Day: August 21, 2025

Pajottegem (24brussels) – Pajottegem is establishing a municipal volunteer corps comprising up to 80 members, in collaboration with the Red Cross and supported by Flemish subsidies, led by alderman Christa Dermez.

As reported by VRT News, Pajottegem, located in East Flanders, Belgium, aims to reinforce emergency responses through this initiative. Officials noted that natural disasters such as storms, floods, droughts, and health crises can quickly overextend police, fire, and medical services.

The new volunteer corps will function alongside professional emergency responders, providing essential support. Volunteers will aid in setting up shelters, distributing supplies, assisting with logistics, and caring for vulnerable residents during crises.

“Through a volunteer corps, we prepare them to spring into action immediately if a disaster strikes,”

says Christa Dermez (CD&V), Pajottegem’s alderman for Volunteer Policy.

What will Pajottegem’s 80-member volunteer corps with Red Cross mean for emergency response?

The concept has been under consideration for some time but gained momentum after Flemish Interior Minister Hilde Crevits (CD&V) urged municipalities to engage in the Red Cross’s crisis volunteer initiative.

“We first thought about creating our own system,”

the alderman stated.

“But when the minister made her call, we signed up right away.”

By collaborating with the Red Cross, Pajottegem guarantees its volunteers professional training and effective coordination.

“The Red Cross is organising the volunteer corps, and they’re also fully subsidised by the Flemish government,”

Dermez has emphasized.

So it’s a real opportunity for us.”

The municipal plans for a volunteer corps in partnership with the Red Cross are progressing. In the coming months, authorities will establish responsibilities and operational procedures to ensure readiness when assistance is needed.

Residents will be kept informed throughout the process, with updates published on the municipality’s website and social media platforms. Once finalized, training sessions for volunteers by the Red Cross will commence.

Dermez recalled the surge of community support during the coronavirus pandemic, noting that many residents expressed their willingness to assist again if required. Initially starting with 80 members, the corps could expand if the initiative proves successful.

“I suspect our corps will fill up quickly,”

the alderman remarked.

“I’m already receiving messages from residents who want to sign up. Anyone who wants to volunteer can, of course, always do so outside the corps.”

Simultaneously, Leuven established a volunteer network named “Leuven Helps” on March 15, 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. The city developed an online platform allowing residents to register for assistance or offer help, which included tasks such as grocery shopping, meal delivery, tutoring, and providing companionship.

A dedicated call centre supported the initiative, matching volunteers with individuals in need, while insurance coverage was provided for participants. The project rapidly expanded, with over 2,500 volunteers signing up and nearly 1,000 requests for assistance being fulfilled.

Lawmakers in the nation’s two most populous states were planning to vote Thursday on competing proposals as the battle over U.S. House maps intensified.

• JPMorgan’s new building is full of amenities, with one open 24 hours, seven days a week.
• Experts said the wrap-around perks reinforce Wall Street’s work-as-life culture.
• As much as workers might like the offerings, they said the bank also has something crucial to gain.

Hungry bankers fear not — employees at JPMorgan’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan will be able to get a midnight snack. Or a 3 am snack. Or a 6 am snack.

The 60-story, amenity-packed skyscraper at 270 Park Avenue is scheduled to open this year, just as Wall Street beats the return-to-office drum louder than ever. With a gym, massive food hall, and 24/7 grab-and-go option, the building reinforces a long-standing law of Wall Street: work and life are often indistinguishable. And if you want to be successful, that work happens face-to-face, either in a conference room or the in-house pub.

Headhunters, consultants, and management experts told Business Insider that JPMorgan seems to be telegraphing its cultural expectations as much as the Wall Street hours with the new building. Representatives for JPMorgan declined to comment.

“There’ll be people there at night, there’ll be people on the weekends, and if you’re there, you might as well take advantage of some of these things,” said Alan Johnson, founder of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, adding that Wall Street has long had an “obsession” with people putting in face time.

JPMorgan has been a leader of the wider return-to-office push. It called nearly all employees back to the office full-time earlier this year, and CEO Jamie Dimon has blasted remote work, saying it can negatively impact a company’s culture.

“Don’t give me this shit that work-from-home-Friday works,” Dimon said during a leaked employee town hall earlier this year. “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.”

Robin Judson, founder of recruiting firm Robin Judson Partners, said the culture could send two messages: “It can say, ‘We really care about the people who work for us,’ or it can say, ‘You’re going to be working all the time, so we’re going to make sure that you don’t have to leave your desk for very long.'”

An ‘explicit recognition’ of long hours

While many of the food options are open on weekdays from 6 am to 5 pm, the grab-and-go Park Ave Express is open 24 hours, seven days a week, according to screenshots of the bank’s intranet obtained by Business Insider.

Meridith Dennes, managing partner of the headhunting firm Prospect Rock, said that bankers know the realities of the job when they opt in. With the building, JPMorgan is acknowledging the nature of the work.

“That’s part of the gig,” Dennes said. “That’s why you’re being paid so much. If you don’t want to sign up for that, then don’t do it. There are plenty of people who want that, and they’re trying to make it as pleasant as possible.”

Even with that mutual understanding, banks have faced something of a reckoning in recent years over the working conditions for young employees, and JPMorgan was among the companies to impose new policies last year to protect against burnout.

The 24-hour nature of some aspects of the new headquarters, however, cements the expectation of long hours in the office.

“We have seen some react to that kind of approach where there’s food available all the time and coffee available all the time as a bit of an encouragement to always be at the office,” said James Atkinson, vice president of thought leadership at the Society for Human Resource Management. Without guardrails, he said, it can harm mental health.

“It’s an explicit recognition that that’s not changing,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said of the building and bankers’ hours. “They’re not moving to 9-to-5 work, and neither is anybody else.”

Why the amenities matter

If employees are going to be at work up to 100 hours each week, they’ll likely enjoy having a swanky building, the experts told Business Insider.

Yet as lavish as a building is, it’s not the biggest factor for people when deciding where to work. Atkinson said that his data suggest coworkers, pay and benefits, and work environment consistently rank higher in people’s priorities.

That doesn’t mean, though, that there’s nothing in the $3 billion investment for JPMorgan. As much as some employees might love the Wellness Center or trendy restaurants, the new building will likely help the bank enforce its culture of choice.

“It’s a little bit of looking out for the employee and a little bit looking out for the company,” Johnson said. “I think on Wall Street that’s kind of always the balance.”

And part of looking out for the company means looking out for the in-person work environment, at least according to Dimon.

For Cappelli, the sit-down dining options, including a pub, suggest that employees should actually spend time with each other. That, he said, sends an even stronger message about what JPMorgan wants than the building’s hours.

“I think the reinforcement of, ‘We want you together to collaborate and talk to each other’ — I think that’s a much bigger signal.”

Work at JPMorgan or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at atecotzky@insider.com or Signal at alicetecotzky.05. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• Healthcare AI unicorn Innovaccer is planning to make two to three acquisitions in the coming months.
• Innovaccer is 11 years old, but it’s not choosing secondaries over an IPO in the near term.
• CEO Abhinav Shashank said Innovaccer is happier taking big swings right now as a private company.

Healthcare AI unicorn Innovaccer has a lot on its docket, including two to three additional acquisitions planned in the coming months. But an IPO isn’t on its to-do list.

The 11-year-old company has been buying itself more time in the private markets through secondary transactions as it rolls out more software to add to its suite of healthcare AI offerings.

In January, Innovaccer raised $275 million in funding, which included nearly $100 million in secondary sales for early investors. Then, as an extension to the Series F round, Innovaccer facilitated a $50 million tender offer for employees, funded by the round’s investors.

“For any company that’s successful at this point, this is going to happen,” cofounder and CEO Abhinav Shashank told Business Insider. “If the business is evolving that rapidly, you get freedom to make longer-term bets in private markets, a lot more than the public markets would allow you to do. …Private markets have never had the kind of depth they have today.”

It’s an increasingly common sentiment among venture-backed startups confronting a tougher IPO environment. While Hinge Health and Omada Health both had successful public listings this spring, digital health’s 2021 IPO cohort has significantly underperformed the broader market. Today, healthcare IPO hopefuls are expected to generate several hundred million dollars in revenue, achieve profitability, and show growth of 30% or higher, investors and bankers told BI earlier this year.

Shashank said Innovaccer, valued at $3.45 billion in its most recent raise, is well on its way toward those metrics. It’s growing its revenue at a rate of over 40% and bringing in more cash than it’s burning. Innovaccer declined to share its current revenue.

But with plenty of capital available to Innovaccer in the private markets, the startup isn’t in any rush to go public. Innovaccer would have little need to raise additional capital were it not for the startup’s M&A ambitions, Shashank said. He said the startup is already in talks with potential targets, and expects to make two to three additional acquisitions in the next six months.

What Innovaccer wants in an acquisition

Innovaccer set out to build tech infrastructure to connect disparate health data sources. With the rise of AI, it’s aiming to use that infrastructure to allow AI agents and other new tools to communicate with each other inside health systems.

On top of its platform, Innovaccer offers AI call center agents, revenue cycle management software, population health analytics tech, and even an ambient medical scribe. Shashank said it plans to announce more capabilities in the coming months.

“It becomes the one place where you can solve tens of these problems, rather than picking a point solution for everything and then spending millions of dollars on system integrators to make them work together,” he said.

Because of the breadth of its tech, Innovaccer has plenty of competitors, from public health data companies like Health Catalyst to startups like $7 billion Datavant and $6 billion Commure.

As Innovaccer looks to M&A to accelerate its growth, Shashank said the startup’s top target is tech that automates administrative tasks for hospitals’ revenue cycle teams. He said Innovaccer is also looking for acquisitions in remote patient monitoring, care management automation, and specialties like cardiology and oncology.

Innovaccer has made three acquisitions to date, including two buys in 2024 and one this January, and has plenty of cash in the bank to make more, Shashank said. The startup currently works with over 130 large health systems, a scale of distribution that Shashank is one of Innovaccer’s biggest value-adds to its acquisition targets.

The startup wants to cater to those customers with more partnerships, too. Shashank said Innovaccer plans to launch a curated marketplace of 20 to 30 companies integrated with its platform in the next year or so. Customers using Innovaccer’s infrastructure can then choose from a broader range of third-party tools to fit their needs without worrying about data interoperability.

Does Innovaccer still need the public markets?

With top companies like OpenAI staying private and delivering hearty returns to investors through secondary sales, “there’s a good question that I think boards are discussing at this point: why is a public offering the ultimate goal?” Shashank said.

In private markets, companies can take bigger swings like major acquisitions without retail investor scrutiny, he said. He pointed to startups Databricks and Stripe, which have been able to grow aggressively while giving their early investors some liquidity via secondary sales.

Shashank said he still thinks the public markets are the best way for most companies to build in the longer term, and he expects Innovaccer to go public when the time is right. To be sure, the largest secondary sales are enjoyed by top AI and software startups, which can reach far higher valuations and thus generally entertain more investor demand than healthtech companies.

But Shashank wants Innovaccer to keep scaling, and ideally record $500 million in annual recurring revenue or more, before it reaches that milestone.

“There’s a bunch that we’re doing right now, so I think [an IPO] is at least a couple of years out,” he said.

• In recent months, pressure has ramped up inside Google for employees to flex their AI muscles.
• Google leaders told staff to be more AI-savvy, and engineers are now expected to use AI for coding.
• Some staff expect their use of AI will be taken into account when performance reviews roll around.

For Googlers, getting ahead at work doesn’t just mean building AI. They’re expected to work with it, too.

In recent months, pressure has ramped up inside Google for employees to use AI tools in their day-to-day work to make them more productive. As Google and other tech giants like Microsoft try to push the frontiers of AI for new products, they see ways it can boost their businesses — and that means getting employees on board.

In June, Google engineering vice president Megan Kacholia sent an email to software engineers telling them to use AI tools to improve their coding. The email also said that some engineer role profiles—a description of a specific job’s tasks and duties—were being updated to include mentions of using AI to solve problems.

In a July all-hands meeting with the whole company, CEO Sundar Pichai sent a simple message to the troops: Employees need to use AI for Google to lead this race, according to two employees who heard the remarks. Pichai said rival companies would leverage AI, so Google needs to make sure it does the same to compete.

Google, which has been racing OpenAI and others with its Gemini AI models, is using internal learning programs to cajole staff into experimenting with vibe coding and using other AI tools to improve productivity.

Managers have also been pushing staff to prove they’re AI-savvy, according to several current employees who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to speak to the press.

Some employees told Business Insider that their managers have asked them to demonstrate how they use AI day-to-day — and they expect it will be taken into consideration when reviews do come around.

“It seems like a no-brainer that you need to be using it to get ahead,” one told Business Insider.

“It’s still predominantly, ‘Are you hitting your numbers?'” a sales employee said. “But if you use AI to develop new workflows that others can use effectively, then that is rewarded.”

A Google spokesperson said that while the company actively encourages Googlers to use AI in their daily work, it is not evaluating staff on it as part of their performance reviews.

New guidelines for Google engineers

Kacholia’s email to staff in June included a link to an updated set of guidelines on how engineers should use AI in their work. The guidelines, created by Google engineers, included best practices for how employees should and should not use AI for coding based on the capabilities of Google’s internal models.

Engineers should use only internal models for coding, the guidelines said. Employees who want to use third-party AI tools for tasks outside coding must get approval first.

Other tech companies have similar rules to deter employees from putting sensitive internal information into outside systems. At Amazon, employees have pushed for the company to adopt the AI coding assistant Cursor, which has required sign-off from leadership.

Googlers were also told that AI-generated code is still considered the employee’s work and should, therefore, adhere to Google’s standards.

The memo mentioned that employees should be “dogfooding” Google’s AI software coding tools, meaning they should test new products internally before they’re launched to the public, according to two people who saw the email.

A spokesperson pointed Business Insider to a recently published company blog outlining ways Googlers use AI.

“By using AI as a collaborative partner, we’re able to spend time on the most innovative, strategic and fulfilling parts of our work,” the blog reads.

Google wants its coders to go all in on AI

For coding in particular, Google says it’s already seeing huge gains thanks to the aid of AI.

Pichai said earlier this year that Google was measuring productivity gains from AI among its engineers and estimated a 10% boost. During Alphabet’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Pichai said that more than 30% of code written at Google was being generated by AI, up from the over-25% figure he cited the previous October.

Google also last month spent $2.4 billion to hire several key members of the AI coding startup Windsurf, including its CEO Varun Mohan. Google said at the time that it did the acquihire to advance its work in “agentic coding.”

Google engineers are encouraged to use Cider, an internal development tool that includes a coding agent, several current employees said. Cider runs a variety of internal models, including “Gemini for Google” — formerly known as Goose — which was trained on Google’s internal technical data, per internal documents reviewed by Business Insider. Employees were told during last month’s all-hands meeting that more tools are on the way.

The use of AI in software engineering could create a skill gap between those who use AI effectively and those who do not, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth recently predicted.

That means leaders need to get as many employees on board as possible. In June, YouTube held a “vibe coding” week for its employees to promote how AI tools could be helpful for software engineers, according to an employee with direct knowledge. YouTube’s vice president of engineering, Scott Silver, ran and promoted that event.

It’s not just coding. Googlers in sales and legal divisions also told Business Insider that they have been asked by managers to incorporate AI into their workflows with tools like NotebookLM, a research program that uses AI to bring together information from different documents. Some employees are being trained to create Gems — custom versions of Google’s Gemini AI — for their specific roles, one employee said.

Googlers react to these changes

The employees Business Insider spoke to didn’t push back on the idea of using AI more in their work. They all said they felt that becoming AI-savvy was the way to get ahead at Google now, particularly as the company has made changes to better reward high performers.

Some Googlers poked fun at the recent changes to the role profiles on Google’s internal message board, MemeGen.

“If AI actually improved productivity, it wouldn’t need to be in the role profile,” read one Googler-made meme seen by Business Insider.

Another read, “You know a technology works and is great when you’re forced to praise it to maintain your livelihood.”

Googlers who spoke to Business Insider said they see these changes as inevitable, as competitors also harness AI among their workforce.

“Some are really excited about it,” one engineer said. “But some are grudgingly doing it because they don’t want to be left behind.”

Have something to share? Contact this reporter via email at hlangley@businessinsider.com or Signal at 628-228-1836. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

Donald Trump made a sobering confession about his motivations to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. And it wasn’t to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

“If I can save 7,000 people a week from getting killed, that’s pretty good,” the President said Tuesday on Fox & Friends. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The comment has attracted much attention on social media, with some critics joking that a man known for cheating in his personal and professional lives, degrading people and deporting people, and mocking worshippers while hawking bibles is unlikely to get past the pearly gates. Others have questioned whether his soul-searching is a sign of potentially terminal health concerns.

“I think the President was serious,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday when asked about Trump’s comment. “I think the President wants to get to heaven—as I hope we all do in this room as well.”

It was a stunning display of unknowing about one’s fate from a man who has in the past evinced a messianic complex and who has amassed a number of supporters who believe he’s been “anointed by God.” But it’s also not the first time that Trump has publicly contemplated the afterlife—or even mused about his own prospects.

“We go someplace”

“I don’t believe in reincarnation, heaven or hell—but we go someplace,” Trump said in an interview with Playboy in 1990, according to Buzzfeed News. “Do you know, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where.”

Through the ’90s, Trump continued to distance himself from the Christian Church. A 1997 profile in Playboy called him “not a religious man.”

Two years later, as Trump was teeing up a potential presidential run in 2000 as part of the Reform Party, he distinguished between a personal belief in God and organized religion.

“Well, I think there’s a difference between believing in God and organized religion, number one,” he said on Today in 1999. “I think that God and the belief in God is more important than organized religion. But I think organized religion’s important in that it keeps people in the straight and narrow.”

“The only way I’m going to get to heaven”

By the time Trump ran for President in 2016, he described himself as a church-goer.

“Can you believe it? Nobody believes I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness,” he said in 2015.

That year, he joked about the presidency being his ticket into heaven.

“So go out and spread the word and once I get in [to the White House], I will do my thing that I do very well,” Trump told a crowd of over 700 evangelical pastors in Orlando, Fla. “And I figure it’s probably maybe the only way I’m going to get to heaven. So I better do a good job.”

Major parts of the world are “going to hell”

Trump has also on multiple occasions invoked hell. In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, Trump said, “Major portions of the world are in conflict and some, in fact, are going to hell.”

His speech touched on God several more times, ending with: “We will fight together, sacrifice together, and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity, and for the almighty God who made us all. Thank you, God bless you, God bless the nations of the world, and God bless the United States of America.”

He also said that the U.S. was “going to hell” in 2015 and again in 2022, 2023 and 2024, during his campaigns for President.

“I want to just thank everybody, in particular, God,” Trump said during his second-term inauguration speech. “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

“If I’m good, I’m going to heaven”

“I do [believe in heaven],” Trump said in an interview on Fox News in August 2024 after the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pa. “If I’m good, I’m going to heaven. And if I’m bad, I’m going someplace else.”

When asked what he prays for, he said, “Well, I pray for our country. I pray, obviously. I pray for the same thing you pray—our family and our country … and I guess we have a world. I pray for the world too.”

Later in September, Trump, who is 79, recounted in an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast how “a very successful” octogenarian friend told him he thinks about death constantly: “He said, ‘I think about it every minute of every day.’ Then, a week later, he called me to tell me something, and he starts off the conversation by going, ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’ This is a dark person, in a sense, but it is what it is.”

Trump went on: “If you’re religious, you have I think a better feeling toward it. You’re supposed to go to heaven ideally, not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good.”

“Not 100% sure” about his father getting to heaven

At a rally in Madison Square Garden last October in the lead up to the election, Trump told a crowd of around 20,000 people that he’s “not 100% sure” about his father’s chances of having gone to the great beyond.

“My father is looking down on me right now,” Trump said. “He was a tough guy. But he was legit. And I know my mother’s in heaven. I’m not 100% sure of my father, but it’s close.”

Trump’s quip came in a rant about the four criminal charges against him, which included conspiring to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat, mishandling classified documents, and falsifying business records to hide “hush money” payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

“He’s looking down at me right now,” Trump said, “and he’s saying, ‘How the hell did this happen to my son? He’s not a bad person.’”