Category: Business Wires

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Six million people in Somalia are facing acute food insecurity while the World Food Program has only a tenth of the resources it had in 2022 when it helped avert famine in the drought- and conflict-stricken East African nation, the head of the U.N. agency told The Associated Press.

“We can only do the bare minimum,” WFP executive director Carl Skau said Wednesday during a visit to a nutrition center on the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu. “We’re only providing these nutrition supplies to the children that are really the worst hit.”

The reduced funds, because of cuts in international aid by donors and the redirection of resources to other humanitarian crises, meant that the WFP is unable to expand its assistance in Somalia, Skau said.

Millions of people at risk but far less aid

The WFP projects that 1.9 million children under age 5 in the country will suffer acute malnutrition this year, including nearly 500,000 who will require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition. Overall, around 30% of the population faces critical levels of food insecurity, the U.N. has said.

“We had 10 times more resources than now,” Skau said of the 2022 hunger emergency that was caused by a prolonged drought. “We were able to step in, and we prevented a famine here in Somalia.”

“We know what’s going on, we have the capacity, we have the experience of dealing with this. We just need the resources now to do it.”

The consequences of the current food shortage, which is also a result of drought, conflict and the displacement of people, are seen at the Feynuus Health Center in Mogadishu’s Kahda district. Dozens of women carrying babies waited beneath a large tree or crowded along the veranda of the corrugated-metal facility seeking help.

Inside, health workers placed children in a blue weighing sling, screened them for malnutrition, and distributed therapeutic food.

One desperate mother tells her story

Halima Mohamed Hassan, a mother of six, had walked nearly 2 miles carrying her malnourished 4-year-old child. She is pregnant, but said she hadn’t eaten for two days. Her last meal was plain rice.

Health workers treated the child she brought with a special nutrient-dense food, while Hassan said that her other children were also malnourished, but she wasn’t able to bring them to the center.

“I could not carry all of them,” she said.

Hassan fled the Lower Shabelle region four months ago after her husband died of malnutrition, she said. Food and water became scarce, and conflict made it increasingly dangerous for the family to stay.

She and her children walked for four nights before reaching a camp for internally displaced people on Mogadishu’s outskirts.

Hassan now shares a makeshift shelter with her widowed mother and her mother’s four other children. The two women look for occasional work washing clothes in nearby neighborhoods to feed their household of 12.

A health center tries its best to help

The Feynuus center receives between 250 and 350 patients daily, mainly displaced women and children from regions outside Mogadishu, said Abdirahman Barkhad, program director of Youth Link Somalia, which operates the center.

Barkhad said that about 10 nearby health and nutrition centers had closed because of a reduction in humanitarian funding, increasing pressure on those that remain.

“We have witnessed children collapsing, because their families do not have enough food,” he said.

Mohamud Moallim Abdulle, commissioner of the Somali Disaster Management Agency, described the country’s food situation as “extremely alarming.”

He said that an estimated 1.85 million children are malnourished, while around 6 million people are affected by drought, and 2 million urgently need assistance.

They don’t know where their next meal is

Skau said that mothers he met this week in the town of Burhakaba described drought, insecurity, and also rising food prices as the main drivers of the crisis. Some had lost their crops and fled their homes. Others walked for three or four hours to reach health facilities, because aid workers couldn’t reach them.

“I spoke to women with eight to 10 children,” Skau said. “They don’t know where the next meal is going to come from.”

Insecurity, with Somalia battling a 20-year-long insurgency by the al-Shabab militant group, also makes humanitarian operations more expensive. WFP must use aircraft in areas where staff and supplies can’t travel safely by road, and some communities are inaccessible, Skau said.

He said that conflict in the Middle East was adding to the pressure by driving up fuel and food prices, limiting agricultural supplies, and drawing funding toward other emergencies.

After her child received some food at the center, Hassan began the walk back to the camp they live in. Her five other children were still waiting and hungry, she said, and she would have to return with them one at a time.

CHICAGO — Meta insists it has a long history of protecting its youngest customers as it defends itself against a swath of lawsuits alleging its social media empire harms children.

In the latest such instance, the social media giant is fighting allegations in a California federal court that it contributes to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately and stealthily designing features to get children hooked on its platforms Instagram and Facebook. Four states are seeking billions of dollars in damages as well as fundamental changes to how Meta runs those apps.

Children’s mental health, and what they do and see on social media, are all issues “Meta takes seriously and tries to act on,” Paul Schmidt, a lawyer for the tech giant, said in opening statements this week.

Critics say the company’s safety record falls short and that many of its protections simply don’t work.

They include Marc Berkman, executive director at the Organization for Social Media Safety, who said Meta introduced safeguards promising to protect children in response to public pressure rather than out of concern.

There’s been a “lack of real institutional willingness to act here,” Berkman said.

Here’s a look at some of the changes Meta has introduced, along with the work advocates say could still be done.

Access to users and content-focused protections

Most of the changes Meta has introduced focus on addressing harassment and offensive content.

Instagram users have always been able to block others — and, along with Meta’s oldest crown jewel, Facebook — the app has gradually added features for reporting problematic accounts and inappropriate content.

In 2016, Instagram users were given the option to delete or filter comments they found offensive, and later added warnings that prompted users to reconsider posting potentially harmful content, as well as options to limit comments and tags on their posts.

Meta also says it prevents adults from starting private chats with teens if they are not already connected, and has increased checks to make sure users under 13 — the minimum age for holding a Facebook or Instagram account — aren’t online. Schmidt said in his opening remarks that Meta recognizes some users still sign up using incorrect birthdays but that the company takes enforcement of age limits seriously.

The company says it also posts warnings and resources at the top of Instagram search results related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, and touts its “Teen Accounts,” launched in 2024, as a safe space for teenagers online. It aligns photo and video restrictions for teen accounts with those for a PG-13 movie, unless there’s parental permission otherwise.

Critics complain these changes amount to little more than corporate posturing.

A September 2025 report from former employee and whistleblower Arturo Béjar and four online safety advocacy nonprofits accused Meta of not taking “real steps” to address youth safety, instead opting for “splashy headlines about new tools for parents and Instagram Teen Accounts for underage users.”

“We really found that overall what Meta was marketing under Teen Accounts was very lacking in actual protections,” said Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, which co-authored the report. They evaluated 47 of Meta’s 53 safety features for teens on Instagram and found 60% of them were either not available or didn’t work as advertised, Hinkle said.

Meta called the report’s findings “misleading” and “dangerously speculative.”

Scrolling and core design

Researchers say Meta’s efforts to reduce the risk of children becoming addicted to the scrolling features of social media platforms have been largely unsuccessful.

Ashley Shea, a Ph.D. candidate specializing in social media and online spaces at Cornell University, points to what academics call “attention-capture deceptive designs” that are not exclusive to Meta’s platforms. They include infinite scrolling, “casino style” pulls to refresh content, push notifications and algorithmic recommendations. Those features “prey on the cognitive vulnerabilities” of young people with developing brains, in particular the need to feel rewarded.

Meta has taken important steps to address problematic content, cyberbullies, and sexual predators, Shea said, but she has not seen the same level of effort to offset the addictive impact of attention-capture deceptive designs.

Nudges and time management controls

“There’s no question that some teens struggle to manage their time with social media,” Schmidt said Tuesday, adding that Meta’s time management tools prove its evolution on the issue. Those tools include parental supervision controls and in-app “nudges” for teen users who repeatedly look at the same type of content or spend too long on Instagram or Facebook late at night.

Hinkle notes the “entirely voluntary” time management tools are not easy to set up, and amount to “far too little, too late.”

Béjar, the former Meta employee and whistleblower, agrees. In testimony Wednesday, he said a tool called “Take a Break” is “designed to fail.” Users have to turn the feature on themselves and, he said, very few do.

Across the board, tech companies exist to maximize revenue, said Berkman, and for almost every social media platform today, that means “maximizing children using their features for as long as they can.”

Legal challenges focused on “the fact that these are defective products by design because of their features, not the content per se” is something new, Shea added. And beyond the courtroom, mounting pressure on lawmakers could bring more industrywide changes.

“The momentum only continues to grow,” she said. “Ultimately, these are for-profit companies that respond to economic pressures. And so I think that the more economic pressure they’re confronted with through these litigations, the quicker they will have to adapt.”

Wealth, perhaps second only to loyalty, has been a prized attribute for Donald Trump during his second presidency.

The number of people worth at least $100 million whom the Republican president has appointed to his administration is more than four times the combined total under the three previous presidents, according to a report from the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

It’s the numbers for the Trump administration, in the context of previous administrations, that stand out in Public Citizen’s report, published on Monday. In all, 57 Trump officials are worth at least $100 million, including 17 ambassadors and the remaining 40 in senior posts across the executive branch.

Look no further than Trump’s cabinet. Eight of its 23 members fit the category, notably Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, both billionaires.

The president, himself a billionaire, has described his inclination toward appointing the ultrawealthy as deference to financial success. And yet, Trump, who owes his White House comeback to support from middle-income, working Americans drawn to his pledge to lower everyday costs, now faces a midterm electorate decidedly less keen on his handling of the economy.

Presidents have long sought counsel from the nation’s wealthiest people and tapped some for high-profile administrative leadership roles. Likewise, presidents routinely reward wealthy and influential supporters with ambassadorships.

Among the most notable examples is Andrew Mellon, the aluminum, oil, and banking tycoon who was among the handful of the nation’s wealthiest people in the 1920s and served as treasury secretary for three presidents.

The Trump officials worth at least $100 million include Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg and Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, who are also billionaires, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special envoy Steve Witkoff, both worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

By comparison, Republican George W. Bush’s administration and Democrat Joe Biden’s each included five members worth $100 million or more. Democrat Barack Obama’s included three, the report states.

A government populated by so many of the economic elite presents potential problems, the report’s authors said.

“When the people holding the reins of government are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the ultra-rich, it leads to misplaced incentives and corruption, and begs the question, ‘Whose interests they are truly serving?” said Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s co-president.

The list does not include Trump, whose net worth Forbes estimates at more than $6 billion. Nor does it include space and social media giant Elon Musk, who advised Trump last year on an effort to reduce the federal government’s size, scope, and workforce and is the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth Forbes estimates at about $860 billion.

Trump’s views are well established: Financial success is evidence of executive mastery and negotiating strength.

“They have great competence, those people. Incredible competence. Some of the smartest business leaders,” Trump said last year in explaining why he put considerable weight on advice from business executives.

He has also pointed to investments by wealthy people as a signal of future economic growth. To encourage billionaires to deliver, Trump, in his first year back in the White House, pursued policies on artificial intelligence and financial regulation that could benefit wealthy people, along with tax cuts and reduced regulatory burdens for large-scale investments.

Still, last month, only 32% of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 40% at the beginning of his second term and as his Republican Party faces headwinds in its attempt to hold both majorities in Congress in November.

NEW YORK — Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty on Friday to federal stalking charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, admitting matter-of-factly that he trailed the executive to an investor conference in 2024 and gunned him down on a New York City street.

Mangione, 28, said he even used a ruse to glean information about the event, contacting the health insurance company ahead of time under the guise of being an investor at a multibillion-dollar firm.

“On the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan, and he died,” Mangione told the court as Thompson’s wife, Paulette, took several deep breaths and repeatedly wiped tears from her eyes. A supporter put an arm around the wife and held her tight.

Mangione is set for sentencing Dec. 18. When U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett asked whether he understood that he could spend the rest of his life in prison, Mangione answered neutrally: “Yes.”

Mangione entered the plea at a hastily scheduled hearing in Manhattan federal court, resolving one of two cases against him in connection with Thompson’s death. Mangione’s lawyers could now seek to have his separate New York state murder case thrown out on double jeopardy grounds.

Surveillance video of the ambush showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson, 50, from behind. Police say “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase used to describe how insurers avoid paying claims. That detail — and revelations that Mangione’s private writings lambasted health insurers as greedy, according to authorities — made the case a fulcrum for debate about the industry and made Mangione a cause célèbre for some of its critics.

Mangione told the court Friday that he pursued Thompson “after years of enduring severe pain from a broken back and navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system.”

Mangione never was a UnitedHealthcare customer, according to police and the company. A University of Pennsylvania graduate from a wealthy Maryland family, he was arrested five days after the shooting, when he was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa. It’s about 230 miles west of Manhattan.

Thompson led one of the United States’ largest health insurers, but he wasn’t well known outside the industry. Trained as an accountant, he had worked at parent company UnitedHealth Group Inc. for 20 years and became CEO of its insurance arm, UnitedHealthcare, in 2021. He and his wife had two sons, who were in high school when their father was killed.

Both the federal and state cases could lead to a life prison sentence for Mangione. A federal judge earlier this year tossed out additional charges that could have exposed him to a potential death penalty.

Mangione had complained about the prospect of two trials, telling a judge in February: “It’s the same trial twice. One plus one is two. Double jeopardy by any commonsense definition.”

Under New York law, a state prosecution could potentially be barred if the federal case is resolved first.

The state’s double jeopardy protections kick in if a jury has been sworn in a prior prosecution, such as a federal case, or if that prosecution ends in a guilty plea. Mangione’s cases involve different charges arising from the same course of conduct.

In a letter last month, state prosecutors objected to the possibility of a guilty plea in the federal case wiping out the state case.

Garnett has delivered some setbacks to the defense, including ruling in January that prosecutors could use items collected from Mangione’s backpack during his arrest as evidence against him.

They included a 3D-printed pistol that investigators said matched the one used to kill Thompson and a notebook in which authorities say Mangione described his intent to kill an insurance executive.

In June, Mangione’s lawyers said they would pursue a psychiatric defense in the state case but reversed course a day later. The defense, involving claims that he was suffering from extreme emotional disturbance at the time of the killing, isn’t allowed in federal court.

NEW YORK — Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty as early as Friday in the federal case accusing him of stalking and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person, who was not authorized to talk publicly about the case and spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, cautioned that Mangione could change his mind. If he follows through, it would be a stunning development in a case that rattled business leaders while galvanizing their critics.

Mangione’s lawyers, and spokespeople for the Justice Department and Manhattan federal prosecutors, declined to comment.

Mangione is accused of traveling to New York City to ambush Thompson, 50, then shooting him outside a Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4, 2024, as the executive walked to UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor conference.

Mangione is due in court on Friday for a hastily scheduled hearing in the federal case, which involves two counts of stalking. It wasn’t clear what charge or charges Mangione is expected to plead guilty to. The hearing, in Manhattan federal court, comes as his lawyers have been talking with federal prosecutors about a possible resolution to one of two criminal cases against Mangione in Thompson’s death. Previous talks in June broke down.

Mangione, 28, has been charged in both federal and state court in New York and still faces the possibility of a trial in his unresolved state case. Mangione’s state murder trial is set to begin Sept. 8. Both sets of charges carried the possibility of a life sentence.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty and has spoken out publicly against the prospect of two trials, telling a judge in February: “It’s the same trial twice. One plus one is two. Double jeopardy by any commonsense definition.”

Under New York law, a state prosecution could be barred if the federal case is resolved first, but it isn’t automatic.

The state’s double jeopardy protections kick in if a jury has been sworn in a prior prosecution, such as a federal case, or if that prosecution ends in a guilty plea. Mangione’s cases involve different charges arising from the same course of conduct.

Once Mangione pleads guilty, his lawyers could then ask the judge in the state case to throw out those charges on double jeopardy grounds. State prosecutors argue their case is distinct and double jeopardy shouldn’t apply.

Mangione’s federal charges allege that he traveled across state lines by bus to stalk and kill Thompson and that he used means such as a cell phone, the internet, interstate highways, and staying at a hostel that serves out-of-state customers while planning and carrying out the attack. The state charges pertain to the killing itself, as well as firearms offenses.

In a letter last month, state prosecutors objected to the possibility of a guilty plea in the federal case wiping out the state case.

“Obviously, any guilty pleas in these matters must account for the seriousness of defendant’s offenses, the loss of an innocent life, the impact of those crimes on the victim’s family, and the other state interests that are implicated, including the sanctity of life principle that underpins the state homicide charges,” Seidemann wrote.

Mangione’s apparent decision to plead guilty comes after a series of setbacks for his defense.

In January, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett took the death penalty off the table but ruled that prosecutors could use items collected from Mangione’s backpack during his arrest as evidence against him.

They included a 3D-printed pistol that investigators said matched the one used to kill Thompson and a notebook in which authorities say Mangione described his intent to kill an insurance executive.

In June, Mangione’s lawyers said they would pursue a psychiatric defense in the state case but reversed course a day later. The defense, involving claims that he was suffering from extreme emotional disturbance at the time of the killing, isn’t allowed in federal court.

Surveillance video of the killing showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind. Police say “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase used to describe how insurers avoid paying claims.

Mangione, an Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family, was arrested five days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., about 230 miles west of Manhattan.

He has become a cause célèbre for people upset with the health insurance industry.

An online fundraiser for his legal defense fund raised more than $1.5 million, and several dozen supporters have shown up to his court appearances, some wearing green clothing — the color worn by the Mario Bros. video game character Luigi — and “FREE LUIGI” T-shirts.