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Duncan McIntyre founded Highland Electric Fleets in Massachusetts in 2018 after noticing his son's school bus tailpipe exposed children to diesel exhaust. The company, which finances and manages the transition to electric school bus fleets, now generates roughly $50 million annually, is pursuing contracts in about 200 cities, and has secured a sponsorship role with the 2028 Olympics.
British Columbia has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman seeking compensation for the demolition and rebuilding of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where an 18-year-old shooter who had used ChatGPT to plan an attack killed five students and a staff member before dying by suicide in February. The province says the shooter also killed his mother and half-brother beforehand, and that the school was torn down in August because survivors were too traumatized to return.
The Canadian province of British Columbia has sued OpenAI, alleging that its ChatGPT chatbot assisted an individual in planning a mass shooting at a school. The lawsuit claims OpenAI failed to alert law enforcement despite warning signs and points to broader gaps in the product's safety safeguards.
A Bloomberg report citing Pentagon investigators found that the February 28 double-tap strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school, which killed over 150 people including at least 123 children, resulted from outdated intelligence compounded by heavy reliance on an AI targeting system. Investigators described the tragedy as a cascade of small errors rather than a single mistake, involving technology similar to systems used to fast-track thousands of strikes earlier in the war.
A UN fact-finding mission investigating the February conflict between Iran and the US has concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe US forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school and a sports facility in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including roughly 120 children. Investigators said the US relied on faulty intelligence about a commander's presence and failed to verify the target, calling the strike reckless and an indiscriminate attack amounting to a war crime. The same mission also found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity while suppressing anti-government protests that began in December.
A study finds that children who received school meal programs went on to earn more income as adults compared with peers who lacked such access. Researchers tracked long-term economic outcomes to establish this connection between childhood nutrition support and later earnings.
Vermont's Mountain School enrolls high schoolers for roughly $40,000 per semester, having them cook, clean, farm and care for animals on its 418-acre campus instead of following a typical classroom schedule. About 30% of students receive financial aid, and many come from wealthy families unfamiliar with basic chores like cleaning a composting toilet or sweeping a floor.
A new NBER working paper from researchers at Harvard and the Norwegian School of Economics surveyed over 9,000 workers and found that time spent in meetings was the strongest predictor of wage growth among all workplace activities studied. Meetings consume about 12% of work hours on average, and the study found firms with more meetings tend to be more successful overall, while employees attending more meetings saw greater pay and career progress.
A new study examined whether phone tutoring could offset learning losses when schools close, finding that students who received such tutoring showed measurable gains in math performance compared to peers without access to it. The research points to remote, low-tech tutoring as a viable stopgap during disruptions to in-person schooling.
A study spanning randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda found that 20-minute weekly tutoring calls to primary-school children produced substantial learning gains during COVID-19-related school closures. The approach paired widely available mobile phones with tutoring tailored to each child's current skill level, costing about $11 per child, and worked whether delivered by government teachers or NGO staff.
A study led by Oxford researcher Noam Angrist tested a low-cost intervention combining text-message nudges and a weekly 20-minute phone call from a teacher to support children's learning when schools shut down. The randomized trials, involving more than 16,000 households across India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda during COVID-19 closures, followed an earlier pilot in Botswana and were published in Nature.
A new Nature study by Angrist and colleagues examined how remote phone-based tutoring affected children's learning during periods when schools were shut, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research found strong evidence that this low-tech approach helped students keep learning despite the disruption, offering a rare data-backed solution to an otherwise poorly understood problem.