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Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI’s hardware team.

Meta believes the future is gambling. 

As prediction markets surge in popularity, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly calling for his company to consider partnering with Polymarket and Kalshi, two of the biggest platforms, while he develops a similar in-house app, Arena. According to a Friday report by the New York Times, Zuckerberg wants to design Arena to specifically target 18 to 34-year-olds.

Meta also hopes to implement parts of Arena into Facebook and its messaging app, Messenger, attaching betting options to group chats, news feeds, and videos.

“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a senior Meta official leading Arena’s development, reportedly said in an internal company post last month. “The social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”

The strategy appears to be: betting as content, gamifying gambling to become social. It’s a framing that could open the door to harmful situations, especially for the young people he’s going after. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2.5 million US adults, or about 1 percent of Americans, meet the diagnostic mental health criteria of severe gambling addiction. An Epic Research study published on Friday analyzing electronic health records found that gambling disorder diagnoses have risen more than 60 percent since 2018 in states that have legalized sports betting. The largest increase came from young people, aged 18 to 29, whose rate more than doubled.

“When markets are built into a personalized feed, they stop feeling like something for traders,” Archibong wrote in his same internal post. “They start to feel like part of the conversation that is tied to memes, moments, and whatever people are paying attention to.”

Yes. Right. Exactly. Meta appears to openly desire a world in which the company profits off addiction by blurring the lines between gambling and daily online conversation. 

This week, I blew up Daily Kos with two stories that generated fiercely divided responses. The first was the perhaps too-provocatively titled “Why Democrats need their own Trump,” followed by a bit of a cleanup piece, “Yes, there is plenty that Democrats can smash.” Too many people never got past the headline to engage with the substance, which I understand. We don’t need our own Donald Trump.

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When confronted with cancer, Connor Christou fed everything tied tied to his regime — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude.

President Trump on Friday unveiled the latest rendering of a special edition US passport to commemorate America’s 250th birthday that features a large image of himself hovering over the Resolute Desk, the latest in a series of plans to place Trump front and center of the anniversary.

But it’s the warning that will accompany the new passports that’s prompting a new kind of stress: “Welcome, but be good!”

The message instantly called into question Trump’s understanding of a passport, which is primarily obtained so that American citizens can leave the United States and travel abroad—no welcome needed. It seems likely that Trump was conflating a US passport with a visa. Either that or he feels a knee-jerk inclination to inject anti-immigrant, xenophobic themes into everything he does. Both feel too possible.

Truth Social

Meanwhile, the State Department hasn’t confirmed the new design. But American citizens with plans to obtain or renew their passports this summer may want to steer clear of the Washington Passport Agency. As CNN reported when an earlier rendering was released in April, the limited edition passport will be the “default option” at the DC processing center. “Online options or other locations will maintain existing passport design,” an official told CNN.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean. Welcome! This is the first time I am celebrating a Caribbean American ally in this series, applauding the work of Barbara Lee, mayor of Oakland, California, and former U.S.

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trumps find tacky new way to profit from White House cage fight…

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New models are launching in Asia that promise Mythos-like capabilities without fear of an export ban. U.S. AI labs may never recover this enormous market.

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With Western Europe in the grip of a punishing early-summer heat wave, maximum health alerts have been issued in Rome, Paris, and even London. Thursday was the UK’s and Switzerland’s hottest June day on record, with each just below 100 degrees F, while France endured its warmest day ever on Wednesday, with temperatures in some areas rising to approximately 111 degrees F.

The toll of the sweltering temperatures driven by a heat dome has been stark: French authorities have recorded at least 48 drownings as people try to escape the heat, while hot cars have tragically claimed the lives of three young children. Spain is seeing a similarly tragic reality. Between Sunday and Thursday alone, an estimated 327 people lost their lives to the extreme conditions, according to data from the Spanish health ministry’s monitoring system.

Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers.

Italy, where I live, is under severe strain too. Even though this is the country that holds the title for Europe’s hottest-ever temperature (119.8 degrees F in Sicily in 2021), the current climate is testing those limits once again. On Friday, the Italian Ministry of Health placed 18 major cities on strict Level 3 red alert (bollino rosso), indicating immediate risk to even healthy adults. These cities include Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Genoa, and Bari.

That warning seems prescient—of the five people who have died so far, one was a 61-year-old male in the Piacenza area who collapsed while working in his vineyard. Though this initial toll seems small compared to those in Spain and France, Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers, capturing a grim toll of roughly 18,800 deaths in 2022, 13,800 in 2023, and over 19,000 in 2024. (Numbers for 2025 aren’t in yet.)

Moreover, even as other places in Europe are looking toward relief this weekend, meteorologists warn that Italy’s anomalous heat wave will not ease significantly until early July. Yet, tourism figures for this summer indicate a record-breaking 172 million people are slated to come to the Bel Paese in July and August. Oh, and remember—we do not really do air conditioning in this country (more on that in a moment). If you are heading our way, how will you cope?

The Italian health ministry offered sage advice in their recent circular titled “Protect Me From the Heat”: Avoid going out between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when the weather is at its hottest), limit alcohol and coffee (sorry), dress in natural fibers such as linen (do this anyway), eat lightly (again, sorry), and drink at least a liter and a half of water.

Always carry a bottle with you, too; in both the countryside and cities in Italy, you are bound to come across a water fountain. If filling water from somewhere public grosses you out, fear not; there is a knack to it. There should be signs saying Acqua Potabile (drinking water) above the fountain. If it says Acqua Non Potabile, it’s a no-go. If you’re headed to Rome, there are specific drinking-water fountains called nasoni, named because they resemble long noses. There are about 2,500 dotted around the Eternal City.

On a much broader spectrum, there is an app called Acquea that pinpoints over 150,000 points with drinkable water throughout Italy. Run by Rome’s water company, Acea, the app also gives out the sodium and calcium levels of the liquid from the fountains and has a built-in tracker to monitor hydration (small amounts of sodium are essential to rehydrating effectively).

Lunch during hotter times tends to be a no-cook affair. Instead of devouring a plate of hot pasta or a whole pizza come midday, opt for timeless Italian summertime classics such as prosciutto-wrapped melon, a refreshing caprese salad, or an insalata di riso (rice salad) tossed with light ingredients such as vegetables and eggs. Back in 2023, the Italian Ministry of Health even advised swapping out pranzi freddi (cold lunches) for gelato instead. “Consuming an ice cream or a milkshake can be an alternative to a midday meal,” the guide suggested.

Speaking of sweet treats to cool down, Sicilian granita is a semi-frozen dessert similar to a slush, but with fresh ingredients and a more crystalline texture. Originating on the Italian island, but now found everywhere in Italy, popular flavors of granita include lemon and strawberry. In Rome, grattachecca (shaved ice) is king come the summer months. Vendors manually shave ice off of a block and into a cup. The ice is then drenched with flavored syrups, making for a perfect Roman summer street food.

Coffee doesn’t have to be a complete no-go either. There are plenty of cold coffee options, such as caffè shakerato, a drink made by vigorously shaking coffee with ice and a sweetener in a cocktail shaker, or caffè leccese, a sweet, almond-based coffee from Puglia made by placing almond syrup and ice cubes in a glass and topping them off with espresso.

There are plenty of crisp indoor sights, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

While mastering the local food and drink menus is a delicious way to stay cool, surviving an Italian summer also requires a bit of structural strategy. Wherever you are staying or plan to eat, make sure you call before you book to inquire about whether they have air conditioning. The reason it is not a given in Italy is a somewhat unique belief called colpo d’aria (hit of air). According to Italian lore, a sudden exposure to a cold draft while you’re hot is believed to cause neck aches, stomach cramps, earaches, and headaches. Fortunately, recent market data shows unit sales have increased by 16 percent since last year, providing a glimmer of hope that this attitude is changing given the heat waves.

If you find yourself AC-less, the shutters found on the facades of all Italian residential properties can provide much-needed respite. Do as Italians do and keep them closed during the morning to stop the sunlight from getting in and warming up your hotel room.

The boiling weather doesn’t necessarily mean you have to skimp on major landmarks, either—it just means you may have to switch it up. If you fully intend to brave the heat between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., make sure you get tickets in advance to avoid queuing for hours in the blistering sun.

More importantly, make sure your midday landmarks are indoors; standing in the center of the Colosseum at noon during a heat wave is a surefire way to ruin your day. But Italy has plenty of crisp indoor sights to see, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

Taking a stroll (passeggiata) and sightseeing at night is also just as nice as doing it in the day. You’ll probably meet more locals along the way too, as they seldom step out when it is boiling. During summer, main attractions stay open until 7 p.m., and even offer exclusive night openings; after-hours entry at the Vatican or visiting the Colosseum by moonlight allow you to see world-class history under the stars.

And remember, Italy is more than its cities. With tourists never being too far from a beach or hills, and train travel being cheap (and air-conditioned!), holidaymakers can always substitute a day wandering around cobblestoned streets for white sands or grassy paths to keep out of the humidity. By learning to adjust your clock, leaning into the art of the pranzi freddi, and treating the midday heat as an excuse for an extra gelato, you won’t just survive the intense Mediterranean summer, you will get to experience Italy in a safer way, exactly the way the locals have become accustomed to.

We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.

That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”

As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.

All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.

I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”).

As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.

As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:

Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.

Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.

The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity. Some other Democrats who had standing for the same reason decided to pass, including House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and outgoing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Beutler hails Beatty as a model for other Democrats to follow, given what can happen to a country when a traitor to the Constitution is allowed to remain commemorated. Every lasting monument to Trump is really a monument to accommodating his misrule, celebrating his corruption, and a signal to the public that it’s OK to forget his criminal legacy and accept the Trump era as legitimate. “It will be much easier to arrest the normal process of forgetting,” writes Beutler, “if Democrats embrace the goal of Trump humiliation now. If peeling Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center is just a taste of what’s to come.”

Tearing Trump’s various architectural vanities down isn’t what I’d call a top priority. Like TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, I think Democrats need to commit themselves to freeing us from the iron grip of oligarchy and radically reshaping the Supreme Court. Still, as Tomasky wrote earlier this week, we should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

NASA researchers are testing an AI clinical decision support system to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical symptoms during deep-space missions. The Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA) is powered by a Red Hat-backed open source tool called RamaLama, designed to simplify how developers run, pull, and serve AI models. While it's no Star Trek-esque Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) quite yet, it could be a boon to ailing astros far from home. Earlier this year, NASA decided to bring Crew-11 back from the International Space Station (ISS) early because of a medical concern. As missions venture further afield – to the Moon, Mars, and beyond – an early return may no longer be practical, while communication delays can rule out real-time consultation with doctors on Earth. Red Hat says that CMO-DA started life as a proof of concept before moving from a cloud-dependent model to a fully disconnected edge deployment. It currently runs on a terrestrial twin of the HPE Spaceborne Computer aboard the ISS. Inference is multimodal. "RamaLama provides the engine to run both large language models (LLMs) for complex medical reasoning and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for image-based symptom analysis," Red Hat stated. "This allows the CMO-DA to process both text and visual data without needing a massive infrastructure footprint." CMO-DA runs locally on the device, which means responses do not depend on a connection to Earth. That said, the system has yet to leave Earth. Testing on the Spaceborne twin allows the system to be refined before any potential deployment to the ISS. "Once validated on Earth, the CMO-DA will be demonstrated to NASA leadership so that they can evaluate its further use," Red Hat said. HPE's Spaceborne project is on its third iteration aboard the ISS. Built from off-the-shelf components, the system is based on HPE Edgeline and Proliant servers and is more than capable of machine learning and AI workloads. In the future, the team plans to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI for the next iteration of the CMO-DA. Sadly, there appears to be no chance of a virtual Robert Picardo turning up to dispense medical advice to stricken astronauts. ®

Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved person living in Massachusetts when the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. The document’s famous words “all men are created equal” did not apply to her, but she thought they should. 

jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_57a7e01b-bd76-4f5f-b8ce-b13b7500d1bc&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

“She is somebody who heard the words of the declaration, knew that they were real in her life, and argued for that to be true,” says Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th. Eventually, Freeman fought to abolish slavery in Massachusetts.

This week on Reveal, as America marks 250 years since its founding, we share stories of people who were denied equality and the battles they fought to attain it. In addition to Freeman’s story, we hear about one of the first Native American communities to encounter white settlers more than 400 years ago and learn why the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment for women continues to this day.

It's going to be a "messy" summer for security folks, especially when it comes to fixing the open source code that underpins their organizations. That's according to Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of Chainguard, a software supply-chain security company leading Athena, a newly formed coalition of about two dozen companies that wants to make the process of finding and fixing open source bugs "as easy to consume as possible." The members have committed to using AI to prevent attacks on open source software. In addition to Chainguard, other founding member companies include BNY, Cisco, Cloudflare, Corridor, DepthFirst, Docker, JPMorganChase, Kyndryl, LTM, and PwC. Many of these member companies are also partners with Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI Daybreak, which allow them to try out the pair's most advanced bug-hunting models. The coalition accepts vulnerability findings generated by all frontier models, according to Lorenc. Athena has already processed more than 20,000 findings and developed over 2,000 patches across 500 open source projects. In about three weeks, the coalition's first wave of bug disclosures will begin. "This is going to be a messy summer for everyone," Lorenc told The Register in a phone interview. "I know there's still a percentage of people who think it's all fake and marketing," he said, talking about the newest, most advanced frontier models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT‑5.5‑Cyber. "The stats and data we're seeing are so scary – if you just keep running scans on the same libraries and same code, it just keeps finding more [vulnerabilities]," Lorenc said. "We haven't seen that curve start to bottom out yet." Chainguard isn't part of Glasswing or Daybreak, but many of its customers and partners are. "Put yourself in the shoes of someone with Glasswing access," he said. "You get this crazy, new model that can find vulnerabilities everywhere, that no one had seen and you had missed for years with all of your other tooling. You run it on your code, and it finds tons of stuff in your first-party code, the stuff that you've written, and you fix all of that." After running Mythos Preview on all of your organization's proprietary code, imagine pointing the model at an application. Most modern apps contain a mixture of code from different sources, mostly third-party. According to Lorenc, 95 percent of the code in any of these codebases is open source. "When you run [advanced models] at the application level, you find a ton of vulnerabilities in open source code that you can't fix for yourself the same way you can that first-party code," Lorenc said. "So then you're left with: what to do?" By now, most people are familiar with vulnerability disclosure processes and know they need to report these flaws to open source project maintainers. "But when the numbers start getting this large, and you're finding thousands of these [bugs] at a time, and they're across tons of projects you didn't even know you were using before you ran this tool, and you don't even know how to contact the people, you kind of get stuck," he said. The only guarantee in the entire disclosure process is that attackers are moving quickly and the time to exploit – that's the time between a CVE's public disclosure and first confirmed in-the-wild exploitation – has essentially collapsed. A clearinghouse for bug reports This may mean that your application is vulnerable to attack even before someone develops a patch. "Then you're putting yourself at risk – and you were already at risk before you ran these scans, but no one else knew about it," Lorenc said. "In an unintended way, [AI] has created this pickle for everyone." In May, Anthropic said it used Mythos Preview to scan more than 1,000 open-source projects, which also underpin much of its own infrastructure, and found an estimated 6,202 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities in these projects. "It's a super awkward, strange world and timeline we are all living in," Lorenc said. "There's a ton of pressure because all of the frontier models are getting better, and the open models are getting better, and they're going to be able to start discovering these at the same time, too. So, that's what we're trying to help with: to be that clearinghouse for critical industry." Athena coalition members submit vulnerabilities they find in open source code using any frontier model. Sometimes they find these bugs while scanning their own apps. In other cases they discover them after pointing Mythos or GPT‑5.5‑Cyber at a commonly used library, Lorenc said. The companies submit a full report to Chainguard, which acts as a clearinghouse, deduplicating, correlating, and addressing findings from members in batches across entire libraries, hardening them against classes of vulnerabilities instead of just one bug. Affected projects are rebuilt as private, hardened versions available to Athena members through Chainguard Libraries before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed – and hopefully addressed upstream – a month later. For maintainers that can't make a permanent fix, Athena acts as a "maintainer of last resort," according to Lorenc. On Thursday, the Linux Foundation joined the effort and announced Akrites, an industry coalition to defend open source software against AI-enabled threats, by finding and fixing vulnerabilities. Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process. Founding companies include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, Nvidia, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler. "As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven't touched a project in years," Lorenc said, adding that Akrites provides a coordinated way to fix flaws upstream before criminals exploit them. Plus having a dedicated SIRT gives maintainers a single partner - and disclosure -to work with on remediation instead of a hundred uncoordinated reports. "Now the work is making sure there's always someone on the other end to catch them," Lorenc said. ®

Tony Nuñez will be the next Santa Cruz County Supervisor representing the 4th District after final election results certified Friday showed he secured an outright victory in the June primary.

Final results released by Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber show Nuñez received 50.07% of the vote, enough to avoid a November runoff under California election law. 

Incumbent Felipe Hernandez received 30.84% of the vote.

Nuñez will represent the district that includes Watsonville, Pajaro and surrounding South County communities.

A Watsonville High School graduate, Nuñez began his career as a reporter and later editor at The Pajaronian and Good Times before joining Community Bridges, where he now serves in a leadership role. He also helped lead the effort to preserve Watsonville Community Hospital as one of the inaugural members of the Pajaro Valley Health Care District Board of Directors, and currently serves as board chair.

He will give up that seat when he takes on the role of Supervisor.

Throughout his campaign, Nuñez said his priorities are improving access to essential services, creating more economic opportunity for working families and ensuring greater accountability in county government.

He said protecting and strengthening services such as health care, mental health care, transportation, child care, parks and community spaces would be among his top priorities.

Nuñez has also said the county must do more to help families remain in the community by addressing rising housing and child care costs, protecting anti-poverty programs and supporting workforce development and small businesses.

On government accountability, he pledged transparent leadership that clearly explains decisions, measures results and responds when public systems fail to meet community needs.

Nuñez immigrated from Cuerámaro, Guanajuato, Mexico, with his family when he was 8. The grandson of a farmworker and the son of blue-collar workers, he has often cited his family’s experience as shaping his approach to public service.

He has described his career—from journalism to nonprofit leadership and public service—as centered on strengthening the institutions residents rely on every day.

Nuñez lives in Watsonville with his wife and young son. 

Over 100 companies and government agencies are reportedly authorized to use Mythos 5, including their non-American employees.

Mesh came out of stealth in February with a $50 million Series A.

In recent days, Democrats’ lead has shrunk in the congressional generic ballot, which asks respondents if they would vote for the “Democratic candidate” or the “Republican candidate” if the election were held today. On June 1, Democrats led by 7.1 percentage points on the generic ballot, but that has since fallen to 6.1 points, according to election analyst Nate Silver’s polling average.

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump’s ‘Great American State Fair’ is a flop All Maine’s booth had was two empty chairs—and it got worse from there. Trump’s ‘teleporting’ FEMA official vanishes from agency The title for Most Absurd Guy in the Trump administration has a front-runner.

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A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…

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Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s chief business officer announced his resignation this week after about eight months on the job. 

Gerardo Castillo was hired last September and started on the job Oct. 1. His resignation comes a year after the previous CBO, Jenny Im, resigned. 

“My short tenure at PVUSD since October of last year is not a reflection of my colleagues, and especially not of Dr. [Heather] Contreras, but rather due to a recent change in health for one of my family members,” he said in a statement. “This has significantly shifted our circumstances, making it essential that I accept a professional opportunity closer to home to prioritize my family.”

In a message to staff Friday morning, the district said Castillo made the decision to resign and take a new role with Sacramento City Unified School District. 

“While we are saddened to see Gerardo leave PVUSD, we are deeply grateful for his service, leadership, and dedication to our district,” district officials wrote. “During his time with PVUSD, Gerardo helped guide important financial and operational work in support of our schools, students, and staff.”

The district said it will begin searching for a new CBO soon and is committed to a “smooth transition.” 

According to his statement, Castillo said the district is facing significant challenges, from declining enrollment to rising healthcare costs. 

“Addressing these issues requires difficult but necessary actions, and the ongoing work regarding school consolidation and school closures must continue if the district is to achieve fiscal stability,” he wrote. “While we recognize that there are strong opinions surrounding these issues, the ongoing public discussion and differing interpretations of our fiscal realities have made it more difficult.”

During school board meetings, teachers union representatives have argued against recently approved layoffs and the district’s budget projections, saying that PVUSD is manipulating the budget in order to make more cuts than necessary. However, many school districts are facing similar budget challenges across the state. 

The Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers said in a statement that despite Castillo’s departure, its priority continues to be to put students first. 

“We look forward to engaging the district in this mediation process and reaching an agreement that prioritizes our students and staff,” the union wrote.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Pajaro Valley Unified chief business officer resigns appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.