Tom Llamas is taking over for Lester Holt. Will viewers keep watching?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
News Analysis: Trump's 'force of personality' hasn't delivered on key foreign policy goals
When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to deliver big foreign policy wins in record time. He said he would halt Russia's war against Ukraine in 24 hours or less, end Israel's war in Gaza nearly as quickly and force Iran to end to its nuclear program. He said he'd persuade Canada to become the 51st state, take Greenland from Denmark and negotiate 90 trade deals in 90 days. 'The president believes that his force of personality … can bend people to do things," his special envoy-for-everything, Steve Witkoff, explained in May in a Breitbart interview. Six months later, none of those ambitious goals have been reached. Ukraine and Gaza are still at war. Israel and the United States bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, but it's not clear whether they ended the country's atomic program once and for all. Canada and Denmark haven't surrendered any territory. And instead of trade deals, Trump is mostly slapping tariffs on other countries, to the distress of U.S. stock markets. It turned out that force of personality couldn't solve every problem. 'He overestimated his power and underestimated the ability of others to push back,' said Kori Schake, director of foreign policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 'He often acts as if we're the only people with leverage, strength or the ability to take action. We're not.' Read more: Inside Trump's ICE expansion: Can he really hire 10,000 new agents? The president has notched important achievements. He won a commitment from other members of NATO to increase their defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product. The attack on Iran appears to have set Tehran's nuclear project back for years, even if it didn't end it. And Trump — or more precisely, his aides — helped broker ceasefires between India and Pakistan and between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But none of those measured up to the goals Trump initially set for himself — much less qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize he has publicly yearned for. 'I won't get a Nobel Peace Prize for this,' he grumbled when the Rwanda-Congo agreement was signed. The most striking example of unfulfilled expectations has come in Ukraine, the grinding conflict Trump claimed he could end even before his inauguration. For months, Trump sounded certain that his warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin would produce a deal that would stop the fighting, award Russia most of the territory its troops have seized and end U.S. economic sanctions on Moscow. 'I believe he wants peace,' Trump said of Putin in February. 'I trust him on this subject.' But to Trump's surprise, Putin wasn't satisfied with his proposal. The Russian leader continued bombing Ukrainian cities even after Trump publicly implored him to halt via social media ('Vladimir, STOP!'). Critics charged that Putin was playing Trump for a fool. The president bristled: "Nobody's playing me." But as early as April, he admitted to doubts about Putin's good faith. 'It makes me think that maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along," he said. 'I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done, and I always hang up and say, 'Well, that was a nice phone call,' and then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city,' Trump complained last week. 'After that happens three or four times, you say the talk doesn't mean anything." The president also came under pressure from Republican hawks in Congress who warned privately that if Ukraine collapsed, Trump would be blamed the way his predecessor, President Biden, was blamed for the fall of Afghanistan in 2022. So last week, Trump changed course and announced that he will resume supplying U.S.-made missiles to Ukraine — but by selling them to European countries instead of giving them to Kyiv as Biden had. Trump also gave Putin 50 days to accept a ceasefire and threatened to impose 'secondary tariffs' on countries that buy oil from Russia if he does not comply. He said he still hopes Putin will come around. 'I'm not done with him, but I'm disappointed in him,' he said in a BBC interview. It still isn't clear how many missiles Ukraine will get and whether they will include long-range weapons that can strike targets deep inside Russia. A White House official said those details are still being worked out. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sounded unimpressed by the U.S. actions. 'I have no doubt that we will cope,' he said. Foreign policy experts warned that the secondary tariffs Trump proposed could prove impractical. Russia's two biggest oil customers are China and India; Trump is trying to negotiate major trade agreements with both. Meanwhile, Trump has dispatched Witkoff back to the Middle East to try to arrange a ceasefire in Gaza and reopen nuclear talks with Iran — the goals he began with six months ago. Despite his mercurial style, Trump's approach to all these foreign crises reflects basic premises that have remained constant for a decade, foreign policy experts said. 'There is a Trump Doctrine, and it has three basic principles,' Schake said. 'Alliances are a burden. Trade exports American jobs. Immigrants steal American jobs.' Robert Kagan, a former Republican aide now at the Brookings Institution, added one more guiding principle: 'He favors autocrats over democrats.' Trump has a soft spot for foreign strongmen like Putin and China's Xi Jinping, and has abandoned the long-standing U.S. policy of fostering democracy abroad, Kagan noted. Read more: Trump threatens Russia with tariffs and boosts U.S. weapons for Ukraine The problem, Schake said, is that those principles 'impede Trump's ability to get things done around the world, and he doesn't seem to realize it. 'The international order we built after World War II made American power stronger and more effective,' she said. 'Trump and his administration seem bent on presiding over the destruction of that international order.' Moreover, Kagan argued, Trump's frenetic imposition of punitive tariffs on other countries comes with serious costs. 'Tariffs are a form of economic warfare,' he said. 'Trump is creating enemies for the United States all over the world. ... I don't think you can have a successful foreign policy if everyone in the world mistrusts you.' Not surprisingly, Trump and his aides don't agree. 'It cannot be overstated how successful the first six months of this administration have been,' White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week. 'With President Trump as commander in chief, the world is a much safer place.' That claim will take years to test. Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter. Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond, in your inbox twice per week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Contributor: Kids in camp? Nope. Got a summer schedule? Nope. Cue the mom guilt
'How's your summer?' a mom asked from across the living room at a baby shower in June. She was standing with a small group of other moms of my daughter's classmates whom I hadn't seen since school ended almost a month earlier. 'It's the best thing that's ever happened to me,' I replied, honestly. From across the coffee table, their eyes widened, and their mouths skewed into disbelieving shapes. I understood the sentiment. The moms on the other side of the table all work year-round full-time jobs that necessitate puzzling together child care for 11 weeks while school is out. For them, that care usually looks like a conglomeration of scattered camps that drastically increase their weekly mental load with challenges of transportation, different start and stop times, and clothing and supply lists for each kid and every camp. As one mom at the party described this stress, her eyes filled with tears, and she wasn't even addressing the ridiculous monetary cost of keeping her kids supervised while she and her husband worked. 'You didn't sign up for any camps, right?' another mom eventually asked. 'No.' I didn't. I'm spending every day with my 5-year-old and 6-year-old. Our only planned activity is an hour of swim team three mornings a week that is run by a local college's swim program and still feels exorbitantly expensive. While recent headlines and TikTok videos about kids forgoing camp to 'rot' or go 'wild' or regress to the perfect ''90s summer' focus on outcomes, my family's conversation was really about the cause: the financial realities of parenthood. Like those moms, I made my summer plans primarily for financial reasons. They need camp so they can go to work; as a teacher, I have flexibility during the summer and don't need child care so I can work — and camp would have cost more than my salary, anyway. This past school year I returned to the classroom for my first full-time job since my oldest child was born in 2018, but I also continued my gig work as a freelance journalist. While my 8-3 job guaranteed a regular paycheck in this unreliable media landscape and matched my kids' school hours, so we wouldn't need to pay for additional child care, freelancing was still the bulk of my income. Thus, I found myself employed but still participating in an 'infinite workday' as I filled my late nights and early mornings with writing. By the time the first camp registrations opened in January, I'd proven that I could meet deadlines outside of normal working hours, and camp for two kids was unjustifiably expensive. My husband agreed with my plan to forgo camp, and I tried to quiet the guilt that my kids would be missing the art or athletic enrichment. Five months later, I was exactly one week into our unscheduled time when the Cut asked, 'Why not let your kids have a 'wild' summer?' The article argued for the benefits of leaving these months unplanned, 'giving kids space to feel dreamy, inspired, excited, or nothing at all.' A week later, the New York Times followed up with its own question: 'Is it OK for your kids to 'rot' all summer?' In its examination, the article goes so far as to declare that summer is 'a parenting Rorschach test' revealing if a parent has a relaxed approach to raising kids as opposed to a focus on 'skill-building and résumé-padding.' pointed out that an unscheduled summer is impractical for working parents. "Good Morning America" argued that such boredom can be beneficial for this generation of overscheduled kids. The Cut ran a counter-argument to its original column that pointed out how taxing 'screen management' can be at home, and Slate bemoaned the pressure that comes with planning "summer de-escalation." At the beginning of July, Vox even questioned if kids are capable of experiencing the "delirious boredom" of a '90s summer. Much of this discussion has been out of touch. From the thorny linguistic implications of the phrase "rot" to the ludicrous notion that every aspect of parenting needs to have merit (even, ironically, doing less), it's all missing the point that most parents don't have the luxury of time for this level of analysis nor for the 'best practices' that such analysis might suggest. They just feel the weight of judgment for failing to have that spare capacity. It also should not go unnoticed that these articles are all written by women and quote women, which mirrors a universal truth about summer: Moms are surely more likely to be both the schedulers of camp and the caretakers of the children not attending them because they are managing about 71% of the planning, organizing and scheduling within their household. After I told those other mothers that this summer was 'the best thing that's ever happened to me,' I immediately felt 'mom guilt.' Not because I think the empty time my kids fill catching dragonflies in the backyard or squirrelling away to their rooms to listen to audiobooks or cuddling with me in bed to watch an afternoon movie — all done amid constant bickering and wrestling — is more or less valuable than time spent in camp, but because my mental load is currently lighter than those of the other moms who were at the shower. This — not whether your kids are at camp or not — feels closer to the real problem. Modern society isn't built to support modern families. From agrarian-based school years to a lack of affordable child-care options and support for parents who are caretaking, every parent is doing the best they can within a system that is failing them in every season. (When the viral load surges this winter, I'm sure we'll be back to talking about parents missing work to care for sick kids.) Summer is just a three-month microcosm of the larger issues facing parents and, more specifically, moms who are desperate for a lessening of their mental load. Ultimately, I think that's what all these articles are really arguing for when you read between the lines. Returning to the idealized '90s summer of my childhood is less about what kids are doing and more about what parents aren't doing. Maybe the one thing each perspective has in common is that parents, especially moms, are justified in wanting to do less cultivating and scheduling of their children, because we all deserve a brief foray into the seemingly endless summers of our childhood before this summer, like all summers, ends. Sarah Hunter Simanson is a parent, teacher and freelance writer in Memphis. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How AI, robotics and late artist Morrisseau are helping fight art fraud
Famed Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau was browsing a Vancouver gallery with his longtime friend Cory Dingle around 1993 when a painting stopped them in their tracks. The pair asked who created it. The answer? "Norval Morrisseau." The trouble? The artist had never seen the work, let alone painted it. "We had a little chuckle and we left," Dingle recalled. "Then, I said, 'What do you want to do about this?' He said, 'You know, you can't police the world.'" Morrisseau, who died in 2007, was a self-taught, trailblazing artist known for his pictographic style and membership in the Indian Group of Seven. He was the first Indigenous artist to have his work shown in a contemporary gallery in Canada and now his paintings sell for millions. But the incident Dingle remembers proved to be an omen. At least 6,000 fake paintings have since been uncovered, costing Morrisseau's estate $100 million in losses. The phenomenon amounts to what police have called the biggest art fraud in world history. Finding fakes is time consuming work. It requires co-operation from galleries and private collectors, a trained, critical eye cast on anything purporting to be made by the late artist and the patience to keep pursuing justice through the court system. But now a new tool has emerged to help the battle: artificial intelligence. Bogged down by the enormity of the task at hand, Morrisseau's estate, which is run by Dingle, partnered with two art-loving professors to build software nicknamed "Norval AI" about three years ago. It can analyze art pieces and determine the probability that they're a genuine Morrisseau. "Because the fakes were so terrible ... we got to a point with our AI that it was so good at picking them out," Dingle said. "There was no problem." Yet the estate knew fakes were still out there. They were just getting harder to detect because court hearings were revealing the tell-tale signs of a fake Morrisseau — thinner paint lines, for example — which allowed fraudsters to make their works even more convincing. Enter Chloë Ryan. The then-engineering student loved making large-scale abstract paintings. Even though such works could sell for a decent amount, they often take weeks or months to create, narrowing the odds that she could make artistry a viable career. She could make prints of her pieces, but they just weren't the same because they lacked the texture of a real painting. The conundrum became a source of inspiration for Ryan, leading her to start tinkering with robots and paint on her Montreal balcony. She eventually developed Acrylic Robotics, a company that uses technology to paint pieces at the behest of an artist. The process starts with an artist painting with a stylus on a drawing table, which acts like a massive tablet. Amazon Web Services software analyzes and logs every movement, detecting millions of details in the piece, including the strokes, brush pressure, pigment and speed. "We like to think of AI as a powerful magnifying glass," said Patricia Nielsen, AWS Canada's head of digital transformation and AI. "It can detect those patterns and the anomalies that might be invisible to the human eye ... so art experts, historians, can dig in further." With that data, Acrylic's robotic arm can then paint a replica so precise, Ryan says it's indistinguishable from an original — exactly what Dingle needed to put Norval AI to the test. A mutual connection put him in touch with Ryan last August. Shortly after, they got to work. Because Morrisseau isn't alive to paint images on Ryan's tablet, Acrylic's robot (Dingle affectionately calls it Dodo) had a more complicated feat to accomplish. Dingle would send Ryan a hi-resolution image of one of Morrisseau's works. Acrylic Robotics would then have an artist learn about eccentricities of his style and paint the piece before Acrylic's robot would give it a try. Everything the robot painted was analyzed by the estate and Norval AI. The two sides have been going back and forth for about a year, picking out errors in the robot's execution and poring over new works. Early editions had several spots where both the estate and Norval AI could tell the robot had stopped a long stroke to pick up more paint — something uncharacteristic of Morrisseau. "If you look at one of our works randomly on the street, you wouldn't be able to say that's made by a robot, but we can't yet do all art under the sun because there's a lot of techniques that we haven't yet built in," Ryan said. "We can't use every tool in an artist's arsenal yet. If an artist is out here finger painting, obviously we can't do stuff like that." Newer editions of the Morrisseaus are about 69 per cent accurate and expected to improve even more. But Dingle admits, "I have kind of been holding back on getting to 100 per cent." He's scared of developing anything too perfect before he and Acrylic Robotics have found a foolproof method for ensuring a Morrisseau recreation can't be passed off as the real thing. It's a concern Ryan shares. "The worst thing that could happen is that we release this without consultation with groups that have been harmed by art forgery and this technology is used against artists," she said. They're currently exploring markings or other features that can be embedded in pieces to denote they're not originals. Once they settle on an ideal method, they'll have an avenue to disseminate recreations of Morrisseau's work — responsibly. While some might think that's the last thing an estate plagued by forgeries would want to do, Dingle sees it as a way to bring Morrisseau's work to the people who would value it most. "There's two schools named after Norval. There are healing institutions. There are academic institutions. There are remote Indigenous communities," said Dingle, sitting in front of a rarely-shown Morrisseau. "They could never afford to buy this painting, to hang it in their halls, to have the healing and the lessons of it, so we need to be able to produce high level reproductions that bring the life of that painting to these places." This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 20, 2025. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press Sign in to access your portfolio
