JENKINTOWN, Pa. — Schools were closed and residents were ordered to shelter-in-place Tuesday after a large fire broke out at an aerospace manufacturer’s facility in a town north of Philadelphia, officials said.
The fire broke out at SPS Technologies in Jenkintown around 9:30 p.m. Monday and witnesses said there was an explosion and flames could be seen inside the warehouse, the Abington Township Police Department said in a statement on social media. The building was evacuated, all employees were accounted for and no injuries were reported.
SPS Technologies describes itself as a developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a line of aerospace fasteners and precision components.
The Abington and Jenkintown school districts and all private and parochial schools were closed Tuesday.
The shelter in place order was in effect until the incident was under control because smoke and particulates from the fire were filtering across the area, officials said. Hazmat crews were monitoring air quality and advised all businesses within a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) radius to remain closed until further notice.
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority warned that service was suspended on three regional rail lines to start the day due to the fire, noting that it could cause delays in other parts of the system.
European leaders gathered in Paris Monday for emergency talks on how to react to the U.S. diplomatic blitz on Ukraine, which has thrown a once-solid alliance into turmoil and left the Europeans questioning the reliability of their key transatlantic partner.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Shortly before the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump, but Macron’s office would not disclose details about the 20-minute discussion.
Leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the European Union arrived at the Elysee Palace for talks on Europe’s security quandary. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is also attending.
Last week, top U.S. officials from the Trump administration made their first visit to Europe, leaving the impression that Washington was ready to embrace the Kremlin while it cold-shouldered many of its age-old European allies.
Despite belligerent warnings for months ahead of Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president, leaders hoped somehow that Trump would stand shoulder to shoulder with Europe in opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the continent would finally start to beef up its defenses and become less reliant on American firepower.
But a flurry of speeches by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week questioned both Europe’s security commitments and its fundamental democratic principles. Macron said their stinging rebukes and threats of non-cooperation in the face of military danger felt like a shock to the system.
The tipping point came when Trump decided to upend years of U.S. policy by holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Then, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia on Saturday all but ruled out the inclusion of other Europeans in any Ukraine peace talks.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the week “an existential moment … where Europe has to stand up.”
That’s where Macron hopes to step in with Monday’s meeting. Ever since World War II, the United States and Western European nations have basically moved in lockstep as they confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War, right up to the increasingly aggressive actions of current-day Russia close to its borders. Even if there had long been U.S. complaints about the reluctance of many European NATO nations to step up their defense efforts, they never boiled up to the political surface as they have over the past days.
French officials said no firm announcements are expected, beyond a show of unity. More talks are expected at the broader EU level, they said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “negotiations are moving fast with Europe,” in a virtual news conference Monday in Kyiv, he said, “Everyone told me that what happened (at the Munich Security Conference) accelerated everything,” Zelenskyy said Macron had agreed to provide him with a briefing on the conclusions from the meeting in Paris.
A strong U.S. component, though, will remain essential for the foreseeable future since it will take many years before European nations can ratchet up defense production and integrate it into an effective force. That U.S. bond also applies to dealing with war in Ukraine, said U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “U.S. support will remain critical and a U.S. security guarantee is essential for a lasting peace, because only the U.S. can deter Putin from attacking again,” Starmer wrote in Monday’s Daily Telegraph.
While many EU nations are still mulling whether to contribute troops to a potential force in Ukraine after a peace deal, Starmer said that the U.K. was “ready and willing to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by putting our own troops on the ground if necessary.
“I do not say that lightly. I feel very deeply the responsibility that comes with potentially putting British servicemen and women in harm’s way,” he wrote.
Macron last year refused to rule out sending Western troops into Ukraine if necessary.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was clear that there wouldn’t be European troops in Ukraine while the war is ongoing. “The questions about the security architecture that then have to be discussed will be discussed when the time is right,” he said on the sidelines of an election campaign event, German news agency dpa reported.
“A ceasefire must not lead to Russian rearmament, which is followed by new Russian attacks,” warned Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen ahead of the Paris meeting.
European nations are bent on boosting Ukraine where they can, and EU nations see eye to eye when it comes to upping defense spending. However, even if there is a general consensus to move beyond the goal of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense, it is hardly clear how to get to 3%.
Some EU nations insist on an agreement on joint borrowing for massive defense projects, while others say the nations that lag behind on spending should first reach 2%. That issue is also set to be discussed at the meeting.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he plans to urge other leaders to invest more in defense, ahead of his departure for the Paris meeting. Poland spends more than 4% of its GDP on defense, more than any other NATO member.
“If we want to decide about the future of Ukraine together with Ukraine, the United States, Russia, we must also show that we are capable of much more serious investment in our own defense,” he said. However, he also said that he does not envision Poland sending its own troops to Ukraine.
But some of the EU nations balked at the thought of the restrictive Elysee meeting with only a few chosen leaders while others were left in the cold. For an uncomfortable number of decisions, the EU needs the backing of all 27 nations. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has already threatened to use his veto on a number of occasions.
Slovenian President NataÅ¡a Pirc Musar said the selective list of invitees was proof that the EU member states are not treated equally. “This is not Europe that commands respect abroad. This is not the Europe that would be a serious partner to the North American ally,” she said.
Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico questioned the presence of top EU representatives at the meeting, noting that the EU has no right to decide about any deployment of foreign troops in a country.
____
Casert reported from Brussels. Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Germany, Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, Justin Spike in Kyiv, Ukraine and Karel Janicek in Prague, Czech Republic contributed to this report.
If you like your romantic comedies like you like your pizza—that is, extra cheesy—then this is the list for you. Just like the mildly addictive dairy product, the best cheesy rom-coms on Netflix are hard to resist. They are the kinds of movies that will surely brighten up your day, possibly have you reaching for the tissues (to catch those happy tears of course!), and undoubtedly will make you laugh—even if it’s sometimes at their expense. Whether you’re folding laundry and only have one eye on the screen or need an escape after a long, difficult day, these movies are sure to satisfy your viewing appetite.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Since there are so many varieties of cheesy rom-coms to choose from, we’ve broken this list down into different categories to help you find the perfect one for you. So whether you’re looking for a romance with a punny title, a sweet teenage dream, a laugh-out-loud romantic getaway or something starring Netflix’s favorite romantic lead Christina Milian, we’ve got you covered. Below, the 20 best cheesy rom-coms on Netflix to watch right now.
Lola (Victoria Justice) is too busy launchingher own wine import company to even think about love. Yet when the L.A. exec heads to Australia looking to land her first major account, she finds herself vibing with a handsome ranch hand (Netflix’s resident Aussie hunk Adam Demos) who holds the key to her professional success—and, possibly, her heart.
Experience love Italian style in this rom-com from the director of Mean Girls. La Dolce Villa stars Scott Foley as Eric, a successful American businessman who comes to Rome with every intention of convincing his daughter (Maia Reficco) not to buy a dirt cheap villa with her life savings. Best laid plans though since the former chef quickly finds himself rediscovering his passion for cooking and falling for the town’s comely mayor (Violante Placido) who shows him that you’re never too old to love again.
After a disastrous breakup, Gabriela Diaz (Christina Milian) mends her broken heart the way anyone would: she takes over an inn she won in a contest. But that’s not all: the property is in New Zealand and it’s a real fixer upper. To get it back up and running, she enlists the help of Jake, a studly local contractor with a complicated romantic past of his own (Adam Demos, again). Falling Inn Love is an enemies-to-lovers rom-com that could be the tool to fixing your own romantic woes.
Happiness for Beginners, based on the bestselling 2015 novel of the same name, stars Ellie Kemper as Helen, a recent divorcée who embarks on a beginner’s Appalachian Trail hike with a bunch of eccentric strangers. (Yes, the source material is very Wild coded.) Helen’s hope is that this scenic hiking adventure will teach her how to tackle the world on her own. But when she finds herself falling for a fellow hiker, who happens to also be her younger brother’s friend (Luke Grimes), she begins to wonder if she’d prefer to tackle life’s challenges with someone by her side.
One year after her fiancé Jason (Jay Pharoah) suddenly calls off their wedding, aspiring pop star Erica Wilson (Christina Milian, once more) books a gig in paradise, the East African island of Mauritius, only to discover she’s been hired to perform at his nuptials. Oh, and his bride-to-be (Christiani Pitts) doesn’t know about their previous engagement so Erica will have to pretend they’ve never met before. But it’s when she develops a crush on Jason’s brother, a retired Navy SEAL played by Sinqua Walls, that things really get complicated in this rom-com that doubles as the perfect getaway.
Julia (Kat Graham) always dreamed of going to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet took place—just not like this. After getting dumped by her boyfriend of four years, the dogged third-grade teacher decides to turn her couple’s trip to Italy into a solo one. From the moment she lands, everything that could go wrong does. This includes her hotel double-booking her room, which now means she’s stuck sharing a villa with a complete stranger (Tom Hopper), who is as cynical as they come about relationships. Nothing a little quality time in the City of Love couldn’t cure, right?
Lindsay Lohan is already Netflix’s reigning queen of Christmas. With Irish Wish, she becomes its high priestess of St. Patrick’s Day, too. At the wedding of her secret crush, author Peter Kelly (Alexander Vlahos), Maddie (Lohan) wishes that she was his bride-to-be. The next morning, she magically is. (There’s a fairy involved, but don’t get too caught up in the logic.) As Maddie gets to know Peter better, she begins to question whether he really is the man of her dreams. Luckily, the wedding photographer she hired (Ed Speleers) is there to help her find the answer.
While celebrating her sister’s wedding in Rome, successful art curator Beth (Kristen Bell) falls for Nick (Josh Duhamel), the best man, who, like her, is comically unlucky in love. In hopes of changing her luck, she steals from the city’s fountain of love, which is so not what Romans do. Her theft results in the throwers of those coins—played by Will Arnett, Danny DeVito, Jon Heder, and Bell’s future husband Dax Shepard—falling madly in love with her. Now she must figure out if Nick’s interest in her is for real or just the result of her magical Italian faux pas.
What if you could get a do-over with the one who got away? Well, thanks to an enchanted photo booth, Noah (Adam Devine) is about to find out. With some Groundhog Day-esque enchantment, he is able to travel back three years to the first time he met Avery (Alexandra Daddario) and blew his chances of being more than friends. The next day, she goes on to meet her fiancé Ethan (Robbie Amell). Now, using everything he knows about her, all her likes and dislikes, he must steal her heart or end up in the friend zone forever.
For two years, Zara (Joey King) has been the personal assistant and personal punching bag to self-absorbed movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron). But her job only gets more complicated once she discovers that her mom (Nicole Kidman) is hooking up with him. You can’t help but feel bad for the girl, but Kidman and Efron’s chemistry is so good, you may find yourself rooting for their May-December romance against your better judgment.
At a writer’s retreat in Morocco, broken-hearted bestselling author Katherine Loewe (Laura Dern) and adrift businessman Owen (Liam Hemsworth) have their meet-cute. While their more than 20-year age difference may give her pause, it’s his relationship status—he’s at the retreat as a plus one to his novelist girlfriend—that convinces her nothing can happen. Yet the two find themselves naturally drawn to one another, specifically their shared loneliness. Their forbidden love is what makes this late romance so thrilling.
Civil litigator Susan (Rachael Leigh Cook) doesn’t have time for anything other than work, which she often does pro bono. After a wealthy client, played by Damon Wayans Jr., convinces her to take on his case against a dating website that guarantees its users will find a match in less than a thousand dates—he’s gone on 986 and is still desperately single—she finds herself wanting to spend time with him outside of business hours, putting her professionalism at risk. It may just be a chance Susan is willing to take in this sweet rom-com that —like the Tiffany song heard throughout the film makes clear —wants you to feel less alone now.
This zany remake of the 2012 French rom-com Plan de Table follows multiple guests as they try to survive a wedding where everything that can go wrong does. When Marc (Jack Farthing), a former classmate of the bride, shows up high on cocaine and hell bent on ruining the nuptials, her brother Jack (Sam Claflin) is enlisted to stop him by drugging him with sleeping serum. As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate, he’s also trying his best to make nice with his vindictive ex-girlfriend (Freida Pinto) while attempting to reconnect with his missed connection (Olivia Munn).
First rule of wedding planning: don’t fall for the groom. But to be fair to Mary (Jennifer Lopez), a wedding planner so committed to her craft she hasn’t gone on a date in two years, she didn’t know Eddie (Matthew McConaughey), the guy who saved her from a runaway dumpster, was going to be her next client. Now that she does, she has sworn to put her feelings aside and get to work planning his spare-no-expense nuptials. What could possibly go wrong?
For fans of Beautician and the Beast: a kooky Cinderella story in which Laura Marano (channeling Fran Drescher right down to the leopard print) plays Izzy, a Manhattan hairdresser who is hired to work the royal wedding of Prince Thomas (Mena Massoud). His parents arranged the nuptials and he’s having major second thoughts. After Izzy puts the Prince of Lavania (a country east of Aldovia, FYI) in his place, he recruits the outspoken New Yorker to help him understand what life is really like beyond the palace walls.
American girl (Haley Lu Richardson) meets British boy (Ben Hardy) in JFK airport on her way to her father’s wedding in London. They spend the whole flight talking and he gives her his number when they land, but her phone dies, leading her on a wild goose chase to find him and tell him how she feels. By the end of the film based on the 2011 novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight you will be reaching for the tissues and putting an order in for an extra phone charger.
After his latest album bombs, aging rocker John Allman (Harry Connick Jr.) moves to the idyllic Mediterranean island of Cyprus to escape his life only to have his past catch up with him in the form of an erstwhile love with a big secret.
Before heading off to college, high school seniors Clara (Talia Ryder) and Aidan (Jordan Fisher) make a pact to amicably break up. To celebrate their last night together as a couple, they plan the perfect final date in which they celebrate all their relationship firsts only to have it all feel so bittersweet. Think Before Sunset for Gen Z.
In this smooch-heavy rom-com based on the 2012 novel of the same name, Elle (Joey King) attempts to enlist her not-so-secret childhood crush Noah (a floppy haired Jacob Elordi), to take part in their school’s kissing booth fundraiser in hopes of impressing the cool girls. He says no, only to end up locking lips with her at the booth—her first kiss ever—under false pretenses. But that monumental makeout session results in the pair embarking on a secret relationship that puts Elle’s friendship with her bestie, who also happens to be Noah’s little brother, at risk. Be warned: you’ll have to watch The Kissing Booth 2 and 3 to see how this whole thing ends.
Desperate to raise money for college, Brooks Rattigan (Noah Centineo) gets paid to take wealthy outcast Celia (Laura Marano) to her high school semi-formal. He’s so good at faking their relationship, Celia suggests he launch a service where (mostly rich) girls hire him to be their plus one for any occasion. She also agrees to help him win over her classmate Shelby (Camila Mendes) by pretending to be his girlfriend. But when their fake relationship becomes a little too real, Brooks must decide what kind of guy he wants to be in this romance for Some Kind of Wonderfulfans.
Nothing about Donald Trump’s hasty and illegal attempted dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—and with it, the decapitation of American power—is remotely efficient. Just this week, USAID’s now-former Inspector General found that there is currently half a billion dollars’ worth of American-grown food stranded at ports and warehouses across the country, on the verge of spoiling. That’s corn and rice and lentils and soybeans, grown in Iowa and Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma, that would have otherwise fed children in a school in Bangladesh or famished refugees at a camp in war-torn Sudan. (The Inspector General was subsequently fired for disclosing this information.)
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Similarly, there’s no efficiency being achieved by obstructing one of the most successful global health programs in history—the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief—which has saved 26 million lives over the past two decades. PEPFAR currently provides HIV treatment to over 20 million people around the world, meaning every day aid isn’t flowing inches us closer to the very outbreaks we’ve worked so hard to prevent.
Whether it’s delivering clean water to communities across Africa; or promoting economic development through education in Mali and small business support in El Salvador; or providing life-saving care in Thailand and Syria; or fighting human trafficking in Nepal and Liberia, thousands of USAID workers and contractors make miracles big and small happen every day.
But USAID succeeds as more than just a moral matter. Each year, it pours billions of dollars back into the U.S. economy, supporting farmers and businesses that provide food and other supplies. It also helps fight terrorist groups and drug cartels that endanger Americans, while deepening American values and interests in every corner of the globe. But perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of USAID’s work is its singular ability to forge relationships with unlikely partners which help combat the harmful influence of adversaries like China and Russia.
It’s no surprise, then, that Beijing and Moscow are now cheering on our sudden retreat. They’re not wasting any time filling the void, either. Within days of USAID’s closure, China sent aid and dispatched workers to take on projects we’ve abandoned in the Indo Pacific and Africa. Intended or not, that will be the enduring consequence of this episode of chaos: an emboldened China, all-too-eager to exploit American isolation to grow its own power and influence.
Like any organization, USAID is not perfect. There are inefficiencies and redundancies, and evolving challenges and emerging technologies present opportunities for improvement. It’s also entirely legitimate to question whether U.S. funding is aligned with our current priorities and interests and seek to adjust it as needed within the four corners of the law. Doing that is one of Congress’ most fundamental responsibilities—and something I was eager to work on when I became the lead Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing foreign aid last month.
But the abrupt and total shutdown of USAID—in defiance of multiple federal laws through which it was codified and funded—reveals a simple truth: The Department of Government Efficiency is not actually about achieving efficiency. Rather, it’s about Trump trying to wish away whichever parts of the government he doesn’t like. Were a purge of this nature to happen in a country halfway around the world, we would rightly call it an authoritarian takeover. The fact that it’s happening at our own doorstep doesn’t change that.
Much of what DOGE claims to have newly unearthed are either outright lies or were already publicly available for all to see. Worse, there’s no telling what funding they deem unnecessary—except for vague, baseless descriptions like “woke” and “radical” and “criminal.”
The way to make reforms is through the lawmaking process—not the lawbreaking process. If you believe that a program needs to be narrowed in scope, reformed a great deal, or even eliminated altogether, the way to do that is by proposing a law—not by rampaging the federal government and stripping it for parts. Our government with three separate but co-equal branches exists precisely to prevent this kind of anarchy operating under a thin veneer of fiscal responsibility and shrewd cost-cutting.
Moving fast and breaking things may be an acceptable way to conduct business at a tech company. But a break now, fix later strategy doesn’t work when you’re the leader of the free world. What’s on the line is not advertising revenue and the user experience, but lives and livelihoods. Hundreds of millions of them, in fact. People will die, diseases will spread, and famine will grow. Trump is trying to hoodwink Americans into thinking the only way to achieve efficiency is by exacting maximum chaos and cruelty. It’s a false choice and we must reject it.
President Donald Trump announced on Air Force One Sunday that he would impose a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, the latest move as part of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and its allies.
Tariffs refer to taxes that are placed on imported goods, or products that come into the country. Importers have to pay tariffs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which could cause companies to increase prices on their goods to make up for the additional taxes they have to pay.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The move is meant to help domestic steel and aluminum companies, but could also cause local companies that rely on foreign steel to struggle.
The U.S. is the world’s second-largest steel importer, with the top three import sources being Canada, Brazil, and Mexico, although other countries, such as South Korea, heavily rely on exporting steel to the U.S.
Steel and aluminum are heavily used in the automotive and construction industry, but are also used to manufacture goods and appliances.
The decision mirrors the actions Trump levied during his first Administration, when he enacted a 25% tariff on steel and 10% tariff on aluminum, though some countries, including South Korea were exempt.
In response to the most-recent tariff announcement, shares of major South Korean steelmakers in the country fell on the stock market Monday morning, while that of U.S. steel companies rose.
On average, the U.S. imports more than 2 million metric tons of steel mill products per month, according to data by the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, but only about a quarter of all steel in the U.S. is imported, as total steel imports have been decreasing year-over-year.
“You see these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are empty and falling down,” Trump said on the campaign trail in October 2024. “We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes for companies that are going to make their products in the USA. And we’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs.”
The U.S. imports about half of all aluminum it uses from other countries, mostly from neighboring Canada. The International Trade Administration reports that there’s been a significant increase of U.S. imports on aluminum, up 25% from 2015 to 2022.
Earlier in February, Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on most Canadian and Mexican imports, though he later decided to pause the tariffs for 30 days after negotiations with each country.
Trump also issued a 10% tariff on China which remains in place. The President said he will also charge retaliatory tariffs on other countries.
President Donald Trump is expected to attend Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans this Sunday, making him the first sitting president to do so. The President has had a complicated history with the NFL, after criticizing players who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice during his first administration.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Sunday’s Super Bowl will also be the first that will not display an “End Racism” message in the end zone in four years, with a message saying “Choose Love” to replace it.
Here’s how Chiefs and Eagles players have responded to the news.
Travis Kelce, tight end for the Chiefs, told People that it was a “great honor” to play in front of the President. “I think you know, no matter who the president is, I know I’m excited because it’s the biggest game of my life, you know, and having the president there — it’s the best country in the world — and that’s pretty cool.”
Jordan Mailata, offensive tackle for the Eagles, said during a press briefing on Feb. 4 that he wasn’t going to let the news of the President’s attendance distract him from the game. “That’s cool but Donald is not on that field. That’s cool but again that’s blocking out the noise,” he said.
‘What am I going to do thinking about Donald Trump? How is that going to make me win the game?’
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts had a simple response when he was asked if Trump’s attendance would bring any “added pressure” to the game. “No ma’am,” he said.
Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs quarterback, said that it would be “cool” to play in front of the President. “It’s always cool to be able to play in front of a sitting president, someone that is at the top position in our country.”
Historically, the rewards of being a federal employee, including the mission of public service and the value of employment stability, have come at the cost of modest monetary compensation. However, the Trump Administration’s new “deferred resignation offer” promises money to those who leave their jobs without any promises to those who stay. Federal workers to which it applies have until today to decide: Is the package worth it?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]President Donald Trump’s political opponents warn that the president will not pay up, a reasonable concern considering that he does not pay many of his bills in his business and personal life. Unions decry the plan as a scare tactic, and some employee representatives question its legality.
The scale and suddenness of this offer is unprecedented in the federal government but typical of slash-and-burn management practices espoused by Trump and his efficiency czar, Elon Musk. The offer is presented in their preferred language, as a monetary transaction: eight months of paid leave and benefits in exchange for resignation. Because they are personally motivated by material considerations, they presume that everyone must be “rational economic actors,” as rational choice theory refers to people who only care about their own self-interest.
If a federal worker did indeed trust the integrity of the offer, rational economic actors who are not already on the verge of full retirement will weigh only material considerations in their decision. They will consider the value of their remaining take-home wages through September that pays them for looking for their next job. They will consider the probability of finding private sector employment at similar or better pay before their free ride runs out. They will compare the relative job security of their public and private sector prospects in the foreseeable future. Finally, they will consider the retirement timelines and packages in each scenario. People with this worldview see only one dimension of worth: the net worth conferred by money.
But if there are enough rational economic actors in the federal workforce who accept the offer to resign, it could have sweeping unintended consequences for all of us. One is the possibility that necessary services could be disrupted, from air traffic control to tax refunds. A potentially ironic consequence of this “government efficiency” operation could be inefficiency brought on by the chaos a large exodus could cause. The plan could reduce job prospects for unemployed private sector workers who are struggling to stay afloat in an expanded employment pool. In the longer term, Trump’s ploy to improve the federal workforce could adversely affect productivity if workers who are least qualified to find alternative employment are most likely to stay behind in search of employment stability.
However, early resistance to the offer suggests an even more important factor that may foil the attempt of corporate raiders to remake the government in their image. Many of the most talented and devoted federal employees went into public service for the mission, not the money. They care about other forms of worth beyond their net worth: the intangible value of love of country that cannot be counted in dollars and the sense of self-worth conferred by a job well done.
For this reason, many federal workers may choose to stay in their positions not because they have no choice but because they choose to continue serving their country under any administration, even one that disrespects and tries to dismantle them.
Dedicated federal workers may even double down in their roles to defend their work for their country and provide necessary continuity between the previous and the present to the next presidential administration. Unlike their new bosses, they believed in the oath they took, that public service is a public trust. They did not go into public service with the logic that Trump and Musk are banking on: to get paid the most to do the least.
One evening early last year, Anne Bouverot was putting the finishing touches on a report when she received an urgent phone call. It was one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s aides offering her the role as his special envoy on artificial intelligence. The unpaid position would entail leading the preparations for the France AI Action Summit—a gathering where heads of state, technology CEOs, and civil society representatives will seek to chart a course for AI’s future. Set to take place on Feb. 10 and 11 at the presidential Élysée Palace in Paris, it will be the first such gathering since the virtual Seoul AI Summit in May—and the first in-person meeting since November 2023, when world leaders descended on Bletchley Park for the U.K.’s inaugural AI Safety Summit. After weighing the offer, Bouverot, who was at the time the co-chair of France’s AI Commission, accepted.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But France’s Summit won’t be like the others. While the U.K.’s Summit centered on mitigating catastrophic risks—such as AI aiding would-be terrorists in creating weapons of mass destruction, or future systems escaping human control—France has rebranded the event as the ‘AI Action Summit,’ shifting the conversation towards a wider gamut of risks—including the disruption of the labor market and the technology’s environmental impact—while also keeping the opportunities front and center. “We’re broadening the conversation, compared to Bletchley Park,” Bouverot says. Attendees expected at the Summit include OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Google chief Sundar Pichai, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
Some welcome the pivot as a much-needed correction to what they see as hype and hysteria around the technology’s dangers. Others, including some of the world’s foremost AI scientists—including some who helped develop the field’s fundamental technologies—worry that safety concerns are being sidelined. “The view within the community of people concerned about safety is that it’s been downgraded,” says Stuart Russell, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-author of the authoritative textbook on AI used at over 1,500 universities.
“On the face of it, it looks like the downgrading of safety is an attempt to say, ‘we want to charge ahead, we’re not going to over-regulate. We’re not going to put any obligations on companies if they want to do business in France,”‘ Russell says.
France’s Summit comes at a critical moment in AI development, when the CEOs of top companies believe the technology will match human intelligence within a matter of years. If concerns about catastrophic risks are overblown, then shifting focus to immediate challenges could help prevent real harms while fostering innovation and distributing AI’s benefits globally. But if the recent leaps in AI capabilities—and emerging signs of deceptive behavior—are early warnings of more serious risks, then downplaying these concerns could leave us unprepared for crucial challenges ahead.
Bouverot is no stranger to the politics of emerging technology. In the early 2010s, she held the director general position at the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, an industry body that promotes interoperable standards among cellular providers globally. “In a nutshell, that role—which was really telecommunications—was also diplomacy,” she says. From there, she took the helm at Morpho (now IDEMIA), steering the French facial recognition and biometrics firm until its 2017 acquisition. She later co-founded the Fondation Abeona, a nonprofit that promotes “responsible AI.” Her work there led to her appointment as co-chair of France’s AI Commission, where she developed a strategy for how the nation could establish itself as a global leader in AI.
Bouverot’s growing involvement with AI was, in fact, a return to her roots. Long before her involvement in telecommunications, in the early 1990s, Bouverot earned a PhD in AI at the Ecole normale supérieure—a top French university that would later produce French AI frontrunner Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch. After graduating, Bouverot figured AI was not going to have an impact on society anytime soon, so she shifted her focus. “This is how much of a crystal ball I had,” she joked on Washington AI Network’s podcast in December, acknowledging the irony of her early skepticism, given AI’s impact today.
Under Bouverot’s leadership, safety will remain a feature, but rather than the summit’s sole focus, it is now one of five core themes. Others include: AI’s use for public good, the future of work, innovation and culture, and global governance. Sessions run in parallel, meaning participants will be unable to attend all discussions. And unlike the U.K. summit, Paris’s agenda does not mention the possibility that an AI system could escape human control. “There’s no evidence of that risk today,” Bouverot says. She says the U.K. AI Safety Summit occurred at the height of the generative AI frenzy, when new tools like ChatGPT captivated public imagination. “There was a bit of a science fiction moment,” she says, adding that the global discourse has since shifted.
Back in late 2023, as the U.K.’s summit approached, signs of a shift in the conversation around AI’s risks were already emerging. Critics dismissed the event as alarmist, with headlines calling it “a waste of time” and a “doom-obsessed mess.” Researchers, who had studied AI’s downsides for years felt that the emphasis on what they saw as speculative concerns drowned out immediate harms like algorithmic bias and disinformation. Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, who was present at Bletchley Park, says the focus on existential risk “was really problematic.”
“Part of the issue is that the existential risk concern has drowned out a lot of the other types of concerns,” says Margaret Mitchell, chief AI ethics scientist at Hugging Face, a popular online platform for sharing open-weight AI models and datasets. “I think a lot of the existential harm rhetoric doesn’t translate to what policy makers can specifically do now,” she adds.
On the U.K. Summit’s opening day, then-U.S. Vice President, Kamala Harris, delivered a speech in London: “When a senior is kicked off his health care plan because of a faulty A.I. algorithm, is that not existential for him?” she asked, in an effort to highlight the near-term risks of AI over the summit’s focus on the potential threat to humanity. Recognizing the need to reframe AI discussions, Bouverot says the France Summit will reflect the change in tone. “We didn’t make that change in the global discourse,” Bouverot says, adding that the focus is now squarely on the technology’s tangible impacts. “We’re quite happy that this is actually the conversation that people are having now.”
One of the actions expected to emerge from France’s Summit is a new yet-to-be-named foundation that will aim to ensure AI’s benefits are widely distributed, such as by developing public datasets for underrepresented languages, or scientific databases. Bouverot points to AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s AI model that predicts protein structures with unprecedented precision—potentially accelerating research and drug discovery—as an example of the value of public datasets. AlphaFold was trained on a large public database to which biologists had meticulously submitted findings for decades. “We need to enable more databases like this,” Bouverot says. Additionally, the foundation will focus on developing talent and smaller, less computationally intensive models, in regions outside the small group of countries that currently dominate AI’s development. The foundation will be funded 50% by partner governments, 25% by industry, and 25% by philanthropic donations, Bouverot says.
Her second priority is creating an informal “Coalition for Sustainable AI.” AI is fueling a boom in data centers, which require energy, and often water for cooling. The coalition will seek to standardize measures for AI’s environmental impact, and incentivize the development of more efficient hardware and software through rankings and possibly research prizes. “Clearly AI is happening and being developed. We want it to be developed in a sustainable way,” Bouverot says. Several companies, including Nvidia, IBM, and Hugging Face, have already thrown their weight behind the initiative.
Sasha Luccioni, AI & climate lead at Hugging Face, and a leading voice on AI’s climate impact, says she is hopeful that the coalition will promote greater transparency. She says that currently, calculating the AI’s emissions is made more challenging because often companies do not share how long a model was trained for, while data center providers do not publish specifics on GPU—the kind of computer chips used for running AI—energy usage. “Nobody has all of the numbers,” she says, but the coalition may help put the pieces together.
Given AI’s recent pace of development, some fear severe risks could materialize rapidly. The core concern is that artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a system that surpasses humans in most regards—could potentially outmaneuver any constraints designed to control it, perhaps permanently disempowering humanity. Experts disagree about how quickly—if ever—we’ll reach that technological threshold. But many leaders of the companies seeking to build human-level systems expect to succeed soon. In January, OpenAI’s Altman wrote in a blog post: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI.” Speaking on a panel at Davos last month, Dario Amodei, the CEO of rival AI company, Anthropic, said that AI could surpass human intelligence in almost all things as soon as next year.
Those same titans of industry have made no secret of what they believe is at stake. Amodei has previously said he places a 10% to 25% likelihood that AI causes a societal-scale catastrophe. In 2015, months before co-founding OpenAI, Altman said “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” More recently, Altman has downplayed AI’s risks. Meanwhile, a string of safety staff have departed OpenAI, citing concerns over the company’s direction. “Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products,” former OpenAI staffer Jan Leike posted to X in May, after resigning. He previously co-led a now defunct team charged with pioneering techniques to keep smarter-than-human AI systems under humanity’s control.
Predictions of AGI’s imminent arrival could prove premature. The tech industry is notorious for bold claims and hype cycles crafted to court investors, and progress could still plateau, leaving AGI a distant prospect. Nevertheless, over the past year, AI models have demonstrated notable advances. At the beginning of 2024, the most capable model scored only 2% on a benchmark consisting of real world software engineering problems; by October, a new model achieved 49%; by December, an astonishing 71.7%. Similar leaps in performance have occurred in competition math and PhD-level science questions, with current state-of-the-art comfortably surpassing 85%. Though benchmarks are imperfect proxies for intelligence, the wider trend is unmistakable. Some observers note that this rapid progress has largely gone unnoticed by the public, perhaps because few people use AI for complex math or science in daily life. Companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are shifting their focus from user-prompted systems to creating autonomous virtual agents that can operate computers and solve problems independently.
This recent rise in intelligence has been accompanied by new deceptive abilities. In December, an experiment conducted by Apollo Research revealed that when confronted with a fictional scenario where the AI was threatened with shutdown, cutting-edge models, including OpenAI’s recent o1 and a version of Anthropic’s Claude, tried (unsuccessfully) to copy themselves to a new server. When researchers asked the models why they had tried to replicate themselves, they sometimes lied to avoid being caught—often doubling down when confronted with their lies. The same month, a test by Anthropic and the nonprofit Redwood Research, showed a version of Anthropic’s model, Claude, strategically misleading its creators during training. “Exactly the things that people have been writing about for the last 10 years are happening now,” Russell says. “As the systems are increasing their ability to reason, we see that indeed they can figure out how to escape. They can lie about it while they’re doing it, and so on.”
Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director of Mila Quebec AI Institute, and often referred to as one of the three “Godfathers of AI” for his pioneering work in deep learning, says that while within the business community there is a sense that the conversation has moved on from autonomy risks, recent developments have caused growing concerns within the scientific community. Although expert opinion varies widely on the likelihood, he says the possibility of AI escaping human control can no longer be dismissed as mere science fiction. Bengio led the International AI Safety Report 2025, an initiative modeled after U.N. climate assessments and backed by 30 countries, the U.N., E.U., and the OECD. Published last month, the report synthesizes scientific consensus on the capabilities and risks of frontier AI systems. “There’s very strong, clear, and simple evidence that we are building systems that have their own goals and that there is a lot of commercial value to continue pushing in that direction,” Bengio says. “A lot of the recent papers show that these systems have emergent self-preservation goals, which is one of the concerns with respect to the unintentional loss of control risk,” he adds.
At previous summits, limited but meaningful steps were taken to reduce loss-of-control and other risks. At the U.K. Summit, a handful of companies committed to share priority access to models with governments for safety testing prior to public release. Then, at the Seoul AI Summit, 16 companies, across the U.S., China, France, Canada, and South Korea signed voluntary commitments to identify, assess and manage risks stemming from their AI systems. “They did a lot to move the needle in the right direction,” Bengio says, but he adds that these measures are not close to sufficient. “In my personal opinion, the magnitude of the potential transformations that are likely to happen once we approach AGI are so radical,” Bengio says, “that my impression is most people, most governments, underestimate this whole lot.”
But rather than pushing for new pledges, in Paris the focus will be streamlining existing ones—making them compatible with existing regulatory frameworks and each other. “There’s already quite a lot of commitments for AI companies,” Bouverot says. This light-touch stance mirrors France’s broader AI strategy, where homegrown company Mistral AI has emerged as Europe’s leading challenger in the field. Both Mistral and the French government lobbied for softer regulations under the E.U.’s comprehensive AI Act. France’s Summit will feature a business-focused event, hosted across town at Station F, France’s largest start-up hub. “To me, it looks a lot like they’re trying to use it to be a French industry fair,” says Andrea Miotti, the executive director of Control AI, a non-profit that advocates for guarding against existential risks from AI. “They’re taking a summit that was focused on safety and turning it away. In the rhetoric, it’s very much like: let’s stop talking about the risks and start talking about the great innovation that we can do.”
The tension between safety and competitiveness is playing out elsewhere, including India, which, it was announced last month, will co-chair France’s Summit. In March, India issued an advisory that pushed companies to obtain the government’s permission before deploying certain AI models, and take steps to prevent harm. It then swiftly reserved course after receiving sharp criticism from industry. In California—home to many of the top AI developers—a landmark bill, which mandated that the largest AI developers implement safeguards to mitigate catastrophic risks, garnered support from a wide coalition, including Russell and Bengio, but faced pushback from the open-source community and a number of tech giants including OpenAI, Meta, and Google. In late August, the bill passed both chambers of California’s legislature with strong majorities but in September it was vetoed by governor Gavin Newsom who argued the measures could stifle innovation. In January, President Donald Trump repealed the former President Joe Biden’s sweeping Executive Order on artificial intelligence, which had sought to tackle threats posed by the technology. Days later, Trump replaced it with an Executive Order that “revokes certain existing AI policies and directives that act as barriers to American AI innovation” to secure U.S. leadership over the technology.
Markus Anderljung, director of policy and research at AI safety think-tank the Centre for the Governance of AI, says that safety could be woven into the France Summit’s broader goals. For instance, initiatives to distribute AI’s benefits globally might be linked to commitments from recipient countries to uphold safety best practices. He says he would like to see the list of signatories of the Frontier AI Safety Commitments signed in Seoul expanded —particularly in China, where only one company, Zhipu, has signed. But Anderljung says that for the commitments to succeed, accountability mechanisms must also be strengthened. “Commitments without follow-ups might just be empty words,” he says, ”they just don’t matter unless you know what was committed to actually gets done.”
A focus on AI’s extreme risks does not have to come at the exclusion of other important issues. “I know that the organizers of the French summit care a lot about [AI’s] positive impact on the global majority,” Bengio says. “That’s a very important mission that I embrace completely.” But he argues the potential severity of loss-of-control risks warrant invoking precautionary principle—the idea that we should take preventive measures, even absent scientific consensus. It’s a principle that has been invoked by U.N. declarations aimed at protecting the environment, and in sensitive scientific domains like human cloning.
But for Bouverot, it is a question of balancing competing demands. “We don’t want to solve everything—we can’t, nobody can,” she says, adding that the focus is on making AI more concrete. “We want to work from the level of scientific consensus, whatever level of consensus is reached.”
In mid December, in France’s foreign ministry, Bouverot, faced an unusual dilemma. Across the table, a South Korean official explained his country’s eagerness to join the summit. But days earlier, South Korea’s political leadership was thrown into turmoil when President Yoon Suk Yeol, who co-chaired the previous summit’s leaders’ session, declared martial law before being swiftly impeached, leaving the question of who will represent the country—and whether officials could attend at all—up in the air.
There is a great deal of uncertainty—not only over the pace AI will advance, but to what degree governments will be willing to engage. France’s own government collapsed in early December after Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted in a no-confidence vote, marking the first such collapse since the 1960s. And, as Trump, long skeptical of international institutions, returns to the oval office, it is yet to be seen how Vice President Vance will approach the Paris meeting.
When reflecting on the technology’s uncertain future, Bouverot finds wisdom in the words of another French pioneer who grappled with powerful but nascent technology. “I have this quote from Marie Curie, which I really love,” Bouverot says. Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, revolutionized science with her work on radioactivity. She once wrote: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.” Curie’s work ultimately cost her life—she died at a relatively young 66 from a rare blood disorder, likely caused by prolonged radiation exposure.
