refusing immoral demands

MapQuest rose to the No. 1 spot on Apple's App Store after refusing to change Lake Ontario's name to Lake America on its platform following President Donald Trump's executive order on the matter.

The mapping service took the top spot among free apps on Apple’s App Store this week after announcing it would continue using the lake’s historical name despite the president directing the U.S. government to recognize the body of water sitting between the United States and Canada as Lake America.

"We are aware that Lake Ontario is being correctly labeled on our map," MapQuest said Aug. 30 in a post on X.

In January 2025, Donald Trump delivered a death knell, ending DEI within the federal government with executive orders and threatening to target companies that still supported it. Companies including Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s and Walmart that had embraced DEI years earlier fell into line and announced an end to their policies.

But new research published on Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian found that companies that resisted the pressure and kept their DEI practices, including Costco, Apple and Delta Air Lines, performed just as well as their competitors who pulled back.

For the research, Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor at at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, analyzed how S&P 500 companies fared after Trump’s January executive order. He used what economists define as “abnormal returns” – the difference between how a stock was expected to perform versus how it actually performed – to isolate the impact of a company’s DEI decision.

What he found was the firms that kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI shareholder resolutions did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as firms that didn’t. In the days after the executive orders were signed, companies that kept their DEI policies actually performed better on the stock market than those that didn’t.

“There have been some, I’ll say, communications from the federal government, like attached to grants, that would require a jurisdiction to agree to certain things,” Cole-Tindall said. “King County has joined some lawsuits with other jurisdictions around the country related to saying we don’t think that that is fair or appropriate.”

Together, Cole-Tindall’s comments highlight King County’s stance that local law enforcement should not be drawn into federal civil immigration enforcement, except under judge-signed criminal court orders.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced Thursday that she has no plans to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with data on thousands of noncitizens who were erroneously registered to vote due to a software malfunction.

“We are not in the practice of turning over this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it, I’ve seen it personally,” Sherrill said. “They are working to weaponize personal data, and they don’t have a reputation for keeping it private either.”

Rutherford County Library System Director Luanne James said she won’t comply with a directive to relocate more than 190 children’s books from the kids section to the adult section.

The library board voted earlier this week to relocate the books, citing concerns about content, including LGBTQ+ themes. Board members said the decision is about age appropriateness and not banning books.

James said she is “ethically bound” to uphold the First Amendment. She argues that relocating the books would restrict access to information and violate the community’s rights.

The disagreement comes after months of debate over what materials should be available to children in public libraries.

Rutherford County Library Alliance member Tatiana Silvas called the decision “an act of patriotism,” saying James is standing up for the rights of library patrons and the broader community.

But Barker also worried about his ability to act ethically if he stayed on the job. When he learned members of his office were preparing a conspiracy indictment against Mavalwalla and eight others, he decided to resign. “I didn’t feel in this case that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or wanted to be as a federal prosecutor,” he told the Guardian.

We’ve seen it happen in vivid, documented detail — and the story starts with Anthropic itself. Dario Amodei and several of his colleagues founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI over concerns about the company’s approach to safety and the pace of AI development. That departure wasn’t an anomaly. It was the first chapter of a pattern that has only accelerated since. When OpenAI’s direction drifted further from its founding safety principles, the departures didn’t trickle — they cascaded. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, left in May 2024. Jan Leike, who co-led the Superalignment team, followed days later, writing publicly that safety had “taken a backseat to shiny products.” By August 2024, Fortune reported that nearly half of OpenAI’s AGI safety researchers had quietly resigned. Researcher Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from $1.7 million in equity — the vast majority of his family’s net worth — because he’d lost confidence the company would behave responsibly. Most recently, just weeks ago, OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig quit in a New York Times op-ed over the company’s move toward advertising, warning that ChatGPT’s archive of intimate user conversations created manipulation risks that “we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”

Chief executive Dario Amodei said in a statement that the threats from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, would not change the company’s position, and that he hoped Hegseth would “reconsider”.