Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labor in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services. But no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly.
For the past 19 months, officials in rural Martin County have been working on an experimental plan to resurrect the community's shuttered hospital. Martin General, the 43-bed facility that for seven decades served generations of residents in the Eastern North Carolina county, closed its doors in August 2023. The hospital was later placed into bankruptcy, a move that operator Quorum Health attributed to "financial challenges related to declining population and utilization trends." Ownership of the hospital eventually reverted to the county, which had been leasing the building to Quorum.
More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday. Hopkins' medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university's health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.
Republicans are looking for massive budget savings to meet their goal of fully extending President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. This is a separate process from Congress' need to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running by today or face a federal government shutdown.
Cases in the ongoing measles outbreak have risen to 258 across Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, and state health departments are urging more people to get the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In an interview with Fox News, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that "people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. And what we need to do is give them the best information and encourage them to vaccinate. The vaccine does stop the spread of the disease." But Kennedy also downplayed the safety of the vaccine and wrongly told Fox News' Sean Hannity that measles outbreaks could be driven in part by people who have waning immunity from the vaccine.