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More severe storms were expected to roll across the central U.S. this week following the weather-related deaths of more than two dozen people and a devastating Kentucky tornado. The National Weather Service said a multitude of hazardous weather would impact the U.S. over the next several daysfrom thunderstorms and potentially baseball-size hail on the Plains, to heavy mountain snow in the West and dangerous heat in the South. Areas at risk of thunderstorms include communities in Kentucky and Missouri that were hit by Fridays tornadoes. In London, Kentucky, people whose houses were destroyed scrambled Sunday to put tarps over salvageable items or haul them away for safe storage, said Zach Wilson. His parents’ house was in ruins and their belongings scattered. We’re trying the hardest to get anything that looks of value and getting it protected, especially pictures and papers and things like that, he said. Here’s the latest on the recent storms, some tornado history, and where to look out for the next weather impacts. Deadly storms claim dozens of lives At least 19 people were killed and 10 seriously injured in Kentucky, where a tornado on Friday damaged hundreds of homes and tossed vehicles in southeastern Laurel County. Officials said the death toll could rise and that three people remained in critical condition Sunday. Wilson said he raced to his parents’ home in London, Kentucky, after the storm. It was dark and still raining, but every lightning flash, it was lighting up your nightmares: Everything was gone, he said. The thankful thing was me and my brother got here and got them out of where they had barricaded themselves. Survey teams were expected on the ground Monday so the state can apply for federal disaster assistance, Gov. Andy Beshear said. Some of the two dozen state roads that had closures could take days to reopen. In St. Louis, five people died and 38 were injured as the storm system swept through on Friday, according to Mayor Cara Spencer. More than 5,000 homes in the city were affected, she said. On Sunday, city inspectors were going through damaged areas to condemn unsafe structures, Spencer said. She asked for people not to sightsee in damaged areas. A tornado that started in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton traveled at least 8 miles (13 kilometers), had 150-mph (241-kph) winds, and had a maximum width of 1 mile (1.6 kilometers), according to the weather service. It touched down in the area of Forest Park, home to the St. Louis Zoo and the site of the 1904 Worlds Fair and the Olympic Games that same year. In Scott County, about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south of St. Louis, a tornado killed two people, injured several others, and destroyed multiple homes, Sheriff Derick Wheetley wrote on social media. The weather system spawned tornadoes in Wisconsin and temporarily enveloped parts of Illinoisincluding Chicagoin a pall of dust. Two people were killed in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., by falling trees while driving. The storms hit after the Trump administration cut staffing of weather service offices, with outside experts worrying about how it would affect warnings in disasters such as tornadoes. A history of tornadoes The majority of the world’s tornadoes occur in the U.S., which has about 1,200 annually. Researchers in 2018 found that deadly tornadoes were happening less frequently in the traditional Tornado Alley of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, and more frequently in parts of the more densely populated and tree-filled South. They can happen any time of day or night, but certain times of the year bring peak tornado season. Thats from May into early June for the southern Plains, and earlier in the spring on the Gulf Coast. The deadliest tornado in Kentuckys history was hundreds of yards wide when it tore through downtown Louisvilles business district in March 1890, collapsing multistory buildings including one with 200 people inside. Seventy-six people were killed. The last tornado to cause mass fatalities in Kentucky was a December 2021 twister that lasted almost five hours. It traveled some 165 miles (266 kilometers), leaving a path of destruction that included 57 dead and more than 500 injured, according to the weather service. Officials recorded at least 41 tornadoes during that storm, which killed at least 77 people statewide. On the same day, a deadly tornado struck the St. Louis area, killing six people at an Amazon facility in nearby Illinois. More storms threaten in coming days Thunderstorms with potentially damaging winds were forecast for a region stretching from northeast Colorado to central Texas. And tornadoes will again be a threat particularly from central Kansas to Oklahoma, according to the weather service. Meanwhile, triple-digit temperatures were forecast for parts of south Texas, with the potential to break daily records. The hot, dry air also sets the stage for critical wildfire conditions through early this week in southern New Mexico and West Texas. Up to a foot of snow was expected in parts of Idaho and western Montana. Matthew Brown and Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Jake Knapp is a designer, investor, and general partner at Character Capital. He has spent the last 25 years helping companies create products that people genuinely love. He helped build Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and has worked with hundreds of startups, including Blue Bottle Coffee, One Medical, and Slack. Whats the big idea? The foundation of success is shockingly simple, and yet most teams get bogged down for months trying to strategize a new idea. Making your next big project a hit relies on creating a powerful Founding Hypothesis from the get-go. When done right, this method ensures that everyones voice gets heard, there is enough clarity to accelerate experimentation, and a smart product gets to stand in a dazzling spotlight. Rather than wasting time, money, and missing opportunities, starting a project thoughtfully allows teams to move confidently and quickly toward solutions. Below, Jake shares five key insights from his new book, Click: How to Make What People Want. Listen to the audio versionread by Jake himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Project beginnings are a hidden goldmine The beginning of a new project is a moment of massive opportunity. With a strong beginning, we define the right strategy, gain confidence, and build momentum. Without a strong beginning, its nearly impossible to succeed. Beginnings are crucial, but beginnings are totally overlooked. The worlds most popular approach to starting projects is chaos. Meet, and meet, and meet. Talk, and talk, and talk. Churn out slide decks, documents, and spreadsheets that no one reads. Outlast your opponents in a political cage match. Finally, rely on a hunch and commit to years of work. Thats the old wayand it is bonkers. Doing things the old way, it can take six months or more to develop a strategy. The old way is like assembling IKEA furniture by tossing parts, an Allen wrench, and a dozen squirrels into a broom closet, then hoping for the best. We dont have to accept the old way. We can redesign how we start projects. We can structure the first hours so that we get the best contribution from every team member, make smart decisions, and find a winning strategy as fast as possible. 2. Most teams skip the basics Teams that build winning products share some fundamental traits. They know their customers, and the problem they can solve for them. They know which approach to takeand why its superior to the alternatives. And they know what theyre up againstand how to radically differentiate from the competition. These teams have mastered the basics. When I first began working with startups, I was embarrassed to ask founders basic questions like Who are your competitors? or How will you differentiate? because I didnt want to waste their time or appear naive. Smart, motivated people who respect their colleagues can still struggle to get on the same page. But once I worked up the courage, I learned that if I asked three co-founders to write down their startups target customer, I got three different answers. If I asked a team what differentiated their product from the competition, I would witness a sixty-minute debate. Smart, motivated people who respect their colleagues can still struggle to get on the same page. Mastering the basics might be obvious, but its not easy. 3. A clear strategy starts with a clear calendar Business as usual stands in the way of mastering the basics. In the modern workplace, were supposed to attend meetings with teammates, managers, business partners, etc. Were supposed to stay on top of our email and messages. Were supposed to juggle multiple projects. And, of course, were supposed to meet deadlines and deliver results. But if we think we can take on ambitious projects and make them click with customers while bouncing along through business as usual, ricocheting from one context to the next, were fooling ourselves. Figuring out a projects strategy takes intense focus. Choosing the best opportunity among many options takes intense focus. Designing and building a prototype to test our hypothesis? Yup, that, too, requires intense focus. The normal way of working does not allow for intense focusespecially intense focus that is shared by multiple members of a team. The solution is straightforward: make the difficult decision to call a timeout, drop everythingall the constant emails, constant meetings, constant context switchingand come together to think hard, make big decisions, and master the basics. 4. Silence and structure generate the best ideas The group brainstorm is our species natural response to collaboration. Gather a bunch of hunter-gatherers from the Ice Age and ask them to build a hut, and youll get a group brainstorm. Gather a bunch of Royal Society scientists from 17th-century England and ask them to come up with a business plan, and soon theyll be shouting ideas and ordering out for pizza and sticky notes. The normal way of working does not allow for intense focus. Group brainstorms are in our DNA. Theyre funat least, for extroverts. But they dont work. They produce mediocre ideas. They exclude those uncomfortable in the group, those who dont excel at verbal sales pitches, and those who do their best thinking in silence. When its time to define your strategy, do not brainstorm out loud. Do not have an open-ended discussion. Instead, work alone together. Give each person time to generate proposals in silence, review others proposals in silence, and form opinions and vote in silence. 5. Strategy is better understood as a hypothesis Until a solution clicks with customers, strategy is just an educated guess. In one way or another, that guess is almost certainly wrong. Maybe were differentiating on speed when people care most about simplicity. Maybe we chose the wrong problem or the wrong customer. First guesses might be off by a lot or a littlebut they are almost always off. So, instead of writing strategy documents, start with a Founding Hypothesis. A Founding Hypothesis is a simple Mad Libs-style sentence that describes the essential guesses behind every project: If we solve [problem] for [customer] with [approach], then they will choose it over [competition] because our solution is [differentiation]. First guesses might be off by a lot or a littlebut they are almost always off. The Founding Hypothesis is simple, and thats exactly what makes it powerful. Products click when they make a compelling promise. That promise must be simple, or customers wont pay attention. Best of all, once youve written a Founding Hypothesis, theres no hiding behind slides, charts, and projections. Your educated guess is standing in a dazzling spotlight, and youll want to experiment, right away, to find out if the hypothesis is correct. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
This story originally appeared in Global Voices. A decade after the first assessment, the 2025 Ranking Digital Rights Index: Big Tech Edition reveals a landscape of paradox. While some of the world’s most influential digital platforms demonstrate incremental improvements in transparency, particularly in governance disclosures from Chinese companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, the overall picture suggests a concerning inertia. In a world grappling with rising authoritarianism, the use of AI tools, and ongoing global conflicts, the report shows that many Big Tech companies are largely continuing with business as usual, failing to address critical issues. The concentration of power within Big Tech remains a central concern. The report highlights how companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft have aggressively acquired competitors, consolidating their dominance in the digital landscape. This market concentration, where Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon capture two-thirds of online advertising revenue, grants them power over online access and information flows. Despite increasing scrutiny from legal systems, evidenced by rulings against Google for illegal monopolies in search and advertising, the political influence of Big Tech appears to have increased. The symbolic image of US Big Tech CEOs in the front row of the presidential inauguration underscores their deep connections with government bodies, potentially hindering much-needed oversight at a time when human rights and democratic structures face unprecedented challenges globally. This dominance is further exacerbated in a context of conflict. Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have all developed tools meant for war and integration with lethal weapons. Their cloud infrastructure has powered military campaigns, reveals the report. Ranking Digital Rights also calls attention to propaganda, especially on X and platforms owned by Meta. Lack of transparency While the report highlights pockets of progress, particularly among Chinese companies (Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu), showing increased transparency in governance, patterns have been spotted throughout the analysis that raise concerns. Though Meta has shown improvements in disclosing how its algorithms curate content and has enhanced security with default end-to-end encryption on some messaging services, significant shortcomings persist across the industry. A common issue is the widespread lack of transparency in how companies handle private requests for user data or content restrictions, with Samsung notably disclosing no information in this area. [Image: Ranking Digital Rights, 2025] The very engines of Big Tech’s profitalgorithms and targeted advertisingremain largely opaque. Despite the known risks for democracies linked to disinformation and election interference, none of the assessed companies achieved even half the possible score in this area. Alphabet and Meta even showed slight declines in transparency related to their targeted advertising practices. Most companies fail to disclose information about advertisements removed for violating their policies or provide evidence of enforcing their ad targeting rules. X declined significantly more than other companies analyzed. The companys transformation from the publicly listed Twitter to the privately held X Corp. and the elimination of its human rights team coincided with a significant drop in transparency across its governance, freedom of expression, and privacy practices, the report emphasized. X failed to publish a transparency report in both 2022 and 2023. While a report finally surfaced in September 2024, it fell outside the assessment’s cutoff. Even more troubling is the reported removal of years worth of transparency reports dating back to 2011. [Image: Ranking Digital Rights, 2025] Finally, the report points to a troubling pattern of policy evolution. Companies like Meta and YouTube have been revising their content policies in ways that have sparked widespread concern, such as Meta dismantling its third-party fact-checking program in the US and YouTube removing gender identity from its hate speech policy. Global Voices covered the consequences of this policy in Africa, and also how fact-checking practices are needed amidst digital authoritarianism, especially during elections, such as the case of Indonesia. This suggests a potential shift towards justifying existing behaviors rather than upholding previously embraced principles. The 2025 RDR Index demonstrates stagnation at a critical time. While acknowledging some positive developments, the report also calls for a renewed effort from different stakeholders, especially civil society, investors, and policymakers.
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E-Commerce
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