Pentagon official confirms plan as Hakeem Jeffries says president is ‘playing’ with Americans’ lives. Plus, the sorrow – and relief – of leaving Trump’s US for Europe
Good morning.
Planning is under way to send national guard troops to Chicago, an official at the Pentagon confirmed to ABC News on Sunday.
What did the government say? “We won’t speculate on further operations. The department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel,” a Department of Defense official said, according to ABC.
Is the White House planning to send national guard troops to any other states? Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.
What did Giuffre say about the book? Giuffre wrote to Wallace 25 days before her death, stating that it was her “heartfelt wish” the memoir be released “regardless” of her circumstances. “The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders,” the email reads.
Vietnam began evacuating more than half a million people Sundayin preparation for a powerful typhoon, which made landfall on the country’s coasts on Monday afternoon.
Typhoon Kajiki, which drenched China’s Hainan Island and parts of Guangdong province on Sunday evening, has forced mass evacuations, school and airport closures, and emergency preparations in Vietnam’s coastal provinces from Thanh Hoa to Quang Tri. The typhoon hit Vietnam’s coast with winds of up to 133 km/h (82 mph) and was moving inland as of Monday 4 p.m. local time (5 a.m. ET). The wind is expected to rapidly weaken over land, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JWTC), although heavy rain will likely persist for a few days.
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Kajiki is also expected to affect Laos, northern Thailand, eastern Cambodia, and central Myanmar, according to the World Meteorological Center Beijing.
“This is an extremely dangerous, fast-moving storm,” the Vietnamese government said in a statement Sunday.
“Strong winds can last for hours. When the storm passes, it may temporarily calm down but then increase in intensity,” Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha said on Monday morning, adding that “floods and landslides are sometimes more dangerous than storms.
Here’s what to know.
Vietnam braces for powerful storm
The Vietnamese government expects Kajiki, the fifth tropical storm to hit the country this year, to be as powerful as Typhoon Yagi, which brushed Vietnam’s north last year—killing 300 people in the country and leaving more than $3 billion in damages in its wake.
Kajiki is also expected to bring in torrential rains to Vietnam: VnExpress reported that some areas could receive as much as 40 cm (15 in) of rain, and some places may experience downpours of 20 cm (7 in) in just three hours.
Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has issued dispatches to ministers, local government leaders, and other officials, ordering the immediate evacuation and relocation of residents in dangerous areas. A Sunday government statement said that more than 16,500 soldiers and 107,000 paramilitary forces were on standby to assist in disaster response and relief efforts.
Two airports in Thanh Hoa and Quang Binh provinces closed down on Monday for the safety of passengers. Local carriers Vietnam Airlines and Vietjet have also cancelled flights.
The Railway Transport Joint Stock Company also suspended some scheduled passenger train services plying Hanoi-Ho Chi Minh routes because of the storm.
Fishermen in central coastal areas where the typhoon will pass were called back to dock and anchor their ships.
Southern China also shuts down
Southern China’s Hainan Island saw heavy rainfall and gales as the typhoon brushed past the island on Sunday. The island’s Sanya City, a popular tourist resort destination, closed businesses and public transport as it braced for the intensifying storm. Around 20,000 people in Hainan were evacuated, and more than 30,000 fishing boats were recalled to ports, according to state news agency People’s Daily.
China’s national weather agency forecast that Hainan, southwestern coastal areas of Guangdong, and other coastal areas will experience torrential rain of up to 25 to 35 cm (10 to 14 in), and that strong winds could continue to affect coastal areas of Hainan, Guangxi, and Guangdong till around 2 p.m. Tuesday local time (2 a.m. E.T.). Yunnan, Guangdong, Hainan, and Guangxi are also forecast to receive heavy rain till Tuesday.
Chinese authorities issued a yellow alert, the third highest level of a four-tier warning system, on Monday.
The country was recently battered by torrential rainfall which caused flooding and landslides, which killed at least 30 people in Beijing, forced more than 80,000 people to evacuate, and impacted electricity in around 130 villages.
Harrowing footage has been aired in court of the moment an Indigenous teenager riding a trail bike crashed into a police vehicle, as a battle erupts over the relevance of an earlier collision.
Sgt Benedict Bryant, 47, was behind the wheel when Jai Kalani Wright rode the motorbike into his unmarked police vehicle in inner-city Sydney on 19 February 2022.
Deaths take to at least 192 the number of Palestinian journalists killed in the conflict since 7 October 2023
Four journalists were among at least 15 people killed by Israeli strikes on al-Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, Palestinian health officials said.
The strikes on Monday killed Hussam al-Masri, who worked for Reuters, Mariam Abu Dagga, who worked for the Associated Press, the Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Salam, and Moaz Abu Taha from NBC. Another Reuters journalist, Hatem Khaled, was also wounded in the attack.
Kevin Wu got bored as a constant at BCG and left to found an AI startup.
Kevin Wu
Kevin Wu left his job at Boston Consulting Group to start Leaping AI, an AI voice agent startup.
Wu said consulting made him confident in business, but didn’t fully prepare him to be a founder.
As a founder, he said he works as much or more now but that it’s more enjoyable than consulting.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Kevin Wu, CEO and cofounder of Leaping AI, an AI voice agent startup that participated in Y Combinator earlier this year. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I grew up in Germany and studied computer science. When I was 19, I founded my first startup and I was the CTO, but it really wasn’t a founder-market fit, so we discontinued it after a couple of months and went back to school. After I was thinking, “What should I do with my life?”
I knew that I didn’t want to be a CTO again. I didn’t want to program. I was interested in business, but to do business as someone who studied computer science was hard. Why would they hire some random computer science grad to do business? One of the only fields that I found was open to taking non-business majors to do business was consulting.
I’m pretty hardcore in things like test prep. I probably did over 200 mock interviews or case studies for six months straight, and I ended up joining Boston Consulting Group in their Berlin office.
I think consulting is great for a young grad. You learn business within two years. You learn how to communicate, how to present, how to work in a team, how to write emails to CEOs of companies. You learn how to be in Zoom meetings with them and not mess up. You learn about different industries; I worked for so many different and interesting clients. It’s a business school MBA in real life.
The camaraderie is also insane. You have young, ambitious people from everywhere on your team, and you’re working hard, then you’re partying hard, and it’s like you’re not sleeping at all.
However, at some point, it’s up and out — you either make the next step or you leave. I wasn’t motivated anymore after two years, because you’re doing a lot of PowerPoint and Excel, and it was just not intellectually stimulating.
I got bored with it, so I decided to leave and found an AI voice agent startup called Leaping AI. We got into Y Combinator‘s winter cohort this year and then raised $4.7 million in seed funding.
Because of consulting, I feel like I’m able to understand business and economy. I know what a P&L is and I understand that businesses have to make money and they have costs and what exactly does that mean. I understand how to conduct myself when I’m talking to CEOs that I want to sell my product to.
I’m also very confident. I learned that in consulting.Before consulting, I was this random computer science grad with no people or leadership skills. Now, even though we’re still in the beginning, I’m confident enough to lead teams and be the guy at the helm.
Consulting doesn’t fully prepare you for entrepreneurship
You have some of the highest-achieving individuals in the world in consulting, but it is very hard out of consulting to do entrepreneurship.
When you’re in consulting, you don’t meet any tech people. You only meet other business people, which can make it hard to found a startup, since most of them today are in tech.
Consulting is also a risk-averse culture. Entrepreneurship is, in a way, hitting rock bottom. You don’t have a job, nobody pays you, and nobody knows who you are. There’s a high risk that it may fail.
In consulting projects, the client will tell you what the goal is and what they need. The path is already given. Whereas in entrepreneurship, there is no path. You have to forge your own and decide what you’re going to do and then do it even when there’s high uncertainty.
In consulting, whatever you do, you have to align it with your managers and customers and everybody involved. But sometimes as an entrepreneur, you just have to do it without talking to everybody about doing it. In Silicon Valley, we call it founder mode.
Also in consulting, most younger consultants aren’t doing sales. But as an entrepreneur, you have to be the one bringing in new customers. I think that is a skill that is very important to entrepreneurship that is not taught in consulting.
Making great tech products is also something an entrepreneur should do. So another good path into entrepreneurship would be to work at a tech company in product management or as an engineer, where you actually learn what great products look like.
I work more as a founder, but I love it
They tell you that doing consulting will help you figure out your passion, but actually, I don’t think that’s true, because you’re just implementing what other people tell you to implement. There’s no time to do what you want to do. Plus, you’re just so tired, you’re working 60 hours a week.
As a startup founder, now I work equally or more hours. I haven’t taken a vacation for two years. So it’s funny that I was burned out as a consultant, and now I work even more. But it’s still more enjoyable than consulting because you can shape your own path and don’t have a boss.
