It follows a drugs operation on Saturday where officers stopped a van in a Hospital and found a concealed haul worth an estimated €493,000.
Month: November 2025
Emergency services were called to the scene in Carrigeen housing estate, Clonmel, at around 6pm on Sunday
Why aiming for moderation can benefit your body and soul over the festive break.
Tim Gillies; BI
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jenny Wood, a 45-year-old former Google executive who lives in Boulder, Colorado. She left Google in August 2024 and is now a keynote speaker, coach, and author. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
It seemed preposterous for me to ever think about leaving Google.
I started there in November 2006, when there were only around 10,000 employees, and became an executive — the director of American media relations — in 2022.
Google’s amazing; I bleed Google colors. I loved the impact I was having, the future of opportunities I saw for myself, and the feedback I was getting as a leader. I’m also the breadwinner for my family.
I’d always thought I’d be at Google for another 15 years and would retire there.
I realized I couldn’t sustain my life anymore
The moment that started the agony was when I was driving my son, who was 7 at the time, home from choir rehearsal in the dark, a 45-minute drive on winding roads.
Because of everything on my plate at the time — my role at Google, leading the Own Your Career program, navigating my book opportunities, and being a wife and mom — I was suffering from so much anxiety that it kept me up at night, feeling like I was letting everybody down and not doing anything well.
Mostly, I was incredibly sleep-deprived.
As I was driving, I was like, Oh my gosh. Did my eyes just flutter closed? I didn’t actually fall asleep at the wheel, but it was a terrifying moment.
During my next session with my executive coach, I told her I couldn’t sustain this anymore. I had taken on so many things in the name of success. She said, “Jenny, circumstances change.”
Her words stopped me in my tracks and opened me up to the possibility of leaving — leaving well and quitting thoughtfully.
Thus ensued 18 months of back-and-forth about whether I should stay or go.
I used a spreadsheet to help me weigh the risks
I’m a left-brain thinker and approach the world in a very analytical way, so it was hard to feel in my gut that it was time to leave.
One thing that really helped was a spreadsheet I made, weighing actual risk against perceived risk. I broke it down into four components: physical risk, cognitive risk, emotional risk, and financial risk.
Physical risk included things like not sleeping at night, pain, and weight loss (which I gave a 1). Cognitive risk was mental stress, distraction, and mental drain (a 2). Emotional risk included potential for rejection, loss of connection with loved ones, negative self-talk, and fear (a 2). And the financial risk was things like paying my future mortgage statement and future earnings potential (a 2).
Breaking things down helped me get out of a catastrophizing mindset of thinking, This is a ridiculous idea, and made me think much more practically about how this might be possible.
I had to change my mindset to escape the golden handcuffs
The golden handcuffs are very real.
It wasn’t just my salary, bonus, and equity; it was all of that future income as well. I would log in to my Google stock portfolio system — which tells you what you’ve earned and what you’ll earn when your stock vests — and my palms would sweat. It was really hard to walk away from that number.
But ultimately, if you’re in an executive role at any Fortune 500 company, you’re probably making more than you need to live on. I guess it depends on your lifestyle; I live pretty frugally. Even so, I still couldn’t imagine my income and net assets not continuing to go up and to the right every single year until I retired.
That was a mindset I had to move past.
It took my husband and me having seven conversations with our financial advisor — which ended up being more like therapy — for me to feel comfortable and confident that I could do this.
My advice on quitting well
I ended up leaving Google in August 2024. I cried after I turned in my badge and computer and as I drove away — happy, sad, and bittersweet tears. It was 18 years of my life!
When I came home, my husband and kids had written all these phrases that I’d said before through my leadership and coaching work, and arranged them in a heart shape on the window in the kitchen.
Courtesy of Jenny Wood
The heart is still up, 14 months later.
Quitting Google has been a massive change. I don’t want to make it sound like it was easy; it was the scariest and hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my professional life.
But I’d say I quit extraordinarily well. Here’s my advice for others.
1. Mind your truths and tales
A truth is a verifiable fact, while a tale is a story you create to make sense around the facts. We often tell ourselves negative tales, and they don’t serve us well because we believe what we think.
To get past my fears, I had to separate the truths from the tales, and then rewrite those tales to be more empowering.
For example:
Tale: I will lose my entire identity if I leave Google.
Truth: I’ll no longer be employed by Google.
A more empowering tale: Part of the reason I’m leaving is because I want to have a huge book launch and possibly be a bestselling author. That’s an incredible new identity to adopt!
Or, tale: We will run out of money and have to move to a smaller house, away from the gorgeous hiking trails that are behind our current house.
Truth: I will not get a paycheck with the Google logo on it every two weeks.
A more empowering tale: I’ve worked really hard to put myself in the best financial position possible to make this a reality.
One tale I told myself was that my kids would never forgive me for leaving Google because they love the secret game room, the climbing wall, and the free snacks and candy — Google’s a really cool place for a parent to work. But I know they’re really proud of what I’m doing.
What matters more to them is that now I’m done with work every day at 2:40 p.m., I drop them off and pick them up from school almost every day, and they’re probably going to start traveling to places like Disney World and Vegas with me for keynotes now.
There’s no question this was the right decision for my family.
2. Prioritize your dynamic dozen
Before I quit, I made a spreadsheet on my personal computer of people I wanted to stay in touch with and their email addresses. I was also posting on LinkedIn frequently and building an audience.
I set up what I call the “dynamic dozen” — 12 people you want to meet with in the next 12 weeks. This is great if you’re trying to switch roles within your company, if you’re looking for a new job, and also if you want to quit. It could be 12 people in 12 weeks, or 30 people in 30 days.
Mine was probably closer to around 60 people in 60 days, because I wanted to leverage all of the relationships I had: people who might want to bring me as a keynote speaker in the future, or people who might want to buy a hundred bulk copies of my book two years from then.
When you leave a company, your network always remains, so double down on that before you peace out. Have honest, intentional conversations, put time on someone’s calendar, and reach out to people, even if it’s been years since you had a working relationship.
I had to push past the fear that no one at Google would want to work with me once I was on the outside, that I’d be irrelevant. My work is a lot about how to thrive in a corporate environment, so I wondered, If I’m no longer in one, will any of my content still be valid?
Now, my number one client is Google. The vast majority of my coaching clients are Google employees, and a huge chunk of my speaking revenue is from Google speaking engagements or consulting.
3. Move, then map
Once, I was hiking in Montana with two friends, and the trail diverged into two paths. I’m always trying to optimize, so I started peppering the park ranger with all of these questions: “What is the perfect path? Which one will be more cardio? Which one is a lake view and which is a mountain view? Which trail is muddy?”
And from 50 feet ahead, my friend yelled, “Jenny, it’s all beautiful! Just start walking!”
I’m always trying to map out everything perfectly — how much income I’d make, how quickly I could build a business, what I’d be if not a Googler.
You can’t do that. Fear adds friction, which slows you down without actually minimizing risk.
Trying to map every little possible component also takes the joy out of the process. Action makes progress; thinking provides clarity. When you move and then map —or at least move and map in tandem — you’re going to be set up for so much more success.
If you quit your job for an unconventional path and want to share your story, please reach out to this reporter at janezhang@businessinsider.com.
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Embassy’s employment of Gila Ben-Yakov Phillips is potentially violation of UK sanctions law, say experts
The British embassy in Tel Aviv may have broken both UK sanctions law and UK government security policies by employing an Israeli citizen who owns a home in an illegal settlement in occupied Palestine, legal experts have said.
The embassy’s deputy head of corporate services and HR, Gila Ben-Yakov Phillips, moved to Kerem Reim in 2022. She listed a house she bought there as her home address on financial documents at the time.
Gennadiy Golovkin, the two-time middleweight world champion and 2004 Olympic silver medalist for Kazkhstan, was named president of World Boxing at the federation’s inaugural congress in Rome on Sunday.
Golovkin, who has been president of Kazakhstan’s National Olympic Committee since last year, will lead the amateur boxing federation into the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. He succeeds Boris van der Vorst, a Dutch national who was the first president of World Boxing.
“I feel great. I feel more excited. Right now, we have a new team, new view,” Golovkin said after his election to the post. “I have a plan. I have ideas, so many. My goal is bringing boxing’s position back to a high level.”
The World Boxing federation was launched in 2023 to address concerns about transparency and governance in amateur boxing that had placed the future of the sport at the Olympics in doubt. That year, the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, expelled the International Boxing Association, the former governing body of amateur boxing, from the Olympic movement because of those corruption concerns.
World Boxing, the new amateur boxing federation, has been collaborating with the IOC and said that, by January of this year, it had approved membership applications from 60 national boxing federations around the world.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev congratulated Golovkin.
“He has become the first representative of Kazakhstan to lead an international federation of an Olympic sport,” Tokayev said. “This landmark achievement is a testament to the global recognition of Gennady Golovkin’s outstanding accomplishments and his great contribution to boxing worldwide.”
Zelensky listened on speaker phone as Witkoff and Kushner read, line by line, from a 28-point plan.
Noah Berger/Noah Berger
- Amazon Web Services lost some AI customers to competitors due to capacity issues.
- Some clients shifted projects after AWS Bedrock didn’t meet capacity demand this summer.
- AWS Bedrock faces rising competition as cloud and AI rivals offer better performance.
This summer, Amazon’s cloud business struggled to keep pace with surging AI demand and missed out on real revenue for its flagship AI product.
Amazon Web Services’s Bedrock service sits at the center of the company’s AI push. It lets developers tap into powerful models, including Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama.
But over the summer, Bedrock hit “critical capacity constraints” that drove some customers to rival services, such as Google‘s cloud service, according to an internal July document obtained by Business Insider.
The shortages led to tens of millions of dollars in lost or delayed revenue. Epic Games shifted a $10 million Fortnite project to Google Cloud after AWS failed to provide enough quota for Bedrock, according to the document. (Quota limits control how much intelligence customers can access via AI cloud services).
Oil trader Vitol weighed moving some projects away from AWS, a decision that risked a $3.5 million revenue hit amid “prolonged quota approvals,” the document also warned. Other customers, including Atlassian and GovTech Singapore, were waiting on quota increases this summer, delaying at least $52.6 million in projected sales, the document also disclosed.
Bedrock was “experiencing critical capacity constraints that are threatening customer adoption and potentially causing substantial revenue loss across multiple industries,” the July document stated.
The fallout underscores the financial toll of AWS’s capacity crunch, and it explains why the biggest cloud companies are rushing to build as many AI data centers as possible right now. High demand is a good thing, but if you can’t satisfy this and customers go to rivals, that’s a frustrating problem.
Indeed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly stressed the need to ramp up cloud infrastructure, particularly AI chips and data center power. It’s unclear whether the company has fully resolved these issues. Three current and former employees said the capacity crunch remained one of AWS’s top concerns through September.
An Amazon spokesperson said Bedrock is “experiencing rapid growth” and AWS is adding capacity to meet that demand. Reviewing customer feedback is a core part of Amazon’s culture, which helps the company improve its products and services, the spokesperson added.
“At Amazon, we’re vocally self-critical because that’s how we drive continuous improvement and deliver better results for customers,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This internal candor is a feature of our culture, not a flaw. We’re grateful for all customer feedback—including challenges they encounter—because it helps us make Bedrock even better, and that’s exactly how you build a scalable, sustainable business that serves customers well over the long term.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Representatives for Anthropic and Epic Games didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Accelerating capacity’
Expanding data center capacity, as with other cloud providers, is one of AWS’s top priorities.
During an October earnings call, Jassy said AWS had been “focused on accelerating capacity the last several months,” adding more than 3.8 gigawatts of power over the past year, more than any other cloud provider. AWS has doubled its power capacity since 2022 and plans to double it again by 2027, he noted.
Jassy added that Amazon will remain “very aggressive” in scaling up capacity to meet booming demand, noting that AWS can monetize new infrastructure almost immediately. Bedrock, he said, is already showing potential to grow as large as EC2, one of AWS’s most successful cloud products and a key profit engine.
Part of Bedrock’s shortages may stem from prioritizing large clients. In October, Jassy said most of Bedrock’s workloads run on AWS’s in-house AI chip, Trainium, but that usage so far has come mainly from “a small number of very large customers.” He added that more mid-sized companies are expected to adopt the next-generation Trainium in the coming months.
Amazon is expected to reveal more details about Bedrock and its broader cloud strategy during its annual re:Invent conference in early December.
Noah Berger/Noah Berger
‘Urgent need’
The July AWS document said the capacity crunch was hitting customers across industries, including finance, gaming, and tech. Companies such as HelloFresh, Zalando, and Ryanair were among those affected.
At the same time, “slow capacity approval and denial of spiky workload requests” prevented firms like Stripe, Robinhood, and Vanguard from moving AI workloads from Anthropic to Bedrock, the document noted.
“These constraints are forcing customers to explore alternative providers like GCP, OpenAI, and Anthropic, signaling an urgent need for AWS to address its Bedrock service quota and performance challenges to maintain competitive positioning in the rapidly evolving GenAI market,” the document stated.
Quota limits in Bedrock are based on how many AI tokens you can process in a minute, or the number of API calls you can make in a given time period. (Tokens are how AI models break queries down into digestible data chunks. Industry pricing is based on how many tokens are processed. APIs are application programming interfaces, a common way applications share data).
In recent weeks, investors have grown uneasy over the tech industry’s massive AI spending, with fears of a potential bubble weighing on markets.
Amazon’s AI capacity issues are a double-edge sword here. On one hand, these challenges suggest customer demand is still very strong. On the other, it’s another reason for big tech companies to keep spending heavily, potentially fueling the AI bubble even more.
Amazon has said it plans to pour $125 billion into capital expenditures this year, and even more in 2026. AWS revenue climbed to $33 billion last quarter, up 20% year over year, marking its fastest growth since 2022.
Performance issues
It wasn’t just capacity woes driving customer workloads away from Bedrock. Latency and missing features also played a major role.
Customers using Anthropic’s Claude models through Bedrock opted to switch to Anthropic’s own platform or Google Cloud because of “ongoing capacity, latency, and feature parity issues,” according to the July AWS document. Companies such as Figma, Intercom, and Wealthsimple were among those migrating their workloads “due to one or several of these challenges.”
The UK’s Government Digital Service considered a move to Microsoft’s cloud because Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet model ran slower on Bedrock, the document added.
Thomson Reuters also chose Google Cloud over Bedrock for its CoCounsel AI product after finding AWS’s service was 15% to 30% slower and lacked key government compliance certifications, the document showed. In May, executives raised these concerns with AWS leadership, including CEO Matt Garman and compute VP Dave Brown, leading both companies to agree to monthly review meetings.
Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, told Business Insider that the company recently moved “one component of an AI workload to Google Cloud to prioritize latency.” He added that Thomson Reuters still runs substantial workloads on AWS and Anthropic as part of its multi-model, multi-cloud strategy.
‘Increasing competition’ from Google
The July AWS document also noted that Bedrock was losing ground to Google’s Gemini models, which boast five to six times larger quota limits and, in many cases, better performance.
When comparing accessing Claude via Bedrock against Gemini Pro, the internal report said the Google model outperformed “across multiple benchmarks.” The document also noted that Gemini Flash, a smaller, cheaper Google model, “delivers comparable quality at a fraction of the cost.” (And this was before Google’s Gemini 3 launch, which improved AI performance further for the internet giant).
Some startups jumped ship because of this. Financial startup TainAI shifted 40% of its Claude workloads from Bedrock to Gemini Flash, saving $85,000 a day, while Hotel Planner was planning to move to Google Cloud or OpenAI, the document noted.
The broader concern, according to the document, is that AWS lacked a cohesive product vision for AI inference, the main space in which Bedrock competes. Rivals such as Databricks, FireworksAI, and Nvidia’s Dynamo were quickly pulling ahead, it noted.
Without a clear strategy or compelling long-term vision, AWS risked missing out on one of the most lucrative opportunities in the AI market, it warned.
“We are still missing an inspiring long-term vision and a holistic strategy,” the document said.
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Carla D.A.
- Brian Zhan is a young VC who made early bets on Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, Periodic Labs, and Reflection AI.
- Zhan will be employing an unusually bold strategy of writing $30 million checks to seed-stage companies.
- Zhan believes VC is undergoing a transformation that requires firms to pounce with big checks very early.
At just 29, Brian Zhan, who practices what he describes as “nerdy investing,” has already made early bets on buzzy AI companies now valued in the billions.
After quietly leaving Silicon Valley VC firm CRV this summer, Zhan recently joined Striker Venture Partners, where he and veteran investor Max Gazor plan to upend traditional VC playbooks with a $165 million fund that aims to make massive seed bets on the next generation of AI startups.
“We’re only investing in 10 companies per fund, and we’re going to show up with checks up to $30 million,” Zhan said. “That takes conviction.”
$30 million is what companies typically raise in a later funding round once they have achieved product-market fit, but Zhan believes VC is undergoing a radical transformation that requires firms to pounce with big checks when an early kernel of an idea presents itself.
“Seed-stage investing is moving earlier and earlier,” he said. “Seed rounds today are often just 22-year-old founders with a great idea.”
Zhan, who studied computer science at Northwestern University and started his career writing code at Facebook, is emblematic of a shift taking place in venture, where investors switch firms more often and technical backgrounds are prized above MBAs because many of the most promising new startups have few business metrics to evaluate.
“It was on the Facebook data team where I saw a pattern that really stuck with me,” he said. “The best technical minds at the company were founding startups and then struggling to raise meaningful capital, despite having résumés that Silicon Valley normally drools over.”
He started angel investing in his spare time, writing small checks into projects led by former Facebook engineers. At CRV, Zhan transitioned to a full-time VC role, making early bets on Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, and Periodic Labs.
“Today, these companies are some of the best-known companies in AI, but back at the seed round, a lot of VCs just didn’t really know who these founders were,” Zhan said.
His biggest win so far is the model startup Reflection AI, which he views as proof that VCs should not be afraid to pay up in seed rounds.
Zhan co-led Reflection AI’s seed round just last year at a $200 million valuation, a very expensive price that many other VCs passed up. Last month, the company raised $2 billion at a valuation of $8 billion.
“Founders want someone who can speak their language,” said Misha Laskin, CEO and cofounder of Reflection AI. “Brian is rare in that he’s actually done the work, is incredibly well connected, and is insightful about what’s happening at the frontier.”
Excited about AI for science
Zhan grew up in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Palo Alto. His older sister is Stephanie Zhan, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, who was also an early backer of Reflection AI and Skild AI.
“I would say we have very similar tastes, and sometimes we land on the same companies,” Brian Zhan said.
Asked if they will be discussing deals around the Thanksgiving table, he said: “No, we keep work separate.”
While many VCs spend their days in coffee shops meeting as many founders as possible, Zhan finds it more useful to devote hours a day to reading the latest AI research curated by his own custom AI assistant.
He says he was drawn to reunite with Gazor, an MIT Ph.D. dropout who has appeared four times on the Forbes Midas list, because of their similar intellectual style.
“We spend all morning reading papers and trying to identify the trends and who has the most exciting ideas,” Zhan said. “We take very few meetings every day. We just spend more time figuring out what the frontier is, and when we reach out to founders, we have already made up our mind to go back to them.”
Gazor, who is probably best known for his early investment in Airtable, helped recruit Zhan to CRV in 2023 and wanted to work with him again.
“I saw him become one of the most trusted advisors to some of the most high-profile AI founders, and I was really in awe of how he related to them,” Gazor said. “He’s got a fantastic trajectory ahead of him.”
Zhan says he is most excited about founders who are harnessing the power of AI for science, such as William Fedus, a former OpenAI researcher who recently cofounded Periodic Labs to automate scientific discovery.
“Imagine if we could use AI to dramatically shorten drug discovery timelines?” Zhan said. “I think that AI for science will become as big a category as AI for robotics is today.”
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Clasp
- We asked top investors at firms like A16z and NEA to name healthcare’s most promising startups.
- Most of their picks are using AI, automating in critical areas like healthcare hiring and payments.
- Meet the 18 healthcare startups investors have been watching in 2025.
Healthcare investors are chomping at the bit to fund hot startups tackling administrative burdens, workforce shortages, and high medical costs with new technologies.
We asked 10 investors from VC firms, private equity shops, and family offices to identify the most promising healthcare startups of 2025.
Top backers from firms like Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Oak HC/FT were asked to make two picks each: one healthcare startup from their portfolio, and one they have no financial interest in.
Nearly every startup nominated is utilizing AI in their products, from automating hospital back-end tasks to assisting patients with questions about their payments. Healthcare AI startups have dominated digital health VC funding so far this year, capturing nearly $4 billion of the $6.4 billion raised across the industry in the first half of 2025, according to Rock Health.
Here’s the full list of the most promising healthcare startups of 2025, according to investors.
AKASA
Cadence
Carefam
Chai Discovery
Clasp
Courier Health
Diana Health
Inbox Health
Infinitus Systems
Knownwell
PayZen
Stedi
Stepful
Teal Health
Chloe Jackman Photography
Wellsheet
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