of the oven. How dangerous is this product? According to a separate recall notice posted to the Oster website, 95 injuries have been reported. Of those, 93 were minor burns that required no medical treatment and were “consistent with first-degree burns, such as sunburn or friction-related irritation.” The remaining two were second-degree burns that resulted in the victims seeking treatment. Oster says it has received no reports of hospitalizations as a result of using the ovens. What should I do if I have this product? First, stop using it. If your Oster French Door Countertop Oven is part of the recall, then you can contact Sunbeam Products to receive a free repair kit. You can reach the company through one of three options: A toll free call to 800-334-0759 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday. On Osters recall page. On Osters website by clicking the recall banner at the top of the homepage. It will bring you to the recall page. The repair kit is made up of a clip-on device that provides additional holding force to help keep the doors in the open position when reaching in the oven. It also has repair instructions and QR code that leads to an installation video. No tools should be necessary to attach the clip-on device.
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E-Commerce
The meteoric rise in artificial intelligence and its usage in nearly every facet of our daily life is leaving a profound mark on the job market. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, more than 76,000 jobs were lost to automation, as AI-powered analytics platforms replaced junior data analysts. Nearly 40% of employers expect to cut staff in areas where AI can handle tasks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025. Now, with the rise of generative AIs successor, agentic AI, many in the tech industry fear that AI will soon claim coding and tech jobs. After all, if AI-powered coding assistants can write, debug, and refactor code in seconds, what use is there for human developers? But leaders inside OpenAI see the moment in almost opposite terms. Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead for Codex at OpenAI, argues that coding isnt dyingits evolving. Rather than rendering developers obsolete, he believes AI is transforming coding by amplifying human strengths in creativity, reasoning, and problem-solving. If you look at todays AI tools, its clear theyre far from perfect. Theres still so much capacity in the world to absorb better, more powerful, and more delightful software, Sottiaux says. These coding tools, he says, are radically reshaping the learning curve for young coders. I see new graduates on my team picking up programming at a speed I havent witnessed before.” Developers are spending less time on line-by-line debugging, freeing them up to what should be built, how systems should be structured, and what kind of impact software can have in the world. OpenAI predicts that human roles will increasingly shift toward oversight and orchestration, with AI serving as both collaborator and accelerator: handling background work, surfacing errors early, and enabling engineers to explore ideas faster. OpenAI recently introduced an upgraded version of Codex, a specialized model designed for the long, messy work of coding and software development. Now powered by GPT-5, Codex can adapt its reasoning effort based on task complexity. It can breeze through a simple bug fix in seconds, or run for more than seven hours to reengineer an entire subsystem. That balance between being fast on simple tasks and going deep on harder problems is a distinctive trait of GPT-5-Codex, Sottiaux added. The quality of its code reviews and its ability to think dynamically over longer periods are key differentiators. GPT-5-Codex also pushes further on code quality overall. Now available in the Codex Responses API, and for use through Codex in various environments, including IDE extensions, terminal, web, and GitHub integrations, it can review an entire codebase, execute unit tests, validate dependencies, and even catch subtle vulnerabilities before they become production headaches. Codex was built to work alongside developers, and humans still stay in control, Sottiaux explains. For newcomers, its a collaborator that can help explore languages like Rust, navigate codebases, and grasp core concepts much faster. For senior developers, it provides leverage at a higher level. By setting the right context, guardrails, and structure, they can take on more ambitious problems and ultimately achieve more impact than before. OpenAI isnt the only big player arguing that AI isnt the IT job killer many feared. According to Googles latest DORA: State of AI-assisted Software Development report, 90% of tech professionals now use AI in their workflows, highlighting a 14% jump from last year, for coding, testing, and security reviews. Likewise, Udemy, one of the worlds largest online learning platforms, reports that the rise of AI integrations within enterprises has sparked a surge in enrollment for AI-related courses. Every minute, five to eight people sign up for a generative AI class on our platform, Hugo Sarrazin, CEO of Udemy, tells Fast Company. Designing code requires critical thinking, which is fundamentally a human trait. Of course, AI will generate a lot more software, but you still need analysis, judgment, and testing. Thats why its so important to teach the foundations of coding and development, whether or not someone ends up relying heavily on AI. Coding as a foundation Skeptics often warn that due to AI-driven automation, coding roles will disappear,leaving fewer opportunities for junior developers to gain experience. Thats not how OpenAI sees it. Some will use AI to go deep, building technical expertise at an accelerated pace, Sottiaux says. At OpenAI, more of the effort is shifting into code review and planning, while much of the coding itself is automated. Software engineering is about making an impact, and this shift allows us to create more in the same amount of time. He added that coding literacy remains vital for training the next generation of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs and stressed that the shift to AI-augmented development is a natural progression. In practice, many of OpenAIs customers are actively deploying Codex in production. Popular language-learning app Duolingo, for example, uses it to review back-end Python code for the platform. In benchmark tests, the company found that Codexs upgraded version was the only system able to catch subtle backward-compatibility issues and consistently flagged bugs that other automated reviewers overlooked. On a major software engineering test called SWE-bench Verified, GPT-5 Codex beat its predecessor by a wide margin. It solved more than half of the code-fixing challenges it was given, compared with about one-third for the earlier GPT 4.5 integrated model. For simple bugs, Codex used far fewer resources, cutting the workload by 94%. And when faced with tougher problems, it didnt just work faster; it applied roughly twice the level of reasoning to reach a solution. Likewise, companies including Gap Inc., Vanta, and Virgin Atlantic are also using Codex for specific applications. “During planning and development, the Extension can be tuned to the right level of reasoning (the ability to solve problems), and its ability to utilize Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows the right tools to be called directly from engineers’ IDEs, Richard Masters, VP Data & AI at Virgin Atlantic, said in a statement. Surviving the AI era The shifts suggest that coding is becoming just one part of a much larger transformation, as AI tools weave themselves into both work and daily life. Jan Chorowski, CTO at Pathway and a former deep learning researcher at Google who worked alongside Geoff Hinton at Google Brain, says coding is one of the few areas where AI is already delivering on its promise. While workflows are undeniably shifting as teams look to maximize productivityWho looks up Stack Overflow by hand these days? he notes. Chorowski says that while AI enables a deep understanding of coding, from low-level machine tasks to grasping entire problem domains, it often falls short on the basic nuances that human developers handle instinctively. The key differentiation we have today, as humans, is the ability to come up with new ideas that are well-grounded in a specific context. For developing software, the required context is particularly broad, he explained. AI lacks such contextualized judgement. Changing this is the challenge for the next decade. An important question is if AI tools will reach the deep understanding to be able to innovate and go beyond the capabilities of current Codex models. OpenAI maintains that coding holds a unique place: it cultivates reasoning, the very skill on which AI itself depends. If that vision proves true, the story of coding will not be one of extinction but of expansioninto a future where software is crafted through the partnership of human creativity and machine intelligence. Theres never been a better time to learn, especially for students and recent graduates, says Sottiaux. Id recommend picking a coding agent and starting a couple of projects. You can even use ChatGPT to generate creative ideas for what to build. Then start learning, engage with curiosity, and treat the agent as a true collaborator.
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