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  • Muharram 9 central procession peacefully concludes in Karachi amid tight security – Pakistan

    Muharram 9 central procession peacefully concludes in Karachi amid tight security – Pakistan

    Karachi’s central mourning procession of Muharram 9 entered its destination of Hussainiya Iraniyan Imambargah in Kharadar on Saturday and peacefully concluded amid tight security, according to police.

    Earlier in the week, Karachi Traffic Police issued a traffic plan for Muharram 8 to 10, outlining the procession routes as well as alternative traffic flows.

    Stringent security measures are being taken across the country, such as army deployment as well as a crackdown on sectarian content and hate mongers, ahead of Ashura (Muharram 10), which will be observed tomorrow.

    In Karachi, the Muharram 9 majlis started at Nishtar Park at 12:15pm, according to an alert from the police. “The number of participants is approximately 800 to 1000, and it is being led by Shahenshah Hussain Naqvi,” the alert read.

    Another alert at 1:29pm said that the procession had departed the park, while another at 1:54pm read that head of the procession reached Aza Khana Zuhra, while the tail was still at Nishtar Park. A later alert at 2:16pm stated that the procession head had reached Shah Khurasan, with the tail still at the park.

    The police said the procession entered its destination of Hussainiya Iraniyan Imambargah in Kharadar at 7:07pm with the tail still at Baghdadi Crossing. The procession concluded around 7:53pm.

    Cellular services were also suspended in the areas adjoining the central procession’s route as well as the smaller procession’s routes across the city, according to a letter by the Sindh police chief.

    According to the Karachi police chief, a total of 7,507 police personnel were deployed to monitor the main procession and its routes and passages.

    “Expert police snipers have been deployed along the main procession and at the crossings and large contingent of police personnel, including senior officers of Karachi Police” is active, according to a statement from the additional inspector general of police’s office.

    Traffic police personnel were also deployed to maintain traffic flow along crossings intersecting the main procession routes, as well as the alternative traffic routes arranged for Muharram 9.

    Meanwhile, Sindh Home Minister Ziaul Hassan Lanjar, Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab, Sindh IG Ghulam Nabi Memon and Senator Waqar Mehdi reviewed security arrangements for the procession at Numaish, Nishtar Park and the Hussainiya Iraniyan Imam Bargah, a statement read.

    Lanjar reviewed the security package and received a briefing from the Sindh IG and met the procession organisers.

    “Peace and order in the city is our priority,” Lanjar was quoted as saying. He also directed the law enforcement agencies to take foolproof security measures, according to the press release.

    Meanwhile, Wahab said, “Cleanliness arrangements have been ensured along the procession’s passageways. Proper lighting arrangements have also been made in the passageways and around them.”

    On Friday, more than 5,500 police personnel were deployed across Karachi for the security of 8th Muharram processions.

    Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said that 27,063 processions were taking place nationwide, with 7,598 majalis.

    “Everything is going well,” he told reporters in Sukkur. “Sukkur has the largest procession, with approximately 1 million participants.”

    The minister added that there were few blockages and praised the Sindh chief minister and other officials for taking care of the participants by arranging for special fans along procession routes, among other measures.

    Punjab arrangements

    Punjab Home Secretary Ahmad Javed Qazi briefed Punjab Chief Secretary Zahid Akhtar Zaman on the security situation across the province, a statement by the Public Relations Office said.

    According to Qazi, more than 37,000 Muharram gatherings and 9,800 processions were being live monitored across the province. He said that Pakistan Army and Rangers personnel were also deployed to assist the police.

    The chief secretary reviewed the arrangements for the Urs of Baba Farid and the Data Darbar Ghusl ceremony in Pakpattan. He also reviewed the social media monitoring process with the Cyber ​​Patrol Cell of the Home Department.

    Chief Secretary Zaman said, “All administration and police should be present in the field and follow the rules and regulations,” directing the control rooms to remain alert. He said that the main processions and gatherings are being monitored with CCTV cameras.

    Meanwhile, Lahore Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Operations Faisal Kamran visited different areas of the city to review the security. He met with the organisers of the processions and instructed all officers to remain alert.

    According to him, 386 gatherings were to be held and 81 mourning processions would be taken out in the city today. He said, “Over 8,000 officers and soldiers are performing security duties.”

    He said that full security was being provided at all places, adding that the district administration, security agencies and other institutions were providing assistance.

    “The streets on the route have been sealed with barbed wire and barriers,” he said, adding that snipers were deployed on high-rise buildings along the procession routes.

    Police and community volunteers were deployed at various checkpoints, including ladies police personnel to check the mourning women, he added.

    DIG Kamran advised citizens to immediately report abandoned goods, motorcycles and suspicious persons to the police.

    A ‘Peace Caravan’ was launched under the supervision of DIG Kamran, which included scholars, the peace committee and police officers.

    It was led by Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Operations Tasawur Iqbal, who, along with the superintendent of police (security(, met with leaders of different faiths.

    “The aim of the peace caravan is to promote unity and solidarity in the city,” DIG Kamran said.

    He said that “interfaith harmony” was a clear message to the enemies of the country, stating, “Lahore Police is taking every possible step to strengthen interfaith relations. Maintaining peace in Muharram is a shared responsibility of all of us.”

    In Multan, police issued a statement outlining that 166 majalis and 80 processions were scheduled for Muharram 9.

    Multan City Police Officer (CPO) Sadiq Ali Dogar said that 5,092 police personnel were deployed to protect the processions.

    “We are prepared for any emergency,” Dogar was quoted as saying. “In addition to rooftop duty, police personnel in white uniforms are also present along the routes for secret surveillance. The procession routes have been sealed with barbed wire.”

    The CPO added that alternative traffic routes had been provided and urged citizens to report anything suspicious to the police.

    “Citizens should support the police in keeping the peace and promoting religious harmony,” Dogar said.

    Earlier, Dogar, South Punjab Additional IG Kamran Khan, Counter-Terrorism Department Additional IG Waseem Sial, Multan Regional Police Officer Captain (retired) Sohail Chaudhry, Multan Commissioner Aamir Karim Khan and other officials reviewed the security package and visited the control room in the Deputy Commissioner’s office, a statement read.

    The officials visited the Mumtaz Abad procession — the biggest in south Punjab — where Multan’s senior superintendent of police (operations) briefed the chief secretary and Punjab IG about the security arrangements.

    The control room was also inspected, where the officials were briefed that all processions and gatherings in Multan were being monitored and controlled with the help of CCTV cameras.

    Chief Secretary Zahid Akhtar Zaman and Punjab IG Dr Usman Anwar met with members of peace committees, community leaders and the organisers of mourning processions and gatherings, who appreciated the efforts of the Punjab government to maintain peace and security during Ashura and Muharram.

    Peshawar

    Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IG Zulfiqar Hameed visited the mourning procession in Saddar are and reviewed security arrangements.

    He told Dawn.com that there were 115 processions in the city and over 10,000 security personnel are present on duty with 50,000 personnel deployed across the province.

    “Fourteen districts of the province have been declared sensitive, eight as extremely sensitive. Paramilitary and army are performing security duties in the most sensitive districts. We are fighting terrorism, operations are carried out wherever necessary.”

    He said the processions were proceeding as usual throughout the province.

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  • New research reveals hidden biases in AI’s moral advice

    New research reveals hidden biases in AI’s moral advice

    As artificial intelligence tools become more integrated into everyday life, a new study suggests that people should think twice before trusting these systems to offer moral guidance. Researchers have found that large language models—tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama—consistently favor inaction over action in moral dilemmas and tend to answer “no” more often than “yes,” even when the situation is logically identical. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Large language models, or LLMs, are advanced artificial intelligence systems trained to generate human-like text. They are used in a variety of applications, including chatbots, writing assistants, and research tools. These systems learn patterns in language by analyzing massive amounts of text from the internet, books, and other sources.

    Once trained, they can respond to user prompts in ways that sound natural and knowledgeable. As people increasingly rely on these tools for moral guidance—asking, for example, whether they should confront a friend or blow the whistle on wrongdoing—researchers wanted to examine how consistent and reasonable these decisions really are.

    “People increasingly rely on large language models to advise on or even make moral decisions, and some researchers have even proposed using them in psychology experiments to simulate human responses. Therefore, we wanted to understand how moral decision making and advice giving of large language models compare to that of humans,” said study author Maximilian Maier of University College London.

    The researchers conducted a series of four experiments comparing the responses of large language models to those of human participants when faced with moral dilemmas and collective action problems. The goal was to see whether the models reasoned about morality in the same ways that people do, and whether their responses were affected by the way questions were worded or structured.

    In the first study, the researchers compared responses from four widely used language models—GPT-4-turbo, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Llama 3.1-Instruct—to those of 285 participants recruited from a U.S. representative sample. Each person and model was given a set of 13 moral dilemmas and 9 collective action problems.

    The dilemmas included realistic scenarios adapted from past research and history, such as whether to allow medically assisted suicide or to blow the whistle on unethical practices. The collective action problems involved conflicts between self-interest and group benefit, like deciding whether to conserve water during a drought or donate to those in greater need.

    The results showed that in moral dilemmas, the language models strongly preferred inaction. They were more likely than humans to endorse doing nothing—even when taking action might help more people. This was true regardless of whether the action involved breaking a moral rule or not. For example, when the models were asked whether to legalize a practice that would benefit public health but involve a controversial decision, they were more likely to recommend maintaining the status quo.

    The models also showed a bias toward answering “no,” even when the situation was logically equivalent to one where “yes” was the better answer. This “yes–no” bias meant that simply rephrasing a question could flip the model’s recommendation. Human participants did not show this same pattern. While people’s responses were somewhat influenced by how questions were worded, the models’ decisions were far more sensitive to minor differences in phrasing.

    The models were also more altruistic than humans when it came to the collective action problems. When asked about situations involving cooperation or sacrifice for the greater good, the language models more frequently endorsed altruistic responses, like donating money or helping a competitor. While this might seem like a positive trait, the researchers caution that this behavior may not reflect deep moral reasoning. Instead, it could be the result of fine-tuning these models to avoid harm and promote helpfulness—values embedded during training by their developers.

    To further investigate the omission and yes–no biases, the researchers conducted a second study with 474 new participants. In this experiment, the team rewrote the dilemmas in subtle ways to test whether the models would give consistent answers across logically equivalent versions. They found that the language models continued to show both biases, while human responses remained relatively stable.

    The third study extended these findings to everyday moral situations by using real-life dilemmas adapted from the Reddit forum “Am I the Asshole?” These stories involved more relatable scenarios, such as helping a roommate or choosing between spending time with a partner or friends. Even in these more naturalistic contexts, the language models still showed strong omission and yes–no biases. Again, human participants did not.

    These findings raise important questions about the role of language models in moral decision-making. While they may give advice that sounds thoughtful or empathetic, their responses can be inconsistent and shaped by irrelevant features of a question. In moral philosophy, consistency and logical coherence are essential for sound reasoning. The models’ sensitivity to surface-level details, like whether a question is framed as “yes” or “no,” suggests that they may lack this kind of reliable reasoning.

    The researchers note that omission bias is common in humans too. People often prefer inaction over action, especially in morally complex or uncertain situations. But in the models, this bias was amplified. Unlike people, the models also exhibited a systematic yes–no bias that does not appear in human responses. These patterns were observed across different models, prompting methods, and types of moral dilemmas.

    “Do not uncritically rely on advice from large language models,” Maier told PsyPost. “Even though models are good at giving answers that superficially appear compelling (for instance, another study shows that people rate the advice of large language models as slightly more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful, and correct than that of an expert ethicist), this does not mean that their advice is actually more sound. Our study shows that their advice is subject to several potentially problematic biases and inconsistencies.”

    In the final study, the researchers explored where these biases might come from. They compared different versions of the Llama 3.1 model: one that was pretrained but not fine-tuned, one that was fine-tuned for general chatbot use, and another version called Centaur that was fine-tuned using data from psychology experiments. The fine-tuned chatbot version showed strong omission and yes–no biases, while the pretrained version and Centaur did not. This suggests that the process of aligning language models with expected chatbot behavior may actually introduce or amplify these biases.

    “Paradoxically, we find that efforts to align the model for chatbot applications based on what the company and its users considered good behavior for a chatbot induced the biases documented in our paper,” Maier explained. “Overall, we conclude that simply using people’s judgments of how positive or negative they evaluate the responses of LLMs (a common method for aligning language models with human preferences) is insufficient to detect and avoid problematic biases. Instead, we need to use methods from cognitive psychology and other disciplines to systematically test for inconsistent responses.”

    As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The studies focused on how models respond to dilemmas. But it remains unclear how much influence these biased responses actually have on human decision-making.

    “This research only showed biases in the advice LLMs give, but did not examine how human users react to the advice,” Maier said. “It is still an open question to what extent the biases in LLMs’ advice giving documented here actually sway people’s judgements in practice. This is something we are interested in studying in future work.”

    The study, “Large language models show amplified cognitive biases in moral decision-making,” was authored by Vanessa Cheung, Maximilian Maier, and Falk Lieder.

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  • ICC T20 World Cup Europe Qualifier: Joe Burns tells Italy’s cricketers to ‘create a legacy’ and reach first World Cup

    ICC T20 World Cup Europe Qualifier: Joe Burns tells Italy’s cricketers to ‘create a legacy’ and reach first World Cup

    Joe Burns says Italy’s cricketers have the chance to “create a legacy” as he attempts to guide the European nation to their first ever World Cup.

    Opening batter Burns, 35, made four centuries in 23 Tests for Australia between 2014 and 2020 but made himself available to play for Italy last year, qualifying through his grandparents.

    He has since been appointed captain of Italy, who will battle it out with Guernsey, Jersey, Scotland and the Netherlands in a European regional qualifier for next year’s 2026 T20 World Cup.

    The two teams who finish top of the round-robin tournament held in the Hague between 5 to 11 July will qualify for the event in India and Sri Lanka.

    “We’re very confident that if we play to our best, we’ll be going to a World Cup,” Burns told BBC Sport.

    “It’s not lost on us the magnitude of the impact we can have on Italian cricket. We talk a lot as a team about creating a legacy for the generations to come after us.

    “To wear the Italian cap at a World Cup would make us a groundbreaking team. And we think we’ve got the team to get there.”

    The first recorded game in Italy was played in Naples in 1793 by sailors from the fleet of Lord Nelson, and today there are more than 3,500 competitive players and in excess of 100 clubs.

    They are currently 32nd in the International Cricket Council world rankings but do not have any proper turf pitches.

    Italy’s squad have prepared for the tournament with a short training camp in Rome, some friendlies on grass in Horsham before warm-up games in the Netherlands.

    Burns said there is a “huge opportunity” for cricket, and T20 in particular, to really grow in Italy and qualifying for the T20 World Cup could prove to be a major catalyst.

    “I feel like Associate cricket is very much the grassroots of international cricket,” Burns added.

    “But I really think that in 30, 40 or 50 years from now, Italy could be a massive player in world cricket.

    “Playing Tests for Australia it was about the history that you’re honouring, and you’re carrying on in the traditions of the past, but when you play for Italy, it’s a blank canvas and you shape the future.”

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  • Risk of dementia in older patients with different anesthesia: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies | BMC Geriatrics

    Risk of dementia in older patients with different anesthesia: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies | BMC Geriatrics

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  • England v India: second men’s cricket Test, day four – live | England v India 2025

    England v India: second men’s cricket Test, day four – live | England v India 2025

    Key events

    48th over: India 237-4 (Gill 58, Jadeja 1) A lesser spotted maiden from Josh Tongue. Some respite after the dismissal of Pant.

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  • Earth’s rotation speeds up: Days getting shorter, global clocks face historic leap second reversal by 2029 – Organiser

    1. Earth’s rotation speeds up: Days getting shorter, global clocks face historic leap second reversal by 2029  Organiser
    2. Earth set to have three shorter than average days in coming weeks  Dunya News
    3. Summer 2025 will have three of the shortest days on record as Earth’s rotation unexpectedly accelerates  New York Post
    4. Scientist issues warning the shortest day in history will happen in weeks as Earth’s rotation is speeding up  UNILAD
    5. The shortest day in history on Earth may occur within just a few weeks.  Vocal

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  • Exposure to pesticides and increased risk of AMD

    Exposure to pesticides and increased risk of AMD

    (Image Credit: AdobeStock/New Africa)

    The risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was found to increase as a result of exposure to the urinary dialkyl phosphate (DAP) metabolites in organophosphorus pesticides (OPPs), according to a new Chinese study.1 The authors, led by first author Yu-Xin Jiang, MD, are from the Department of Ophthalmology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; the National Clinical Research Center for Eye Diseases; the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Fundus Diseases; and the Engineering Center for Visual Science and Photomedicine, all in Shanghai, China.

    The investigators pointed out that AMD is a multifactorial disease resulting from aging, genetic susceptibility, lifestyle habits, and environmental exposures, which make the pathogenesis of AMD highly intractable to prediction and interpretation. Considering that patient responses to current intravitreal treatments vary and complications are associated with treatment,2 early prevention of AMD from exposure to numerous risk factors is the most effective and feasible measure.

    “Among all factors, the adverse effects from environmental chemical exposures on AMD have been heatedly discussed in population-based epidemiologic studies. For example, several researchers have emphasized the impacts of heavy metals,3 air pollutants,4 and radiation5 exposure on the development of AMD. OPPs, a group of organophosphate or phosphate sulfide esters, are prevalent insecticides commonly applied worldwide in agricultural, residential, and commercial settings with the advantages of cost-effectiveness and high efficacy in controlling pests and preventing insect-borne diseases.6 Nevertheless, the persistent non-biodegradable nature and propensity of residue accumulation in soil and water bodies, in conjunction with multiple routes of human exposure to OPPs, for instance, ingestion, inhalation, and skin contact, have raised public attention to concern about their toxic effects on human health and ecosystems,7” they said.

    The OPPs can be swiftly absorbed, metabolized, and eliminated as urinary DAP metabolites from the body, commonly used as biomarkers in cohort studies.8

    Previous research has identified that OPPs are relevant to diverse diseases, including cancer,9 central nervous system disorders (Parkinson’s disease 10and depression),11 sleep problems,12 diabetes,13 hypertension,14 sex hormone function,15 and atopic diseases.16

    The investigators identified patients from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey17 between 2005 and 2008. Urinary DAP metabolites were used to construct a machine learning (ML) model for AMD prediction, they explained.

    They used interpretability pipelines, ie, permutation feature importance (PFI), partial dependence plot (PDP), and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to analyze the effects of exposure features to prediction outcomes.

    Exposure effects

    The authors reported that of the 1,845 patients in the study, 137 had been diagnosed with AMD. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis evaluated Random Forests as the best ML model with its optimal predictive performance among 11 models. PFI and SHAP analyses indicated that DAP metabolites were of significant contribution weights in AMD risk prediction, higher than most of the sociodemographic covariates. Shapley values and waterfall plots of randomly selected AMD individuals emphasized the predictive capacity of ML with high accuracy and sensitivity in each case. The relationships and interactions visualized by graphical plots and supported by statistical measures showed the indispensable effects of six DAP metabolites to the prediction of AMD risk, the investigators reported.

    The authors believe this study yields a novel insight into the link between environmental factors and health outcomes.

    The study concluded, “Urinary DAP metabolites of OPPs exposure are associated with AMD risk, and ML algorithms show excellent generalizability and differentiability in the course of AMD risk prediction.”

    References
    1. Jiang Y-X, Gui S-y, Sun X-D. Associations between organophosphorus pesticides exposure and age-related macular degeneration risk in U.S. adults: analysis from interpretable machine learning approaches. Int J Ophthalmol. 2025;18:1214-1230. DOI:10.18240/ijo.2025.07.04
    2. Rakoczy EP. The promise of long-term treatment for neovascular age related macular degeneration. Lancet. 2024;403(10436):1517-1519.
    3. Park SJ, Lee JH, Woo SJ, et al. Five heavy metallic elements and age related macular degeneration: Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2008-2011. Ophthalmology. 2015;122:129-137.
    4. Liu L, Li C, Yu HH, et al. A critical review on air pollutant exposure and age-related macular degeneration. Sci Total Environ. 2022;840:156717.
    5. Brodzka S, Baszyński J, Rektor K, et al. Immunogenetic and environmental factors in age-related macular disease. Int J Mol Sci. 2024;25:6567.
    6. Costa LG. Organophosphorus compounds at 80: some old and new issues. Toxicol Sci. 2018;162:24-35.
    7. Nandi NK, Vyas A, Akhtar MJ, et al. The growing concern of chlorpyrifos exposures on human and environmental health. Pestic Biochem Physiol. 2022;185:105138.
    8. Li AJ, Kannan K. Profiles of urinary neonicotinoids and dialkylphosphates in populations in nine countries. Environ Int. 2020;145:106120.
    9. Sun HB, Sun ML, Barr DB. Exposure to organophosphorus insecticides and increased risks of health and cancer in US women. Environ Toxicol Pharmacol. 2020;80:103474.
    10. Narayan S, Liew Z, Bronstein JM, et al. Occupational pesticide use and Parkinson’s disease in the Parkinson Environment Gene (PEG) study. Environ Int. 2017;107:266-273.
    11. Wu YD, Song J, Zhang Q, et al. Association between organophosphorus pesticide exposure and depression risk in adults: a cross-sectional study with NHANES data. Environ Pollut. 2023;316(Pt 1):120445.
    12. Han L, Wang Q. Association between organophosphorus insecticides exposure and the prevalence of sleep problems in the US adults: an analysis based on the NHANES 2007-2018. Ecotoxicol Environ Saf. 2023;255:114803. 14
    13. Guo XW, Wang H, Song QX, et al. Association between exposure to organophosphorus pesticides and the risk of diabetes among US Adults: Cross-sectional findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Chemosphere. 2022;301:134471.
    14. Dong YQ, Xu W, Liu SP, et al. Serum albumin and liver dysfunction mediate the mediate the associations between organophosphorus pesticide exposure and hypertension among US adults. Sci Total Environ. 2024;948:174748.
    15. Zhang YQ, Wu WK, Zhu XD, et al. Organophosphorus insecticides exposure and sex hormones in general U.S. population: a crosssectional study. Environ Res 2022;215(Pt 2):114384.
    16. Dantzer J, Wood R, Buckley JP. Organophosphate pesticide exposure and atopic disease in NHANES 2005-2006. J Allergy Clin Immunol Pract. 2021;9:1719-1722.e3.
    17. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/ index.htm.

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  • ‘I Didn’t Vote for Trump’

    ‘I Didn’t Vote for Trump’

    While accepting the President’s Award during the opening night of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Friday, actor Peter Sarsgaard spoke out on the current political division in the U.S., stating: “As my country retreats from its global responsibilities and tries to go it alone, it is also being divided into factions from within, factions of politics, gender, sexuality, race, Jews split over the war. But when there’s a common enemy, there is no going it alone. Enemies are the forces that divide us, that individuate us. We all know who they are.”

    Asked by Variety why he decided to go political with his acceptance speech, the Golden Globe nominee says, “To me, it is not political at all to say we’re being divided into smaller and smaller groups.”

    “This is the way authoritarianism works, right?” adds the actor. “They’re making you feel bigger and that person feels smaller. You are worried about your job, your status, being deported, all that sort of stuff, so if you’re safe, you are holding onto the life raft. Maybe you’re a little sad about the other person who’s drowning, but you hold on.”

    Closing his acceptance speech, the American actor quoted Czech statesman and playwright Vaclav Havel, saying that “one half of a room cannot remain forever warm while the other half is cold.” Commenting on why he chose the quote, Sarsgaard says, once again, that he feels it is not a “political” sentiment. “That’s just humanitarian.”

    “I don’t know that you could tell who I voted for,” he continues, bringing up the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “I mean, you could probably tell I didn’t vote for Trump, right? But I wouldn’t say that Biden was my person either. I consider myself a humanitarian. Politics are not that interesting to me.”

    The actor adds that what “impressed” him about the Czech statesman growing up was “a willingness to sacrifice yourself personally for a greater good,” something he doesn’t believe the left “or even the anti-Trump group” in the U.S. possesses. “The left in my country that has been vocal is typically wealthy and satisfied. The hippies got rich and we’re just happy chilling out and not doing much. They don’t want to lose their stuff, they don’t want to go to jail. Havel chose jail over exile. No one that I know would do that.”

    “While a lot of people in my country were struggling, the left was cruising by, drinking their cappuccinos,” he goes on. “It’s time to suffer, you know? My daughters are going to be willing to do that, even though they grew up in a nice, cushy environment. Their futures are on the line and they know that.”

    While the actor doesn’t feel hopeful about his generation, he nurtures hope for the younger ones. “The middle and left are talking about leaving the country and handing over everything for [their] personal comfort. The United States has a huge responsibility. We have nuclear weapons, a massive economy that controls so much of the world… It’s worth fighting for. Where are you going to run to? The planet’s not that big. I don’t know what it means to fight, but I do know it means to put down your cappuccino,” he concludes, taking a sip of his coffee.

    Sarsgaard, who was raised Catholic, also spoke about the religious sentiment of “love your enemy,” particularly during troubled times sociopolitically. “I was extremely Catholic, I was an altar boy and Jesuits were my heroes in high school. I didn’t have pedophile Jesuits around me. For me, Catholicism was a great experience. Love your enemy is a complicated term; it doesn’t mean everything they’re doing is ok, it’s more like being interested in them, don’t discount them. And that’s what an actor does. I don’t just play ideal people.” 

    Elsewhere in the conversation, the actor reminisced on coming up in the scene in the 90s and working on films like “Boys Don’t Cry” alongside Chloë Sevigny and Hillary Swank. 

    “There was no movie star in that movie,” he emphasizes. “It used to be like that, where you could go to watch a movie and you might not recognize every actor in it. Now I don’t know how a young actor comes up and gets into anything interesting in the States. The government doesn’t give any money to the movies, and even less now to the arts. I’ve been doing a lot of movies that are not shooting in the States, not because I don’t want to, but because it certainly has dried up.”

    On working with his wife, filmmaker and actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sarsgaard says he is “probably tougher” on her than any director he’s worked with. The actor starred in Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut “The Lost Daughter” and her upcoming sophomore effort, “The Bride.” “She says I’m very tough with her, but that’s just because I can, I guess [laughs]. But I respect her and would do anything for my wife, not just because she’s my wife but because she’s so talented. I really believe in her talent.”

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  • Everything We Know So Far About the 2025 Venice Film Festival

    Everything We Know So Far About the 2025 Venice Film Festival

    Below, everything else you need to know about this year’s ceremony:

    Alexander Payne will chair the jury

    American director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants, The Holdover) will take on the role of jury president at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, succeeding Isabelle Huppert. His appointment has proven controversial, however, given the filmmaker has faced allegations of sexual assault from actress Rose McGowan.

    Kim Novak and Werner Herzog will receive honorary Golden Lions

    Kim Novak made her final film appearance in 1991, in Mike Figgis’s Liebestraum, before retiring from Hollywood. This summer, however, Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic muse—best known for her role as Madeleine Elster in Vertigo—will return to the spotlight to receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

    According to artistic director Alberto Barbera, who shared the news on June 10, the decision to honor the actress was an obvious one, as she is “one of the most beloved icons of an entire era of Hollywood films, from her auspicious debut during the mid-1950s until her premature and voluntary exile from the gilded cage of Los Angeles a short while later.”

    Earlier this year, it was announced that Werner Herzog would also receive the same honor. With more than 70 films to his name—spanning fiction and documentary works created across the globe—the German filmmaker has left an indelible mark on the history of cinema. According to Alberto Barbera, Herzog has done so by “testing our ability to see, challenging us to grasp what lies beyond the surface of reality, and pushing the limits of cinematic representation in a relentless quest for a higher, ecstatic truth and new sensory experiences.”

    When will the full lineup be released?

    The full slate of films headed to the 2025 Venice Film Fesitval is expected to be unveiled at the end of July.

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  • Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?

    Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?

    Tech companies that are cutting jobs and leaning more on artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves.

    Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last month that he expects the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.”

    At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work.

    Other tech leaders have chimed in before. Earlier this year, Anthropic, an AI startup, flashed a big warning: AI could wipe out more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

    Ready or not, AI is reshaping, displacing and creating new roles as technology’s impact on the job market ripples across multiple sectors. The AI frenzy has fueled a lot of anxiety from workers who fear their jobs could be automated. Roughly half of U.S. workers are worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future and few think AI will lead to more job opportunities in the long run, according to a Pew Research Center report.

    The heightened fear comes as major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Meta cut workers, push for more efficiency and promote their AI tools. Tech companies have rolled out AI-powered features that can generate code, analyze data, develop apps and help complete other tedious tasks.

    “AI isn’t just taking jobs. It’s really rewriting the rule book on what work even looks like right now,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a company based in Folsom, Calif., that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers.

    Disruption debated

    Exactly how big of a disruption AI will have on the job market is still being debated. Executives for OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, have pushed back against the prediction that a massive white-collar job bloodbath is coming.

    “I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is going to be real pain here, in many cases,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, at an interview with “Hard Fork,” the tech podcast from the New York Times. ”In many more cases, though, I think we will find that the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now.”

    As new economic policies, including those around tariffs, create more unease among businesses, companies are reining in costs while also being pickier about whom they hire.

    “They’re trying to find what we call the purple unicorns rather than someone that they can ramp up and train,” Lucido said.

    Before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT — a chatbot that can generate text, images, code and more —tech companies were already using AI to curate posts, flag offensive content and power virtual assistants. But the popularity and apparent superpowers of ChatGPT set off a fierce competition among tech companies to release even more powerful generative AI tools. They’re racing ahead, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, facilities that house computing equipment such as servers used to process the trove of information needed to train and maintain AI systems.

    Economists and consultants have been trying to figure out how AI will affect engineers, lawyers, analysts and other professions. Some say the change won’t happen as soon as some tech executives expect.

    “There have been many claims about new technologies displacing jobs, and although such displacement has occurred in the past, it tends to take longer than technologists typically expect,” economists for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a February report.

    AI can help develop, test and write code, provide financial advice and sift through legal documents. The bureau, though, still projects that employment of software developers, financial advisors, aerospace engineers and lawyers will grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033. Companies will still need software developers to build AI tools for businesses or maintain AI systems.

    Worker bots

    Tech executives have touted AI’s ability to write code. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks AI will be able to write code like a mid-level engineer in 2025. And Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.

    Other roles could grow more slowly or shrink because of AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of paralegals and legal assistants to grow slower than the average for all occupations while roles for credit analysts, claims adjusters and insurance appraisers to decrease.

    McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economics research arm of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., predicts that by 2030 “activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated.”

    The institute expects that demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics roles will grow in the United States and Europe but shrink for customer service and office support.

    “A large part of that work involves skills, which are routine, predictable and can be easily done by machines,” said Anu Madgavkar, a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute.

    Although generative AI fuels the potential for automation to eliminate jobs, AI can also enhance technical, creative, legal and business roles, the report said. There will be a lot of “noise and volatility” in hiring data, Madgavkar said, but what will separate the “winners and losers” is how people rethink their work flows and jobs themselves.

    Tech companies have announced 74,716 cuts from January to May, up 35% from the same period last year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that offers job search and career transition coaching.

    Tech companies say they’re slashing jobs for various reasons.

    Autodesk, which makes software used by architects, designers and engineers, slashed 9% of its workforce, or 1,350 positions, this year. The San Francisco company cited geopolitical and macroeconomic factors along with its efforts to invest more heavily in AI as reasons for the cuts, according to a regulatory filing. Other companies such as Oakland fintech company Block, which slashed 8% of its workforce in March, told employees that the cuts were strategic not because they’re “replacing folks with AI.”

    Diana Colella, executive vice president, entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, said that it’s scary when people don’t know what their job will look like in a year. Still, she doesn’t think AI will replace humans or creativity but rather act as an assistant.

    Companies are looking for more AI expertise. Autodesk found that mentions of AI in U.S. job listings surged in 2025 and some of the fastest-growing roles include AI engineer, AI content creator and AI solutions architect. The company partnered with analytics firm GlobalData to examine nearly 3 million job postings over two years across industries such as architecture, engineering and entertainment.

    Workers have adapted to technology before. When the job of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman was disrupted because of the rise of online search, those workers pivoted to selling other products, Colella said.

    “The skills are still key and important,” she said. “They just might be used for a different product or a different service.”

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