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If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18th after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay. At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December. Submariners on Britain’s nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more. More

Spit in a tube and, for about $100, discover secrets held by your DNA. That was the promise of 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic-testing company. It proved popular—more than 15m customers coughed up to receive tailored reports. Insights ranged from the banal (there is a 48% chance you have freckles) to the potentially helpful (you have an increased risk of type-2 diabetes). Ultimately, though, the venture was unprofitable. On March 23rd the firm filed for bankruptcy. More

CENTRAL PARK bisects upper Manhattan, creating two neighbourhoods and, apparently, two reading cultures. On the Upper West Side, the New York Times is “a standout for us” in terms of driving book purchases, says Victoria Harty, assistant manager of the local branch of Barnes & Noble, America’s biggest bookstore chain. On the east side, meanwhile, customers prefer recommendations from the Washington Post and the Atlantic. More

If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18th after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay. At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December. Submariners on Britain’s nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more. More

President Donald Trump said he would place 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United States.”
The tariffs apply to imported passenger vehicles and light trucks, as well as key automobile parts including engines and transmissions, the White House said in a fact sheet.
Vehicles are made up of tens of thousands of parts, many of which cross back and forth over the U.S. border before a final product is completed.

The border wall is shown in a background as a semi-truck carrying Toyota trucks crosses a bridge after clearing U.S. Customs while entering the United States from Mexico along the border in San Diego, California, on March 4, 2025.
Mike Blake | Reuters

Auto stocks are digesting President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would place 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United States,” as well as certain automobile parts.
Trump’s administration had been telegraphing plans to put tariffs on the auto industry, but the effect of those moves and mechanism for enforcement are starting to take shape. Trump said the tariffs would go into effect April 2.

General Motors stock was down about 7% in early trading Thursday, while Stellantis lost more than 2%. Tesla, however, was marginally higher, while Ford Motor shares hovered around the flat line.
“In our coverage, for [original equipment manufacturers], Tesla and Ford appear to be the most shielded given location of vehicle assembly facilities although Ford does face incremental exposure on imported engines,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note Thursday. “GM has the most exposure to Mexico.”
Trump said Wednesday he would not put a tariff on vehicles that are built in the U.S.
The tariffs apply to imported passenger vehicles and light trucks, as well as key automobile parts including engines and transmissions, the White House said in a fact sheet.

The United Auto Workers union cheered Trump’s announcement.

“These tariffs are a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country, and it is now on the automakers, from the Big Three to Volkswagen and beyond, to bring back good union jobs to the U.S.,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a statement Wednesday.
Vehicles are made up of tens of thousands of parts, many of which cross back and forth over the U.S. border before a final product is completed.
Data and forecasting firm S&P Global Mobility reports there are on average 20,000 parts in a vehicle when it is torn down to its nuts and bolts. Parts may originate anywhere from 50 to 120 countries.
The firm also reports that 25 automakers on average produce 63,900 light-duty passenger vehicles in North America per day. A majority of those, roughly 65%, are assembled in the U.S., followed by 27% in Mexico and 8% in Canada.

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote Thursday that Trump’s 25% tariff could raise the price of imported cars by $5,000 to $15,000. If roughly 50% of parts in a U.S.-made car came from foreign sources, the tariff could raise the price of those cars by $3,000 to $8,000, they added.
President Trump had previously granted automakers a one-month tariff exemption for vehicles that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s trade rules of origin.
— CNBC’s Michael Wayland and Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans 10,000 job cuts at his department.
The reductions could affect teams that respond to disease outbreaks, approve drugs and help people with their insurance coverage.
Kennedy has repeatedly criticized the department he now leads.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, March 24, 2025. 
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to slash 10,000 full-time employees across different departments, as he works to reshape the nation’s federal health agencies, the department said Thursday.
Those job cuts are in addition to about 10,000 employees who opted to leave HHS since President Donald Trump took office, through voluntary separation offers. Combined, they will lead to the federal health department shedding about a quarter of its workforce, shrinking it to 62,000 employees.

HHS is a $1.7 trillion agency that oversees vaccines and other medicines, scientific research, public health infrastructure, pandemic preparedness and food and tobacco products. The department also manages government-funded health care for millions of Americans – including seniors, disabled people and lower-income patients who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act’s markets.
The department will cut jobs at divisions responsible for offering insurance to the poorest Americans, approving new drugs, and responding to disease outbreaks, according to The Wall Street Journal, which earlier reported the cuts.
The major restructuring comes as the U.S. grapples with one of the worst measles outbreaks in more than two decades, and as bird flu spreads in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows, with several recent human cases.
HHS will also drop five of its 10 regional offices, but it said essential health services won’t be affected.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said. “This Department will do more – a lot more – at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

The department said the cuts will save the government about $1.8 billion per year. The federal government spent roughly $6.8 trillion in fiscal 2024.
Here are the employees the Trump administration plans to cut, according to the Journal:

3,500 full-time employees from the Food and Drug Administration, or about 19% of its workforce
2,400 workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or roughly 18% of its staff
1,200 employees from the National Institutes of Health, or about 6% of its workforce
300 workers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or roughly 4% of its employees

Before he was confirmed, Kennedy pledged to end what he calls “corporate corruption” at federal health agencies and purge staff when he stepped into his role in the Trump administration.
He had said he would clear out “entire departments” at the FDA, saying that workers who stand in the way of approval of several controversial or dubious treatments should prepare to “pack their bags.”
Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, has made early moves that could impact immunization policy and further dampen uptake in the U.S. at a time when childhood vaccination rates are falling.
He has said he will review the childhood vaccination schedule and is reportedly preparing to remove and replace members of external committees that advise the government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions, among other efforts.
His so-called Make America Healthy Again platform also pledges to end the chronic disease epidemic in children and adults. Kennedy has been vocal about making nutritious food, rather than drugs, central to that goal.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates. More

Sandy Weill on Thursday announced a new $50 million donation to create a cancer research and treatment hub focused on immunotherapy.
The hub is in partnership with four leading research institutions.
The Weill Family Foundation said the hub will also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.

Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill announced Thursday morning a $50 million gift through the Weill Family Foundation to establish the Weill Cancer Hub East, a partnership aimed at using research on nutrition and metabolism to develop cancer treatments.
The partnership brings together four leading research institutions — with experts from Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research — to develop an immunotherapy strategy to fight cancer.

“Good things happen when people believe in cooperation,” Weill said in an exclusive interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday morning.
Weill’s latest donation marks the foundation gifting a total of more than $1 billion to nonprofits.
“With the best minds in the field armed with the most advanced research techniques, the Weill Cancer Hub East will seek to elevate immunotherapy and improve patient care for people battling cancer,” Weill said in a statement.
The new partnership will focus on investigating how nutrition and the microbes that metabolize food can influence immunotherapy and other cancer treatments. The Weill Family Foundation said the hub will also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.
Immunotherapy, unlike other therapies that target removing or attacking cancer cells directly, uses the patient’s immune system to fight the illness from the inside. The hub’s projects will focus on “reprogramming” the tumor microenvironment, the foundation said in a release, and will also offer clinical trials.

“How we can increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy across all cancer types and patients is one of the scientific questions that most needs answering,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, the dean of Weill Cornell Medicine.
The research from the new hub is meant to complement research and development out of the National Institutes of Health, Weill said, and cannot replace the work the NIH does. However, Weill added that he thinks NIH’s work may be somewhat limited.
“I think they’re not the big risk-takers that they used to be,” he said on “Squawk Box.” “I think that it’s the job of the private sector to be more of the risk-taker.”
The Weill Family Foundation previously founded another hub in 2019, called the Weill Neurohub, that pulled together researchers from University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Washington; and the Allen Institute to work on developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

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California-based KB Home is unveiling what it calls its first “wildfire-resilient” community, meeting standards that protect the homes against the three major sources of ignition during a wildfire.
As climate change causes more severe drought in more areas of the country, focus is shifting to fire-resistant homes and communities.
The homes range from $1 million to the low millions, which tends to be a move-up price in the area of Escondido, just outside San Diego.

KB Home’s new wildfire-resilient neighborhood in Escondido, California.

Just months after raging wildfires destroyed thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area, California-based KB Home is unveiling what it calls its first “wildfire-resilient” community.
The development, in Escondido, just outside San Diego, will have 64 single-family homes when completed that all meet the wildfire resilience standards developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a nonprofit, scientific research and communications organization supported by property insurers. These standards are designed to protect the homes against the three major sources of ignition during a wildfire: Flying embers, flames and radiant heat.

A handful of homes in the development are now complete, with roughly 20 homes already sold. Three homeowners have moved in, according to KB Home.
The homes are built with covered gutters, enclosed eaves, noncombustible siding — like stucco and fiber cement — tempered-glass windows, and non-combustible patios, doors and roofing. They have six-inch vertical clearance using the concrete foundation, stucco and stone. They also incorporate defensible space with low-combustible vegetation at least 5 feet from the homes. Metal fencing is used throughout the neighborhood.
Steve Ruffner, regional general manager of KB Home’s coastal division, said he and his colleagues saw a fire-resistant home demonstration by IBHS at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference last summer and were impressed by the opportunity this type of community presented. Since KB Home had already broken ground on the development, they had to change gears quickly to incorporate the fire-resilient components.
“We had to change the architecture on the fly to a more stucco-oriented architecture with fire-resistant shutters, or fire-free shutters and doors and tempered windows. We were able to do that really quickly with the city, because they wanted to work with us. They really understood that this was important for their city,” Ruffner said.
He called it more of a research and development project to see what the costs might be and how to work with trade partners to lower that cost, although he wouldn’t say how much those costs increased.

KB Home’s new Wildfire-Resilient Neighborhood in Escondido, CA.

The homes range from $1 million to the low millions, which tends to be a move-up price in that area for single-family, detached homes.
“We’re trying to get the cost to a reasonable place, because we really specialize in first-time buyers and first-time move-up buyers. So we want to make sure we can get this in a good place where it’s affordable to do it and it’s also got a good payback to the customer in a form of safety,” he added.
As climate change causes more severe drought in more areas of the country, focus is shifting to fire-resistant homes and communities.
During the the Palisades Fire in January, some homes that had been specifically built to fire-resistant standards remained unscathed while everything around them was destroyed. These types of homes, however, are largely one-offs by custom builders.
There has been progress in California on a home-by-home basis, according to IBHS, but KB Home is the first big production builder in the country that has designed and is fully building out 64 homes all to meet the wildfire-prepared neighborhood standard.
Among the specifications, homes are spaced 10 feet apart to help slow the progression of a fire.

KB Home’s new wildfire-resilient neighborhood in Escondido, California.

“This subdivision built by KB Home, it’s really the test bed to show this and demonstrate it,” said Roy Wright, CEO of IBHS. “I know that KB Home already has two other projects here in Escondido, looking at duplexes and other kinds of town homes, and I do imagine that other builders are going to quickly follow suit. They’re going to be building the homes that Californians want to buy.”
Wright emphasized that part of the draw is not just to build a home that is survivable, but also one that is insurable. Insurance companies have been pulling out of California in droves, leaving homeowners with soaring costs and some without insurance entirely.
Though the homes are billed as fire-resilient, that doesn’t mean they are entirely risk-free. Homeowners and cities are going to have to make changes when it comes to non-combustible landscaping, elevations and even design. The real test will come in the future, should the community be in the line of a wildfire.
“Nothing is ever fireproof. We’re always just seeking to try to narrow those paths of destruction,” said Wright. More