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Jeffrey Epstein has been a topic of national conversation for years now, but Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, thinks something is missing from the dialogue.

The federal government’s student loan program has operated under the same roof for 45 years. That just changed.The Trump administration announced March 19 that it is transferring management of the nation’s nearly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio from the Department of Education to the Treasury Department. The move, formalized in a 17-page interagency agreement, is the largest single step yet in President Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to dismantle the Education Department.For the 43 million Americans with federal student loan debt, the immediate message from officials is straightforward: Nothing changes right now. But the longer arc of this shift carries real consequences worth understanding.What the transfer of student loans to the Treasury Department actually meansThe agreement is structured in three phases. The first, which takes effect immediately, hands Treasury operational control of more than $180 billion in defaulted loans, PBS reported. These cover approximately 10 to 12 million borrowers who are either in default or in late-stage delinquency, representing about 11% of the total portfolio.More Personal Finance:Why selling a home to your child for a dollar can backfireElon Musk says ‘universal high income’ is comingFTC, 21 states sue Uber over ‘shady’ subscription billingThe second phase, with no set timeline, would extend Treasury’s reach to non-defaulted loans. The third phase would hand Treasury full operational control of the entire federal student lending program, including administration of FAFSA and major aid programs like Pell Grants.”Treasury has the unique experience, the operational capability, and the financial expertise to bring long overdue financial discipline to the program and be better stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who called the planned transition a “hard reset,” per the Washington Times, framed the move as a recognition that the Education Department was never designed to function as the country’s fifth-largest bank.Why is Treasury overtaking student loans, and why now?The Trump administration has been systematically moving Education Department functions to other federal agencies through interagency agreements. This is the tenth such agreement and by far the largest. Congress holds the authority to formally close the Education Department, but the administration has been dismantling it piece by piece without waiting for that vote.Officials pointed to the scale of the default problem as justification. Nearly a quarter of all borrowers are currently in default, according to NPR, and fewer than half are actively making payments. The administration argues the Education Department’s focus on loan forgiveness under the Biden administration contributed to that deterioration.Treasury brings tools Education does not have in the same way. Its debt collection infrastructure handles roughly $80 billion in IRS offsets annually and has established mechanisms for wage garnishment and tax refund seizure that are more aggressive than what Education typically deployed.

The Treasury Department is better equipped to oversee student loans and can be a better steward of taxpayer dollars, says Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.Shutterstock

What student loan borrowers need to know right nowOfficials have been explicit that borrowers do not need to take any action during the transition. Loan servicers remain the same. Repayment plans remain unchanged. The administration emphasized on a call with reporters that the goal is continuity during the handoff.What stays the same for now:Borrowers continue making payments to their existing servicer, whether Navient, MOHELA, Aidvantage, or others.Current repayment plans, including income-driven options, remain in effect during the transition.No immediate changes will be made to interest rates, balances, or forgiveness eligibility.The concern among borrower advocates is what comes next. Protect Borrowers Policy Director Aissa Canchola Bañez warned that the transfer could “exacerbate borrower confusion and push relief further out of reach,” The Hill reported. Critics also note that federal law requires student loans to be overseen by the Education Department, raising the likelihood of legal challenges from multiple state attorneys general.The broader student-loan picture for investors and higher educationThe student loan portfolio is the largest consumer debt program in the United States, and its management has direct implications for servicer companies, college enrollment trends, and the broader consumer economy.Treasury’s more aggressive collection posture on defaulted loans could accelerate recoveries on the $180 billion initial tranche, which would be a positive for federal finances. But a tougher collections environment also means more financial pressure on millions of households that are already stretched.For higher education institutions, the uncertainty around FAFSA administration moving to Treasury in a later phase adds another layer of operational risk on top of the endowment tax increases and enrollment pressures they are already navigating. Community colleges, which depend on federal aid for a significant share of their revenue, face the most direct exposure if the transition creates processing disruptions.The administration insists the transition will be orderly. Whether that holds once the later phases begin is the question investors and borrowers alike will watch closely.Related: Student loan backlog shrinks, but 576K borrowers can’t get relief

Once a chain files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it runs the risk of being forced to close part, or all, of its operations. In some cases, the bankruptcy court can even force it into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.As part of the process, the court will consider whether the company can satisfy its creditors and vendors by remaining in operation. It also tests whether it’s likely to be worth more as an ongoing concern or having its assets sold off.”Under this test, the court will look at the entire financial picture of the debtor, including its actual prospective income, its assets, and the liens on those assets, and will determine whether or not, after proceeding through the reorganization process, a viable company is likely to emerge. If the debtor has little income or the ability to generate income, there is little to rehabilitate,” law firm Newman, Simpson, and Cohen shared on its website.That’s the situation facing FAT Brands, which has been closing Fatburger and Fazoli’s Pizza locations as it tries to avoid a forced bankruptcy sale.FAT Brands closes select restaurantsAs part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, FAT Brands has been closing select restaurants. That has included closing 39 Smokey Bones locations, while turning others into its Twin Peaks sports bar concept.The chain has not shared a list of specific shutdown plans, but its Fatburger and Fazoli’s Pizza Brands have faced selective shutdowns.ALSO READ: BBQ chain shuts 14 more locations amid Chapter 11 bankruptcy”FAT Brands plans to use the filings to deleverage the balance sheet, maximize value for its stakeholders, and support continued growth of its brands,” the company shared in a press release. “FAT Brands’ portfolio of 18 restaurant concepts encompasses more than 2,200 locations worldwide. Iconic brands such as Fatburger, Johnny Rockets, [and] Round Table Pizza, among others, are expected to remain operating as usual during the Chapter 11 process.”As part of its Chapter 11 process, FAT Brands will be trying to renegotiate certain leases, and when it fails to do that, certain restaurants will close, according to a motion filed in U.S. bankruptcy court.”The Debtors seek entry of an order, substantially in the form attached heretoauthorizing the Debtors to reject certain unexpired leases of non-residential real property,” FAT Brands asked the court. In addition to the Fatburger and Fazoli’s locations, which have closed, the parent company asked the bankruptcy court to terminate leases for three of its other brands, according to documents filed on PacerMonitor.More Restaurants Chipotle’s new consumer strategy raises eyebrowsBurger King revives iconic kids’ meal toys after 22 yearsWalmart surprises shoppers with bold new restaurant offeringThe Beverly Hills, Calif.-based restaurant chain operator filed a motion in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas on Jan. 27, asking for permission to reject the leases of 23 Smokey Bones, seven Yalla Mediterranean, and two Johnny Rockets locations nationwide.”FAT Brands, which operated over 150 company-owned restaurants when it filed its petition, would eliminate over $492,000 in monthly lease payments if the court approves the motion to reject the 32 restaurant leases, court papers said. Fatburger closuresIt’s important to note that since most FAT Brands locations are franchised, it’s difficult to know which locations are closing due to the Chapter 11 filing, and which ones were closed for normal business or operating reasons.New Braunfels, TX: Fatburger permanently closed less than two years after opening as part of a Texas expansion, according to MySanAntonio.San Antonio, TX region: Several Fatburger locations have shut down amid parent company struggles, added MySanAntonio.Franchise actions: Some franchisees are shutting down Fatburger locations or repurposing sites to distance from corporate issues, reported Fast Company.Fazoli’s closuresIndianapolis area, IN: Three locations in Indianapolis and one in Carmel permanently closed following parent company pressures, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal.Michigan locations: Restaurants in Walker and Muskegon were permanently shut, leaving only a few remaining open locations, reported WGRD.

Fatburger could be sold as part of a larger asset sale.Shutterstock

FAT Brands’ creditors want a saleFAT Brands faces pressure from its creditors, who filed a court document calling for the liquidation of the company’s assets.“One of the Debtors’ main goals for Mediation is to gain alignment on a path forwardfor these Chapter 11 cases. At this time, the Debtors believe that potential going-concern asset sales may be value-maximizing and that the proposed Bidding Procedures are designed to maximize the value the Debtors may receive from any such sale(s),” according to the documents filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.The sale will be challenging for a number of reasons.“FAT Brands has a somewhat atypical financing structure, which adds a bit of complexity, but from a big picture standpoint, it’s a typical bankruptcy because the bankruptcy will provide an opportunity for the company to get back on its financial footing,” Jerry Bregman, bankruptcy expert and attorney at BG Law, told Nation’s Restaurant News.A sale may actually improve operations for the individual brands.“There are a lot of shared costs that can be reduced, and there are efficiencies that can be gained from that collection of brands. It’s a positive cash-generating business, however, it’s overleveraged,” he added.Related: Another Mexican restaurant chain files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

U.S. stocks finished sharply lower on Friday, as investors wrapped up another bruising week.

Taylor Sheridan’s “The Madison,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, concludes this weekend with three more episodes. Find out what time they will be available on streaming.

Trump has repeatedly claimed Iran’s military capabilities are crippled as the U.S. has deployed more forces to the Middle East.

Wall Street fears higher prices and slower growth will sink all stocks — but small-caps and housing hold their own.

Even a tiny stand may just be lost in a crowded hall, or may halt people on their way. The variation is hardly due to budget. It is elegant in clarity, layout and message.
I have witnessed an example of a brand that had very little room to be able to beat larger brands because in essence, they knew what they intended to do and built the whole thing around that purpose.
When you are going to exhibit in the near future, ask yourself: do visitors get your offer in five seconds? Otherwise, you are already losing your attention. It is time to dissect how to make even a small booth a powerful business instrument and get actual leads not only foot traffic.
Clear Goals Before Booth Design
Before you think about colors, banners, or furniture, define one clear goal. Not three. Not five. Just one. Do you want leads? Demo bookings? Direct sales? This decision shapes everything that follows.
From experience, booths with a single goal perform up to 40% better in lead conversion, simply because the message stays focused. When teams try to do everything, they confuse visitors.
Set simple metrics:

number of conversations
qualified leads
scheduled follow-ups

Also, match your goal with your audience. If your target is decision-makers, your booth should support short, efficient talks. If it’s general visitors, focus on quick engagement.
Clarity at this stage saves money, time, and effort later.
Layout Planning for Limited Floor Area
Space is limited, but smart layout changes everything. This is where many brands fail—they overfill the booth. The result? Visitors hesitate to step in.
With 10×10 booths, the best approach is simple: open space, clear zones, and easy movement. You don’t need more elements you need better placement.
Use this structure:

open entry area with no barriers
central focus point for your main offer
side space for short conversations

Avoid placing tables at the front. It creates distance. Instead, keep the entry open so people can walk in without thinking.
Storage is often ignored. Hide boxes and materials. A clean space feels more professional and invites interaction.
Even small changes like shifting a display slightly can improve flow. When visitors move freely, they stay longer. And time inside your booth directly increases the chance of a conversation.
Visual Message That Can Be Read in Seconds
People don’t read booths. They scan them. You have about 3–5 seconds to communicate your value. If your message isn’t clear in that time, it won’t be seen at all.
Start with one strong headline. Not a slogan. A clear benefit.
Bad example:
“Innovative Solutions for Modern Businesses”
Good example:
“Cut Your Marketing Costs by 30% in 60 Days”
See the difference? One is vague. The other is direct and measurable.
Keep text minimal. Use visuals that support your message. Research shows that visual content is processed much faster than text, so images should carry meaning, not decoration.
Here’s a simple checklist:

one headline (max 10 words)
one supporting visual
one clear call to action

Lighting also matters more than most expect. Poor lighting reduces visibility and makes even a good design look weak. Use focused light on key elements.
Staff Actions That Increase Booth Visits
The most suitable booth design cannot work without the appropriate individuals in the booth.
Tourists do not interact with buildings that they interact with people. I have witnessed more mediocre booths outshine great ones just because the employees were trained to be that way.
Start with body language. Being behind a table and crossing your arms would give space. It is inviting to talk to a person standing in a general position near the aisle.
Train your team to:

acknowledge visitors in less than 3 seconds.
try to ask just one single question, not to pitch.
listen more than they speak

As an illustration, ask: rather than telling you about our product, ask:
 What are you seeking during this event?
This minor change enhances interaction. Event studies indicate that the more active the staff is in a booth, the more interactions will take place.
Also, limit phone use. A single distracted member of the team can decrease trust. People notice everything. Brief talks are better than lengthy speeches. Concentrate on initiating conversations, but not making deals on hand.
Tools That Improve Visitor Interaction
Aids ought to facilitate and not kill contact. The idea is not complicated, just to maintain visitors interested to the extent of engaging them in an actual conversation.
In the case of 10×10 booths, there will be limited space, and each tool will need a purpose. Screens, tablets and demos are the most appropriate when they are user friendly and fast to learn.
Effective tools include:

short demo videos (30–60 seconds)
User-friendly touchscreens.
QR coded quick access to offers.
lead capture applications rather than paper-based.

Memory is enhanced by the interactive components. Research indicates that an individual can retain up to 70 percent of the information when being actively involved rather than passively watching.
But avoid overload. It suffices to have one or two powerful tools.
Smart Use of Standard Booth Sizes
There are standard sizes such as 10×10 booths or 10×20 size because it fits most event plans and budgets. Yet to make proper use of them needs planning.
One of the errors is to consider a minor booth a smaller version of a large one. That doesn’t work. You must adapt your approach.
Focus on:

vertical space for branding
minimal furniture
clear visitor flow

Tallness tends to be more important than thinness. The strategic placement of a banner makes it visible even at a long distance attracting people to your area even before you see them.
Also, think modular. A flexible structure allows the reuse of elements between events, which is a cost savings in the long term.
Small booths that apply these principles in practice can in some cases give higher ROI per square meter than large ones. Large scale is not about size it is about the use of it.
The post How to Make Your Market Stall Impossible to Walk Past appeared first on Addicted 2 Success.

Large language models are running into limits in domains that require an understanding of the physical world — from robotics to autonomous driving to manufacturing. That constraint is pushing investors toward world models, with AMI Labs raising a $1.03 billion seed round shortly after World Labs secured $1 billion.Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing abstract knowledge through next-token prediction, but they fundamentally lack grounding in physical causality. They cannot reliably predict the physical consequences of real-world actions. AI researchers and thought leaders are increasingly vocal about these limitations as the industry tries to push AI out of web browsers and into physical spaces. In an interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Turing Award recipient Richard Sutton warned that LLMs just mimic what people say instead of modeling the world, which limits their capacity to learn from experience and adjust themselves to changes in the world.This is why models based on LLMs, including vision-language models (VLMs), can show brittle behavior and break with very small changes to their inputs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis echoed this sentiment in another interview, pointing out that today’s AI models suffer from “jagged intelligence.” They can solve complex math olympiads but fail at basic physics because they are missing critical capabilities regarding real-world dynamics. To solve this problem, researchers are shifting focus to building world models that act as internal simulators, allowing AI systems to safely test hypotheses before taking physical action. However, “world models” is an umbrella term that encompasses several distinct architectural approaches. That has produced three distinct architectural approaches, each with different tradeoffs.JEPA: built for real-timeThe first main approach focuses on learning latent representations instead of trying to predict the dynamics of the world at the pixel level. Endorsed by AMI Labs, this method is heavily based on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). JEPA models try to mimic how humans understand the world. When we observe the world, we do not memorize every single pixel or irrelevant detail in a scene. For example, if you watch a car driving down a street, you track its trajectory and speed; you do not calculate the exact reflection of light on every single leaf of the trees in the background. JEPA models reproduce this human cognitive shortcut. Instead of forcing the neural network to predict exactly what the next frame of a video will look like, the model learns a smaller set of abstract, or “latent,” features. It discards the irrelevant details and focuses entirely on the core rules of how elements in the scene interact. This makes the model robust against background noise and small changes that break other models.This architecture is highly compute and memory efficient. By ignoring irrelevant details, it requires much fewer training examples and runs with significantly lower latency. These characteristics make it suitable for applications where efficiency and real-time inference are non-negotiable, such as robotics, self-driving cars, and high-stakes enterprise workflows. For example, AMI is partnering with healthcare company Nabla to use this architecture to simulate operational complexity and reduce cognitive load in fast-paced healthcare settings. Yann LeCun, a pioneer of the JEPA architecture and co-founder of AMI, explained that world models based on JEPA are designed to be “controllable in the sense that you can give them goals, and by construction, the only thing they can do is accomplish those goals” in an interview with Newsweek.Gaussian splats: built for spaceA second approach leans on generative models to build complete spatial environments from scratch. Adopted by companies like World Labs, this method takes an initial prompt (it could be an image or a textual description) and uses a generative model to create a 3D Gaussian splat. A Gaussian splat is a technique for representing 3D scenes using millions of tiny, mathematical particles that define geometry and lighting. Unlike flat video generation, these 3D representations can be imported directly into standard physics and 3D engines, such as Unreal Engine, where users and other AI agents can freely navigate and interact with them from any angle.The primary benefit here is a drastic reduction in the time and one-time generation cost required to create complex interactive 3D environments. It addresses the exact problem outlined by World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li, who noted that LLMs are ultimately like “wordsmiths in the dark,” possessing flowery language but lacking spatial intelligence and physical experience. World Labs’ Marble model gives AI that missing spatial awareness. While this approach is not designed for split-second, real-time execution, it has massive potential for spatial computing, interactive entertainment, industrial design, and building static training environments for robotics. The enterprise value is evident in Autodesk’s heavy backing of World Labs to integrate these models into their industrial design applications.End-to-end generation: built for scaleThe third approach uses an end-to-end generative model to process prompts and user actions, continuously generating the scene, physical dynamics, and reactions on the fly. Rather than exporting a static 3D file to an external physics engine, the model itself acts as the engine. It ingests an initial prompt alongside a continuous stream of user actions, and it generates the subsequent frames of the environment in real-time, calculating physics, lighting, and object reactions natively. DeepMind’s Genie 3 and Nvidia’s Cosmos fall into this category. These models provide a highly simple interface for generating infinite interactive experiences and massive volumes of synthetic data. DeepMind demonstrated this natively with Genie 3, showcasing how the model maintains strict object permanence and consistent physics at 24 frames per second without relying on a separate memory module.This approach translates directly into heavy-duty synthetic data factories. Nvidia Cosmos uses this architecture to scale synthetic data and physical AI reasoning, allowing autonomous vehicle and robotics developers to synthesize rare, dangerous edge-case conditions without the cost or risk of physical testing. Waymo (a fellow Alphabet subsidiary) built its world model on top of Genie 3, adapting it for training its self-driving cars. The downside to this end-to-end generative method is the great compute cost required to continuously render physics and pixels simultaneously. Still, the investment is necessary to achieve the vision laid out by Hassabis, who argues that a deep, internal understanding of physical causality is required because current AI is missing critical capabilities to operate safely in the real world.What comes next: hybrid architecturesLLMs will continue to serve as the reasoning and communication interface, but world models are positioning themselves as foundational infrastructure for physical and spatial data pipelines. As the underlying models mature, we are seeing the emergence of hybrid architectures that draw on the strengths of each approach. For example, cybersecurity startup DeepTempo recently developed LogLM, a model that integrates elements from LLMs and JEPA to detect anomalies and cyber threats from security and network logs. 

A mailer from Think Big PAC told voters that the Democratic U.S. House candidate once got $100,000 in support from the former head of failed global exchange FTX.