The Washington Post

More than 120 million hens have been slaughtered due to the avian influenza outbreak and egg prices have risen to record levels. In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump called the situation “out of control.” Yet for some corporate egg companies, these are good times. On Tuesday, the nation’s largest egg producer, Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., is expected to announce another round of earnings to cap three years of extraordinary profits, which have surged since the avian flu outbreak in 2022. Cal-Maine’s financial reports show it has been able to more than double its price for a dozen eggs, from about $1.30 a dozen before the outbreak to as high as $3.30 a dozen, while their feed costs to produce an egg have been relatively stable.

Americans are less interested in buying and owning electric vehicles than they were two years ago, according to polling released by Gallup. The poll shows that the number of Americans who are open to buying an EV has dropped to 51 percent in early 2025, down from 59 percent in 2023. While EV sales are still on the rise from year to year, the increase has slowed in recent months. Tesla sales in particular have plummeted as Elon Musk’s push to cut the federal workforce as head of U.S. DOGE Service has polarized the country.

I took over the Tech Friend newsletter for Shira Ovide today (she's just on vacation, no worries!). I covered the latest research from Pew and others about which jobs might be at risk as AI advances. Check it out.

Sweeping tariffs are hitting tech giants hard, shaking the industry’s confidence in a president they hoped would boost their fortunes. On Friday, China announced retaliatory tariffs that included an especially steep tax on exports of rare earth minerals essential for the computer chips that power everything from iPhones to artificial intelligence. The European Union is preparing a wide-ranging response that could include direct hits to the largest American internet and software companies. And the industry is bracing for further fallout from abroad that could include rising energy prices, restrictive data-privacy policies and taxes on digital services. https://lnkd.in/gAciPATm

A future where artificial intelligence will guide skin cancer detection is in sight, experts say, even as human care remains essential. “The whole ecosystem has really matured and we are now past the hype and the big media headlines,” says Ivy Lee, a Los Angeles-based dermatologist who chairs the Augmented Intelligence Committee at the American Academy of Dermatology. A 2017 paper in the journal Nature found that an AI model that reviewed 129,450 clinical images outperformed 21 dermatologists when diagnosing skin cancer. https://lnkd.in/g-ZqB-Sg

Jonathan Stanley had been sitting at a Barnes & Noble store for about an hour, behind a stack of his own books, when he saw a 4-year-old girl marching toward him. “I want to be an author when I grow up,” Ella Dinelli told Stanley. The girl and her mother, Taylor Dinelli, 29, agreed to use the money they had saved that afternoon for a Starbucks drink to instead buy a copy, which Stanley signed. “Ella,” he wrote, “the greatest gift you have to offer is you!” The interaction was brief — no more than a few minutes — but it would change Stanley’s life. A week after Dinelli posted a TikTok of the exchange, the video has been viewed more than 77 million times, and tens of thousands of people have commented that they had just followed Stanley’s account or bought his book, “Purposeful Performance: The Secret Mix of Connecting, Leading, and Succeeding.” https://lnkd.in/gw37KknG

Tyler Sowden was on a phone call in his family’s Cleveland home Friday when he heard a scream. Sowden, 16, rushed outside and saw black smoke pouring from a nearby house. He ran to his garage, grabbed a ladder — and filled with adrenaline — raced with the roughly 100-pound ladder past about 10 houses until he reached the one on fire. A woman, a baby and a child were on the home’s second-story porch roof. The woman screamed for help as smoke billowed behind her. Sowden set up the ladder, then climbed up and grabbed the 11-month-old with his left arm while holding the ladder with his right. https://lnkd.in/gpyjcXa7

Over the past few years, electric vehicle manufacturing facilities producing lithium batteries, car parts and critical minerals sprang up all over the United States. Drawing on cash and tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, these factories promised to provide jobs — largely in Republican areas — and to set the nation on a path to making homegrown EVs. But even before President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on imports, many of those projects were being canceled — leaving thousands of jobs and the shift to clean energy in doubt. According to data from Atlas Public Policy, a policy research group, more projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. https://lnkd.in/gyDu7XmH

Economists say the crude formula the White House used to calculate what it’s calling “reciprocal tariffs” is too simplistic to achieve its goal of wiping out U.S. trade deficits — and, for that matter, they say that goal doesn’t make sense, either. But the administration is defending its approach as a necessary step toward breaking apart a system that officials say is unfair to American workers and manufacturers. President Donald Trump’s tariff plan would impose a 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports from virtually all countries — plus an additional punitive import tax tailored for each of about 60 countries. The math used to come up with those rates is what experts are lampooning. https://lnkd.in/gMBwvgKa

The first months of President Trump’s second term have posed unexpected challenges for many corporate leaders. Executives who had soured on President Biden’s administration largely expressed optimism when Trump took office, suggesting the new White House would be better for business. But Trump’s erratic tariff strategy, erosions in stock markets, a dip in consumer confidence and warnings from economists about risks of recession have stirred doubts in the corporate suite. Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks — just as law firms, universities and others institutions have. https://lnkd.in/gXdWrBdU