Commanders suspected of sexual violence during the largest and fastest slaughter of civilians in more than 30 years have been subjected to travel ban and asset freeze
Senior Sudanese commanders implicated in a “campaign of rape” have been targeted by the UK on the first anniversary of a mass atrocity that saw tens of thousands of civilians killed over several days.
A year after the fall of El Fasher, the British government said it had sanctioned military leaders from both sides in the country’s ongoing conflict whom it suspected of sexual violence during the siege of the city.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development say spending next year is likely to be £410m less than anticipated
The UK is on course to miss its target of spending 0.3% of national income on international aid by an estimated £400m by the end of next year.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development (CGD) found the UK was on course for a large shortfall in promised official development assistance at the end of 2027.
Blanche told CNN's "State of the Union" that President Donald Trump, who said Friday that he was "the one that said do it," is not trying to overturn state election results "in any way, shape or form" on the cusp of the Nov. 3 election.
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I am someone who notoriously struggles with big decisions. Over a year ago, I found a wonderful partner, who very much feels like they could be my soulmate. We’ve been dating three time zones apart for a while. Being near our families, communities, and aging parents is a shared value — unfortunately one that makes it hard to compromise on location. Either way, I have to give up something I want and value — a wonderful partner who I can see a life with (the first time I’ve felt this way about someone), or the place I’ve always imagined settling down and that represents the person I am becoming and values I want to live. Two good things are pulling me toward opposite paths and there’s not much room for compromise. How do I make the “right” decision?
Dear Fork in the Road,
You’ve found a place in the world that you feel connected to and you met a person you envision spending the rest of your life with. Geographically restless and lonely people everywhere are jealous! But with your good fortunes seemingly at odds with one another, it feels that by choosing one, you’ll forsake the other — and doom the choice you did make to feel like a sacrifice.
When circumstances have forced me to make a tough decision, I’ve daydreamed about a thought experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation.
In quantum physics, particles behave differently than us mortals. For example, an electron can be in more than one place at once until it’s measured. How can it be in multiple locations and then be observed to be in a single position? In the 1950s, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed an explanation: The universe splits into alternate versions of itself, one for each place a particle could be measured. To apply this theory to your life, if you chose to move cities, don’t worry, another universe would be created in which you didn’t choose to do this, and you’ll stay right where you are!
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Yes, I know you can’t transport yourself into such a quantum realm, but there is something helpful in thinking about alternative universes. Did you have an immediate reaction to which universe you would be upset not to inhabit? Take that information to heart, because it’s likely you’re not ultimately going to make your choice based on a tidy pro-con list.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that most of our decisions are not based on rationality. People use two systems for decision-making: System one is faster and emotionally based, and system two is more logical and slow. But even the slower, more deliberate decision-making can fall prey to any number of cognitive biases.
In your case, one called loss aversion may be especially relevant. People have the tendency to worry more about what they’ll lose, even if what they stand to gain is equal in value. For example, it will likely feel worse to lose a $10 bill from your pocket than it would feel good to find a $10 bill on the ground. This bias is relevant in people’s social lives too: They hold onto older, maybe fading, friendships because the thought of losing them is too painful, but don’t seek out new friends with equal effort. Or, they stay in a meh job because it feels scary to let it go, rather than applying that same energy to finding a new one. Once you accept that your decision-making process will be subject to messy feelings and biases, you can let go of trying to make the perfect choice.
You opened your question by sharing that you struggle with big decisions, and it makes me wonder if you simply feel anxiety about making a choice at all. This is called analysis paralysis. When outcomes are uncertain, anxiety wakes up, and a voice in your head tells you to avoid taking risks. People with analysis paralysis overthink their options, over-research, and second-guess their first instincts. These actions have more to do with stress over committing to any decision rather than the content of what you’re deciding on.
A surprising finding from psychology may ease your paralysis. Researchers told people to make a big life decision — on the order of ending a relationship or quitting their job — by flipping a coin. Heads, they made the change; tails, they didn’t. For those who followed the results of the toss, the people who made the change were overwhelmingly happier, even though their decision to do so was made by pure chance. These random-flip outcomes also show “that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices,” the authors wrote. The coin helped the participants resist the bias of tending to stick with the status quo, even if it doesn’t make them happier.
To begin to loosen your paralysis, something that might assist you, paradoxically, is to introduce more options into the mix. Jacques Derrida, the 20th-century French philosopher, is known for the concept of deconstruction, a way of analyzing texts or ideas more critically, and showing they’re not as stable as they seem. He pointed out that we often think in binaries and false opposites: good vs. evil, man vs. woman, nature vs. culture. This can set up an easy dichotomy in which one of the items is good, and the other, by being its opposite, is bad.
You’ve created a binary situation, and you don’t actually have to be in one. What if there’s a third option, or a fourth? What if you and your partner move to a brand-new city, and set out to create new community, together? What if you and your partner find a way to split your time between your respective hometowns? Now you don’t have only two good things pulling you in opposite directions, you would have different options you can be more creative with. You also don’t have to commit to the decision you make now for the rest of your life. You can always move cities again, or try to find another mate.
You are with a partner you love, and live in a place that you love. You might reframe your situation as a win-win, rather than a lose-lose. And remember that if you don’t make a choice, you’re not successfully avoiding a decision — it’s a choice of its own. Your partner may get tired of long-distance or end the relationship for another reason. Or, you could start to resent the place you live since you have to travel so much to spend time with your partner.
I also want to point out how you describe your partner. Don’t turn your nose up at finding someone who you can see making a life with, especially as you note, if you’ve never felt that way before. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said that there were two most important moments in his life: when he came out of the womb, and when he met his wife. “What happened with me would not have happened without her.” Buffett’s view is supported by research that shows that people with supportive spouses tend to take on more rewarding challenges throughout their lives, and end up having more personal growth and happiness.
Another quantum idea that might interest you is spooky action at a distance. This is when two particles, even far apart, become connected to one another. Measuring one affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. If your partner feels like your “soulmate,” perhaps you have become entangled already. Don’t fret about making the perfect choice about the next phase of life, but do make a choice (any choice!) that considers your futures as bound up together. For the other details, maybe it’s time to find a coin to flip.
Bonus: What I’m reading
I’m currently re-watching The Twilight Zone and recommend the episode Mirror Image, about a young woman who encounters her double from a parallel universe. The show’s creator, Rod Serling, was inspired to write the script when he saw a man at the airport who looked suspiciously like him, and had a similar suitcase and jacket. What if he approached the man, and it turned out to be himself? The dreamy story also inspired the movie Us by Jordan Peele.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on “handedness”: how molecules can have variants that are non-identical mirror images of one another. These variants are their own kind of dark doppelganger; only one can exist in the body. The science writer Ann Finkbender wrote a charming essay about understanding this principle of life in Last Word on Nothing.
If you haven’t yet read Stoner by John Williams, just put down whatever you’re currently reading and do it. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t act, and let your passivity make choices for you.
Jaron Alexander, of Ingram, Texas, is one of more than 29,000 local police officers on the front lines of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
With new intelligence and the possibility of all sides seeking pretexts for action, the war in Iran is entering a dangerous phase ahead of elections in the United States and Israel.
After largely peaceful marches on Saturday, clashes broke out in the evening. But a large-scale police presence, 1,000 arrests and the rerouting of protest routes kept a lid on wholesale vandalism.
The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump's Department of Justice, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections.
The U.S. government has ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave Saudi Arabia. It is also drawing down staff at other missions in the region.
The Trump administration wants to move Forest Service headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, shutter 23 research stations, and close many regional offices and replace them with state offices.
Oscar Belgal, a Dominican immigrant, was shot in the neck on Oct. 8 and detained at a federal prison. His lawyers had said he needed outside medical care.
Immigration agents descended upon Oscar Belgal, an undocumented Dominican immigrant, as he drove with his son along a strip of small stores in New York on Oct. 8.
The agency regularly monitors polling places. But this year's effort on Nov. 3 will more than double the number of federal monitors deployed during the 2022 midterms.
A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it.
Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study.
It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.
In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions.
Now we have AI tools, too.
With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.
Key takeaways
More people are turning to AI for financial advice:One in five Americans have used AI to help manage their money, and some experts think chatbots could be better than the status quo.
AI works best if you know what questions to ask: Those with basic financial literacy will be able to make the most of these tools, while those without it — who might need help the most — could be led astray.
Better advice comes with greater risks: Sharing your financial information with a chatbot helps personalize its recommendations. This raises privacy concerns, so you might want to delete your data when you’re done.
Think of AI as a financially savvy friend:Chatbots can answer money questions you might be embarrassed to ask someone else and use that context to help build your budget.
AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.
Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.
The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.
Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.
Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year.
“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”
But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions.
Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious.
“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”
An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.
“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”
It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.
That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes.
One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane.
“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”
Don’t assume your data is safe
Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.
It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads.
Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life.
“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”
The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.
Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are.
“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”
Trust but verify — and then delete your data
In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.
Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.
The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources.
“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”
When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days.
Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.
“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”
Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates.
Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence.
Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.
The lawsuit centers on one of the president's longstanding complaints in the Senate race — the presence of a second candidate named Dan Sullivan who Republicans fear could siphon away votes from the incumbent in what's likely to be a photo-finish contest with Democrat Mary Peltola.
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