Speaking with FRANCE 24’s Sharon Gaffney, David Sacks, Fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that Trump “could choose to change US policy towards Taiwan and Congress only has so many things that it can do to try to rein that in”. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese ​President Xi ‌Jinping are holding two days of meetings on Thursday and ⁠Friday where the issue of Taiwan, which Beijing views as its own territory, is certain to come up.

Meta founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company’s Meta Connect conference, which offers a glimpse into what the tech giant sees as the future, will take place September 23–24. The conference is typically a major event for the company. Last year, Meta used the stage to debut its AI glasses.

Though little is known about what Zuckerberg plans to showcase this year, he has at least offered a preview of the conference vibes via a new Spotify playlist.

Shared alongside the announcement, the “Connect 2026 Vibes” playlist consists of five extremely mainstream, EDM-adjacent pop tracks, including Jack Harlow’s new release “Say Hello” (perhaps best known for the terrible hat Harlow wore while promoting it), a remix of Tame Impala’s “Dracula,” and “Born Again” by Thai artist Lisa featuring Doja Cat and RAYE. The overall effect is less “visionary tech summit” and more “college party hosted by a startup accelerator.”

Zuckerberg has revealed increasingly more about his music taste in recent years, often while trying to project a looser, cooler public image. Last year, for his wife’s 40th birthday, he dressed up as Benson Boone. He also shared an acoustic version of “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz that he recorded with T-Pain, with the pair billing themselves as “Z-Pain.”

His Spotify profile offers additional clues. Artists Zuckerberg follows include millennial-era staples like Taio Cruz, Gym Class Heroes, Cher Lloyd, and fun., alongside bigger mainstream names like Florence and the Machine, Drake, Lady Gaga, and Pitbull.

The only other playlist Zuckerberg has publicly shared, “2004 facebook coding jams,” paints a noticeably angstier picture, featuring tracks from Trapt, Hoobastank, and Linkin Park. (Zuck still follows Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda’s solo work on Spotify.)

Zuckerberg’s image may have evolved over the years, from the Caesar cut to curls and oversized chains, but one thing has remained constant: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk. The track appears on both the Connect 2026 playlist and his old “2004 facebook coding jams,” making it feel the closest we’ll get to a personal mission statement.

“I think we should have had that challenging dialogue sooner. And perhaps in such cases, we should have rethought our military presence sooner.” In his interview with FRANCE 24, RFI and TV5Monde, French President Emmanuel Macron reflected on the state of relations between France and the Sahel countries. Here’s a part of his interview.

A few years ago, I sat across from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company who told me, “We can’t find people who can solve problems.” When I asked him where he thought the issue began, he answered, “Somewhere in college, I guess.” 

That moment made something painfully clear: He was looking in the wrong place. The problem didn’t start in college. It started in kindergarten. 

CORPORATE AMERICA IS FIGHTING THE WRONG TALENT BATTLE 

American CEOs and HR leaders are losing sleep over talent shortages, skills gaps, and workforce readiness. They pour billions into recruitment, retention, and employee training. In 2025, U.S. corporations spent an estimated $102.8 billion annually on training efforts, much of it reactive and downstream. 

At the same time, the global skills shortage could cost companies $5.5 trillion in lost annual revenue this year. This reveals an uncomfortable truth: While companies fight over the existing talent pool, they’re doing almost nothing to expand it. 

Workers who participate in structured upskilling programs earn more annually, and self-funded upskilling can increase earnings even further. Now imagine the return if that kind of skill-building started years earlier, before students ever enter the workforce. 

Yet corporate America continues to treat education as charity rather than infrastructure. Companies fund programs, sponsor events, and write checks under the banner of social impact, while the systems that actually shape talent remain underbuilt. 

THE WORKFORCE CRISIS IS UPSTREAM 

Here’s what should keep leaders up at night: the World Economic Forum reports that 40% of workers will need reskilling within six months, and 94% of business leaders expect employees to learn new skills on the job. 

The problem is obvious: We are trying to retrofit a workforce that should have been developed more intentionally from the start. 

Education isn’t separate from workforce development—it is workforce development. And right now, we’re systematically underinvesting in the only people capable of building the pipeline at scale: America’s 3.2 million K-12 teachers. 

They are the largest workforce development system in the country. We just don’t treat them that way. 

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN THE SYSTEM WORKS 

Having worked with tech and education industries, I’ve spent the last 20 years in communities that corporations often overlook, like rural Appalachia, high-poverty urban districts, and tribal nations. Places where talent supposedly doesn’t exist. 

In reality, talent is everywhere. What doesn’t always exist is the infrastructure to develop it. 

In Granby, Colorado, educators worked with students to build clubs, electives, and student mentoring teams around what students said they actually wanted. Within one cohort, every student was engaged in at least one program. That kind of agency—feeling heard, belonging, having a stake in your own education—is the foundation of workforce readiness. You can’t train confidence into a 22-year-old who never had it at 13. The students did not suddenly become more capable. The system became more connected. 

This proves that talent isn’t missing. The connection points are. Those connection points are teachers who listen, who build systems around what students actually need (pulling in industry when they can), and who understand that workforce readiness doesn’t start with a résumé. It starts with a student who believes they have something to contribute. 

THE BUSINESS CASE NO BOARD CAN IGNORE 

While companies spend billions a year trying to fix talent gaps mid-career, the most powerful intervention point is far earlier. The average educator influences 3,000 students over a career. Upskill dozens of educators, and you’ve improved a regional pipeline. Support 100+ educators, and you’ve reshaped the talent profile of an entire region. 

This isn’t just competitive with traditional workforce investments. In many cases, it is the higher-leverage move. 

I don’t believe we have a pure talent shortage. We have a long-term design failure between what employers need and what students experience from ages 5 to 18. 

WHAT REALLY MOVES THE NEEDLE 

After decades of doing this work, here’s what doesn’t make a long-term impact: 

• One-off teacher appreciation events 

• Donations that don’t build capacity 

• STEM programs that look good in press releases with no longevity 

• Scholarships that help individuals, but not systems 

And here’s what does: 

• Sustained, multi-year educator development 

• Real industry integration—educators inside companies and companies inside classrooms 

• Systems-level partnerships across entire districts or regions 

• Technology and capacity-building that give under-resourced communities access to modern problem-solving tools 

The model works, but what’s missing is scale. 

THE CHALLENGE TO CORPORATE AMERICA 

When companies struggle to find qualified workers, the first place to look is upstream. Ask yourself: 

• Are we investing in the schools in our footprint? 

• Are we building relationships with educators? 

• Are we creating pathways from classrooms to careers? 

If the answer is, “we donate to education,” it is worth asking a harder question: Does that donation build lasting capacity, or does it fund an activity that disappears when the budget cycle ends? 

You would never ignore the earliest stages of your supply chain. It makes little sense to ignore the earliest stages of your talent chain. 

The future workforce is already in classrooms. The question is whether companies will show up or keep spending billions downstream, only to wonder why nothing changes. It is time to stop treating education as philanthropy and start treating it as one of the most important talent investments a company can make. 

Kellie Lauth is the CEO of MindSpark. 

In tonight’s edition, sovereignty was the buzzword of Kenyan President William Ruto at the close of the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi. Also, in the biggest change on the ground in months,  Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have retreated from seized territory in the DRC. And as the war in Iran continues to disrupt exports around the world, Zimbabwe’s horticulture industry is also struggling with rising shipping costs, which are threatening vital exports. 

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Speaking at the Bank of America Housing Symposium in June 2025, Toll Brothers CEO Doug Yearley—who has since stepped down—acknowledged that parts of Arizona, Florida, and Texas were dealing with spec inventory “overhangs” that he said would eventually “clean up [over time] because the builders are starting fewer spec homes in the softer market, and I think that will naturally work its way out.”

At the height of the Pandemic Housing Boom, when nearly everything homebuilders were building was flying off the shelves, there were only 32,000 unsold completed new-build homes in March 2022. Once the boom fizzled out, that figure quickly began to rebound—especially in Sun Belt boomtowns—reaching a high of 134,000 unsold completed new-build homes by December 2025.

However, data published this week shows that the number of unsold completed new-build homes has, at least for now, fallen to 119,000 as of March 2026. While the count of unsold completed new-build homes is still up year-over-year (there were 113,000 unsold completed in March 2025), the decline over the past few months has been larger than seasonality alone would suggest.

To put the number of unsold completed new single-family homes into better historic context, we have the ResiClub Finished Unsold New Homes Supply Index. It accounts for unsold completed inventory relative to new home sales. A higher index score indicates a softer national new construction market with greater supply slack, while a lower index score signifies a tighter new construction market with less supply slack. Over the past few months, that reading has almost drifted back down into the “historically normal” range.

After experiencing a softer 2025 than expected—and greater-than-expected margin compression—many giant homebuilders told analysts heading into 2026 that they’d pivot toward fewer spec builds and more build-to-order homes. The reason was simple: build-to-order margins are materially higher. Built-to-order homes tend to generate higher margins because they’re sold before construction begins, reducing inventory carrying costs and the risk of having to deploy larger incentives to sell them.

Doing fewer specs and starts in softer pockets of the Sun Belt, has already helped some of the builders reduce their count of unsold completed homes. Just look at America’s largest homebuilder D.R. Horton.

Here’s what Paul Romanowski, CEO of D.R. Horton, said during the company’s April 21, 2026 earnings call:

“Unsold homes [for us] are down 25% from December and 35% from a year ago, with both unsold homes as a percentage of total inventory and completed unsold inventory at their lowest levels since fiscal 2023 for homes closed in the second quarter.”

“We expect starts in the third quarter to be lower than the second quarter, and we will continue to manage our inventory levels and start space based on market conditions.”

While the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t give us a greater market-by-market breakdown on these unsold completed new-builds, we have a good idea where they are based on total active inventory homes for sale (including existing)—likely much of it is in the Mountain West and Sun Belt, particularly around the Gulf.

We should point out that while many markets in Texas and Florida experienced significant post–Pandemic Housing Boom inventory bounce back, that inventory growth has decelerated in recent months. In fact, many parts of Florida are now seeing year-over-year active inventory for sale declines. The heavy discounting by homebuilders in weaker pockets of Texas and Florida to move unsold inventory—combined with reduced housing starts and fewer spec builds in those pockets heading into 2026—has, in part, contributed to that slowdown in inventory growth.

Unlike the existing-home market—where U.S. existing-home sales are still -23.6% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels—U.S. new-home sales are essentially on par with pre-pandemic 2019 levels right now 👇

Why haven’t U.S. new home sales come down more given the affordability picture and what’s happened in the existing-home market?

A lot of it boils down to the fact that many homebuilders since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out have done larger affordability adjustments—including everything from bigger buydowns, more money back at close, and even outright price cuts—in order to keep moving product when they run into softness in a given neighborhood. The most aggressive homebuilder on the incentive front is Lennar. Last quarter, Lennar spent the equivalent of 14% of the final sales price on sales incentives. For a $400,000 home, that translates to $56,000 in incentives. Lennar’s cycle low in Q2 2022, when it spent 1.5% of the final sales price on sales incentives.

In order to do bigger incentives—and pay for sticky land prices—homebuilders have been compressing margins. Indeed, all 11 of the major publicly traded U.S. homebuilders that ResiClub tracks the most closely have seen year-over-year gross margin compression.

So, in other words, big homebuilders have been willing to adjust prices and incentives in order to maintain sales volume, while existing home sellers, in aggregate, have fought harder against price adjustments—at the expense of speed of sale and turnover. Another factor is that homebuilders’ willingness to sell isn’t impacted by so-called affordability “lock-in.” Ever since mortgage rates spiked, high switching costs have left many homeowners either unwilling or unable to sell and buy at today’s prices and rates, further suppressing existing-home turnover.

Before we conclude today’s new construction report, here’s a historic look at nationally aggregated permits:

As the number of confirmed hantavirus cases from the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius reaches 9, social media users firmly revived Covid-19 era conspiracy theories of “bioweapons” and “plandemics,” making the online rhetoric feel eerily familiar. Among these resurrected theories, the name of American billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has once again emerged.