WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Saturday threw out President Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over an article reporting on his ties to disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami ruled that the president did not prove the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice. Gayles dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled and the dismissal is permanent and incontrovertible.
The ruling said the lawsuit was “grasping at straws” as it attempted to “manufacture” flaws in the Journal’s investigative reporting.
The lawsuit was over an article the Journal published last year describing a sexually suggestive letter that the paper said bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The letter was reportedly collected by jailed British socialite and Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a birthday album for Epstein years before he was first arrested in 2006 and subsequently had a reported falling-out with Trump.
The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn nude woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper.
Trump denied writing it and called the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Miami, accused the paper and its reporters of having “knowingly and recklessly” published “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements,” which, it alleged, caused “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” to the president.
BLAINE, Wash. — The Trump administration’s top border official defended plans to build a wall and other infrastructure in Texas’ Big Bend region despite mounting opposition against the project and a court-ordered pause on construction, saying his goal of fortifying the country’s borders was “non-negotiable.”
In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott argued that the $46-billion wall project was justified despite a bipartisan coalition of landowners, local businesses and environmentalists who view it as a waste of taxpayer money that could be destructive to a region with historically low migrant crossings.
“Our No. 1 goal right out the gate is we have to know who and what is coming into the United States,” Scott said on Thursday. If the Big Bend region were left without a wall or other border infrastructure while other areas along the border get those fortifications, he said, “I am 100% convinced it will be completely overrun and destroyed.”
The fight over Big Bend has become a major test for how far the Republican administration is willing to go for the border wall, President Trump’s signature infrastructure project.
Scott, a former Border Patrol agent, was tapped by Trump to complete it.
His agency is responsible for executing a plan funded last summer by Republicans in Congress to line the roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico with a mixture of 30-foot-tall steel walls, vehicle barriers, new roads and surveillance technology to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling.
The Trump administration says it is building about 12 miles a week. Scott, who gets daily progress updates, said it will be complete by the end of Trump’s second term. The primary border wall — some areas also get a secondary layer — will be done by the end of December 2027.
“We’re actually ahead of schedule,” Scott said.
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1.Charlie Angell stands on an overlook of the Rio Grande river2.Pamela Priddy, center, holds up signs with others during a weekly protest against barriers along the border in the Big Bend region, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, in Study Butte, Texas.(John Locher / Ap Photo/john Locher)
Big Bend is a test for the Trump administration’s plans for the wall
The wall plan has run into resistance in places like Big Bend. The Trump administration was dealt a major setback earlier this month when a judge ordered a pause on border wall construction in the region, citing what could be a likelihood that plaintiffs “will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction.” The administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the order.
The ruling included any construction in Big Bend National Park, an area that has seen a loud bipartisan outcry, including from some Republican lawmakers.
After bulldozers were spotted in the park tearing up ground in August, Scott ordered a pause on all construction-related activity there while he went to talk to people in the region. He said the agency is making other outreach to locals to discuss how to build projects so they don’t mar the park.
“We’re talking through and figuring out what is the right solution for that area,” he said.
Scott said he can’t get into specific details on what the agency’s plans are for the park because of the numerous ongoing lawsuits, but he reiterated that the project won’t include tall steel walls.
He also said that the agency’s stated goal of protecting the country and knowing what’s coming in and going out is “non-negotiable.”
He said the region’s formidable natural barriers were not enough to prevent people from entering the country illegally through other more navigable points. And he expressed concern that cartels that control smuggling from Mexico into the U.S. would exploit any opening.
CBP has come under fire for immigration enforcement tactics
Scott leads an agency of 67,000 employees responsible for controlling who and what comes into the country through official border crossings like airports or seaports and stopping illegal smuggling and migration outside those official border crossing points.
The agency came under heavy scrutiny last year when its officers were sent into cities deep inside the country to help carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Agents with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement patrol in a neighborhood after apprehending a person on Jan. 31 in St. Paul, Minn.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
As protests against an operation rocked Minneapolis, a Border Patrol officer and a CBP officer both fired shots in an encounter that killed a U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti. The shooting eventually prompted the Trump administration to wind down high-profile city-based crackdowns. A CBP officer who was the face of the missions, Gregory Bovino, who led a helicopter raid at a large apartment building and used chemical agents to confront demonstrators, retired earlier this year.
Scott said while CBP still helps ICE, it’s now less involved in immigration enforcement far from the country’s borders because ICE has since hired more officers to its ranks. Scott wouldn’t comment on the investigation into the Pretti killing, saying that it was being handled by the FBI and was ongoing. And when asked about Bovino’s tactics, he said the officer didn’t report to him during the operations.
Scott spoke to the AP just outside the border with Canada, where he met with border security representatives from other countries to share information about threats and trends. During his trip, he visited an operations center where he said Canadian and American law enforcement work together.
That border has far fewer threats than the U.S. border with Mexico. Scott said cartels in Mexico are increasingly sending drones into the United States to move contraband and keep tabs on Border Patrol agents. In Mexico, the cartels have been using drones to attack each other or Mexican law enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, recently announced temporary flight restrictions targeting unauthorized drone activity in a zone extending a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border as a way to counter cartels.
“We want to make sure,” Scott said, “that threat does not come into the United States.”
Neve Jones will win her 50th Ireland cap as Stacey Flood and Dorothy Wall return for the first of two WXV Global Series Tests against South Africa in Cape Town.
Gloucester-Hartpury’s Jones is named at hooker, while Flood and Wall are reinstalled at full-back and lock for Saturday’s game at Athlone Stadium (14:00 BST).
Wall’s return to partner Jane Clohessy in the second row means Fione Tuite-O’Sullivan switches to blind-side flanker, while Brittany Hogan starts at number eight to deputise for injured star Aoife Wafer.
Jemima Adams Verling, who filled in for Wafer in the 43-19 win over Japan in Cork on 3 October, drops to the bench.
Flood, who replaces Niamh Gallagher in the 15 jersey, is joined by Beibhinn Parsons and Robyn O’Connor in the back three. Anna McGann and Aoife Dalton are again paired in midfield, while Dannah O’Brien and Emily Lane continue their half-back partnership.
Linda Djougang continues at loose-head prop with Eilis Cahill at tight-head either side of Jones, while Erin King captains the team from open-side flanker.
Kate Jordan, who made her debut as a second-half replacement for King in the win over Japan, is one of six forwards on the bench alongside Beth Buttimer, Niamh O’Dowd, Sadhbh McGrath, Grace Moore and Adams Verling.
Aoibheann Reilly and Eve Higgins provide backline cover from the bench.
Ireland’s only previous meeting with South Africa was a 2006 Women’s Rugby World Cup match in Canada, which the Irish won 37-0.
Scott Bemand’s side opened their WXV campaign with defeat by the United States before bouncing back to beat Japan in Galway. They also defeated Japan in Cork in a non-WXV Test match in Cork.
After Saturday’s first meeting, Ireland face South Africa again in Cape Town on 31 October.
Ireland: Stacey Flood; Beibhinn Parsons, Anna McGann, Aoife Dalton, Robyn O’Connor; Dannah O’Brien, Emily Lane; Linda Djougang, Neve Jones, Eilis Cahill, Jane Clohessy, Dorothy Wall, Fiona Tuite-O’Sullivan, Erin King (capt), Brittany Hogan.
Replacements: Beth Buttimer, Niamh O’Dowd, Sadhbh McGrath, Kate Jordan, Grace Moore, Jemima Adams Verling, Aoibheann Reilly, Eve Higgins.
US federal judge blocked wall’s construction on Texas-Mexico border amid an ongoing legal battle.
Published On 22 Oct 202622 Oct 2026
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to resume plans to build a border wall through the Big Bend region of West Texas, as part of its anti-immigration policy to strengthen security on the border with Mexico.
The Justice Department filed an emergency request on Wednesday asking the court to lift a federal judge’s injunction in a lower court that has halted construction while a lawsuit against the project, brought by an environmental group and other challengers, plays out.
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The Department of Homeland Security plans include vehicle barriers, patrol roads, lighting and detection technology in and around Big Bend National Park.
Big Bend has about 805km (500 miles) of border, and, according to opponents of the project who have sued the administration, accounts for about 1 percent of migrant arrests.
Lipan Apache tribe member Joey Montoya attends a rally opposing border wall construction in Big Bend National Park, outside the federal courthouse during an emergency hearing on the project in San Antonio, Texas, on August 28, 2026 [File: Joel Angel Juarez/Reuters]
Landscape, historic church
The lawsuit, filed by plaintiffs including the Center for Biological Diversity and a Big Bend-area river guide, seeks to preserve the landscape, protect a historic church, and challenge the federal government’s waivers of environmental and historical laws to fast-track the $1.7bn project.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and current Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who issued the waivers between February and July, found the region to be an “area of high illegal entry”, requiring additional barriers to control the border.
US District Judge Kathleen Cardone issued an injunction in El Paso on October 2 halting work “until and unless Defendants comply with all applicable laws,” she wrote in her order.
In a later opinion, the judge found that the waivers exceeded the authority of Noem and Mullin.
The Justice Department in its request urged the Supreme Court to pause or overturn Cardone’s injunction.
The Supreme Court has not yet responded to this appeal.
“Even assuming that the secretary’s waiver authority implicates a question of ‘vast economic and political significance,’ Congress did clearly authorize the secretary both to build border barriers and to waive legal requirements in order to facilitate their expeditious construction,” the Justice Department wrote.
In August, the administration paused construction in Big Bend after the project drew bipartisan criticism over its potential impact on the park’s landscape and wildlife.
Experts warn Bank of America’s hefty AML fine signals a reckoning for aging banking compliance.
When Bank of America released third-quarter financials on Oct. 14, shareholders took note of a $1.2 billion non-tax-deductible blow to earnings. The anti-money laundering, or AML, and sanctions penalty shaved 17 cents off its per-share net income.
But the fine itself may be the least of the bank’s worries.
Financial crime and AML experts told Global Finance that this penalty was not an outlier but a warning to the rest of the industry.
“If you looked at every bank in detail, you’d find problems,” ThetaRay CEO Brad Levy said in an interview. “It’s kind of like every house — when the inspector comes, there’s something wrong.”
What Happened
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) addressed the penalty. The segment cited Bank of America’s “failure to mitigate and report priority national security risks, including Chinese Money Laundering Networks and illicit finance along the southwest border.”
The fine is the third-largest in the department’s history, behind a roughly $4 billion settlement with Binance in 2023 and an approximately $3 billion settlement with TD Bank in 2024.
This particular cost includes $750 million that goes to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — the largest fine that regulator has ever imposed— plus $11.6 million to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control over apparent violations of sanctions programs covering Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.
A Bank of America spokesperson issued the following statement to Global Finance: “Financial crime compliance is serious, and we are responsible for getting it right. We worked with regulators to reach these penalty resolutions stemming from violations cited in the previously reported 2024 OCC Consent Order and FinCEN’s investigation. We have invested billions of dollars in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to combat financial crime, and our team is far along with and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by our regulators.”
Fallout Extends Beyond Government Agencies
For Nikhil Raghuveera, CEO of Predicate, a startup that uses blockchain technology for AML enforcement, the real government-inflicted damage is not to Bank of America’s coffers but to its goodwill.
“The bank faces business and reputational damage with counterparties,” Raghuveera said. Partner institutions, clearing banks, and corporate clients typically tighten their own risk thresholds to protect themselves from secondary liability and run their own risk assessments. And a Bank Secrecy Act violation feeds directly into them, he explained.
“A large bank doesn’t lose its ability to operate, but it does face greater scrutiny and the potential loss of business opportunities,” Raghuveera added. “The regulator now sees the bank as unable to fix things itself. As a result, every new product or expansion gets reviewed through that lens.”
Regulatory Trust Broken
The hefty fine grabbed headlines, but according to Will Lawrence, CEO of San Francisco-based AML software maker Bretton AI Inc., the money matters less than what the bank has lost in regulatory trust.
Will Lawrence, Bretton AI
“For a large bank, even a significant financial penalty may be manageable,” Lawrence said in an email. “What’s much harder is operating once regulators lose confidence in the institution’s ability to manage risk.”
That can mean independent monitoring, more board scrutiny and limits on growth.
“Even without formal restrictions on growth or acquisitions, unresolved compliance issues can complicate a bank’s expansion plans,” he said. “The financial penalty may be immediate, but remediation can take years.”
Big-name banks are also vulnerable if their methods for flagging suspicious activity remain outdated.
For example, when a typical analyst pulls data from different systems, reconstructs transactions, and documents the findings, that approach often falls short against sophisticated laundering networks, Lawrence explained.
“These are not necessarily risks you can understand by looking at one transaction or one customer in isolation,” he said. “You need to connect activity across accounts, counterparties and payment channels to identify broader patterns.”
Large penalties are rarely a one-time blip, Raghuveera said. “They tend to reflect patterns: transaction monitoring that’s poorly calibrated, SARs filed late or not at all, watchlists that aren’t kept current, and compliance teams lacking the staff, tools or authority to escalate.”
24/7 Reality Check
For Lawrence, true accountability raises certain questions: Who knew about the risks? Who had the authority to address them? Was appropriate action taken?
“A bank can have sophisticated monitoring systems, but if serious issues aren’t escalated or leadership doesn’t respond, the program isn’t working,” he added.
Also, Lawrence said, a bank can’t spend its way out of the problem. Regulators want evidence that changes are working, not just new policies or software.
“A bank can hire more analysts, purchase new technology, and rewrite its policies without fundamentally improving its ability to identify financial crime,” Lawrence said. Banks have also long tracked activity counts, such as the number of alerts reviewed or cases closed. “Those numbers tell you something about workload, but not necessarily whether you’re managing risk effectively.”
Levy, who spent nearly 20 years at Goldman Sachs before joining ThetaRay, expressed a similar sentiment. To put it plainly, legacy technology hasn’t kept pace.
“Most of these systems and processes are 10 to 30 years old,” he said, stressing the need for serious internal audits to accommodate the 24/7 banking world.
“Ten years ago, you could get away with it,” he said. “In the next five, you actually can’t… the speed-up in technology is going to be breathtaking.”
Anthony Noto covers corporate finance and private credit. Contact him at anoto@gfmag.com
Their face is gone, LeBron James getting kicked to a Philly curb.
Their voice is gone, longtime public address announcer Lawrence Tanterdying last month at age 76 after more than four decades of dulcet downtown tones.
Meet the 2026-27 Lakers, a team that will look different, sound different, feel different, play different and behave different from their recent predecessors in every way but one.
They’re still not winning a championship.
They’re still not getting to the conference finals.
Lakers guard Luka Doncic enters this season as the face of the franchise after LeBron James’ departure.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
They’re still destined to a sixth seed and a first-round knockout in the impossible West, a mediocre finish that is sure to convince new ownership to make massive changes — look out Rob Pelinka and JJ Redick! — and start all over again next season.
So call this a gap year.
They’ve graduated from LeBron, but they’re still not quite sure what they want to do with the rest of their life.
They’re planning on majoring in Luka Doncic, minoring in Austin Reaves and specializing in Walker Kessler, but there are flaws in all three, and the rest of the proposed curriculum is an unknown collection of ideas that have yet to be put together in a cogent package.
For now, the league’s biggest roster overhaul includes names that are just names, the likes of Quentin Grimes, Collin Sexton, Matisse Thybulle, Ziaire Williams, Sandro Mamukelashvili and Kevon Looney. Who knows where they will fit? Who knows what they can do?
Then there’s the name Bronny James, whose future here took a nosedive when his pops moved to Philadelphia and he had a lousy training camp. Who knows how long Bronny will stick around, but at least the Lakers are out of the LeBron family drama business, which is good, because this team will create enough drama on its own.
First, there’s Doncic, and the risk in building around him, considering he’s missed an average of 20 games a season the last three years. He’s appeared in a total of five playoff games since leading the Dallas Mavericks to the Finals three years ago. He’s 27, but sometimes he trudges around the court like he’s 50.
Lakers guard Bronny James dribbles during a preseason game against the Kings at Crypto.com Arena on Oct. 8.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
Now that this is Doncic’s team, will he act like it?
Every centerpiece player in Laker history — from Mikan to West to Kareem to Magic to Kobe to Shaq to Pau to LeBron — has carried their group to a championship. They’ve not been considered a true Laker until they have done so. In the case of LeBron, one was not even enough.
Is Doncic prepared to shoulder this burden? He says yes. He says he’s done this before, although he’s never won an NBA title, so, um …
“It feels great,” he told reporters at media day last month. “Obviously, it’s a new challenge. I was in this position in my career a lot of times, so it’s not new to me. But I feel great. I feel excited, and like I said, I’m ready to go. It’s been a long time since I played basketball, so I’m ready.”
He got off to a good start this summer when he flew the team to his native Slovenia to spend a few days bonding. He is already acting like a captain. Now he needs to play every day like one.
“I see myself in this role, nothing new, but it’s very important,” Doncic said. “Everybody on the whole team, you know, look up to me, I have to look up to them. And it’s just, there should be many leaders, you know. You should be able to hold each other accountable.”
Lakers guard Austin Reaves dribbles past the Kings’ Nique Clifford during a preseason game at Crypto.com Arena on Oct. 8.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
Many leaders? Probably only two, Doncic and his newly minted $180-million running mate Reaves.
The Lakers were 30-11 when the two gunners were on the court last season, and no NBA duo averaged more points, but, again, this year is different.
Last year they both had LeBron as a safety net. This year, it’s all on them.
Just like Doncic, Reaves said he is ready to help guide his new teammates on this arduous journey.
“The expectation here of being a Laker is higher than it is anywhere in the world,” Reaves said. “The media presence, you know, every day something is going to come out about us, and just being able to know how to navigate that and help others navigate that is the main thing. One second we’re going to be the best team in the world. And the next you lose two in a row, you’re the worst team, you can’t figure it out. So, helping these guys understand that none of that really matters, it’s all about what goes on within these walls, is the main thing.”
Actually, for Reaves, the main thing is the postseason, where he has mightily struggled, even taking into account the slight guard usually enters each spring with all sorts of bumps and bruises. He’s been a lousy playoff shooter. He’s been a clumsy playoff playmaker.
But one of the greatest undrafted free agents in recent league history appreciates and embraces every chance to change the narrative, and he’ll have no greater chance than this season.
“You’re going to have failures within this long season,” he said. “But every single night you’re going to have an opportunity when you take the floor, especially for this organization, for this fan base to show the world what you’re capable of. So, you’re going to have every single opportunity to do good with the opportunities that you’re given.”
No Laker, it seems, will have a greater nightly opportunity to write his legacy than Kessler, who was acquired this summer from the Utah Jazz for the princely sum of two first-round picks and two first-round pick swaps.
He is being projected as a perfect lob and pick-and-roll partner for Doncic and a long-awaited rim protector, but let’s be real.
He played in five games last year and never started a full season in his four years in Utah and even for a perpetually tanking team, that’s not a big resume. What sort of NBA center he will be is anybody’s guess.
The Lakers are guessing huge, and at least he sounds like he’s ready for it.
Laker Walker Kessler fouls the Warriors’ Yaxel Lendeborg during a preseason game on Oct. 13 in Las Vegas, Nev.
(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
“And as far as the belief that they’ve shown in me, I mean, it makes me excited for this year,” he said. “It makes me feel like I can run through the wall for this organization, this team, my teammates, so yeah, I’m just so excited.”
Good thing about that wall, because with this unsettled bunch, there will be plenty of them.
But, hey, at least one looming question has been answered. During media day, new power forward Mamukelashvili gracefully explained how to pronounce his last name.
“So, a lot of people think it’s hard, but I don’t think so,” he said. “It is Mamu-kela-shvili. So if you take like, I feel like, two letters at a time, and “shvili” at the end, it’s not that hard.”
If only the rest of this season would go so smooth.
Renoir art heist suspects were planning ‘imminent’ second robbery, prosecutors say.
Published On 12 Oct 202612 Oct 2026
Two paintings by the impressionist master Renoir which were stolen from a French museum last month have been found damaged behind a false wall in a private home after police made several arrests ahead of what prosecutors say was an imminent second heist.
Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said six suspects were arrested on Wednesday after authorities discovered they were planning to target the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, home to one of Europe’s largest collections of modern art.
Bessone said the arrests were prompted by the “very strong suspicion that another heist was imminent”.
“We were very clearly looking at the repetition of a criminal scheme”, said Eric Antonetti, the head of the Alpes-Maritimes judicial police.
On September 8, thieves used an electric saw to cut through a fence to enter the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, according to investigators.
An alarm sounded and police officers arrived four minutes later, a swift response that “apparently caused the perpetrators to panic,” Bessone said.
The stolen works, “Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well” by impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were valued at about 4.2m euros ($4.7m), Bessone said.
The thieves also attempted to steal two other Renoir paintings, “Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading”, which depicts Renoir’s young son Claude. They abandoned them in the museum gardens while fleeing police.
“As they fled, they were unable to take all four paintings and abandoned two of them, which were later found in a protective sleeve,” he said.
Police chiefs speak to reporters in Nanterre on Monday following recovery of the stolen paintings last week [Thomas Samson/AFP]
Damaged and torn
The paintings were found hidden behind a false wall in a house on Friday. Both works were damaged and will need restoration. One of the paintings, “Madame Colonna Romano”, had been torn.
“These two paintings are not simply works of art. They are part of our city’s history,” Bryan Masson, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, said on Friday. “Knowing they have been recovered is an immense relief.”
The recovery came almost exactly one month after the theft, following an investigation that used DNA evidence, mobile phone geolocation data and surveillance video.
The two key suspects include a 29-year-old, who was charged after investigators recovered DNA from a bag left behind during the getaway.
They were charged with organised theft and other offences. A third man, accused of hiding the paintings, was charged with organised handling of stolen goods.
A fourth suspect, who investigators say was approached about buying the artworks, was charged with handling stolen goods and taking part in a criminal conspiracy.
Bessone said the suspects had denied planning a second museum raid, but he added that he did “not believe the principal suspect visited that museum simply out of a love of art”.
A 200-year-old cottonwood tree has been cut down to make way for an expansion of a US-Mexico double border wall. Activists staged protests for months and camped at the tree to prevent it from being cut down.
“They have been through a lot over the past six or seven years,” said Bhushan Sethi, a partner at PwC, who moderated a Sibos panel on AI-led workforce strategy. “We’ve gone from the Great Recession to quiet quitting. We’re now in the ‘no hire, no fire’ job market in the US and beyond.”
Through it all, companies continue to ask their employees to move faster, reimagine their businesses end-to-end, and standardize their documented processes globally, while their leadership eyes the performance of small AI-enabled startups unencumbered by technology debt, he added. “That’s a challenge.”
Especially when 80% of those polled expect their organization to reduce headcount by 20% in the next few years.
“We don’t have a choice of going back and saying ‘No, we are not going to move with the industry and trends that are leading the next generation of the financial services industry,’” said Anna Domino, global head of client services at BNY.
“BNY has more than 300 AI-enabled offerings currently in production,” she added. “We also have almost 150 digital employees deployed across the organization, including operations and other functions. Over half our employee population are AI super-users on a daily basis.”
In comparison, only 22% of respondents in PwC’s survey reported using generative AI daily for their jobs, up 8% from the previous year.
Calming the AI Workforce
Allaying a workforce’s anxiety about AI won’t be easy, as 44% of respondents in a PwC survey said they did not trust their senior management.
“That’s a hard environment to bring your best self to work and to optimize and leverage the investments that many, many firms have made and will continue to make in AI-led transformation,” said PwC’s Sethi.
Applying human skills such as empathy and kindness would help leadership manage its workforce’s anxiety, he added. “Let’s face it, we could all do with a little more of that.”
When BNY deploys a new solution, Domino’s team works with the people who currently do the job and lets them lead the bank’s redesign of the process to create more value for the client.
“If you include people in the conversation and give them transparency about how their role will change because of the redesign and what skills they need to learn over time to support the new process, it makes buy-in much easier,” she said.
Another option for employers is to wait a few years and hire those born around 2010, who won’t remember a world without AI.
“We have people in their 20s, mid-20s, and late 20s who are digital natives, but [employers] want those people who came out of their cribs and started playing on tablets and iPhones,” said panelist Darmesh Sethi, a managing director at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC), sharing his personal opinion.
They will enter entry-level jobs after working on their high school newspapers and using AI throughout college, he added. “They are comfortable; they’re confident, and that is what we need. We need a confident workforce that can actually harness the power and potential of what these technologies provide.”
However, the same technologies are eliminating the menial work that once taught entry-level employees the business.
“When we were hiring people out of college 20 years ago, they would be creating spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations,” said BNY’s Domino. “None of that is happening anymore. So, we have to focus on apprenticeships, coaching, shadowing, and bringing that talent in front of clients way sooner than it used to happen 20 or 30 years ago.”
The process would require an investment of time and energy from senior leaders who possess the business knowledge, she added.
SMBC’s Sethi sees entry-level employees moving from grunt work to decision-making. “That is where they are going to have to step up,” he said. “And that is what we are really seeing in our employee training and the intentional hiring of young talent.”
WASHINGTON — A federal court in Texas on Friday issued a ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from building a border wall and other infrastructure across the state’s Big Bend region.
The news marks a major win for landowners, businesses and environmentalists in the region who have united to oppose the planned infrastructure projects, which are part of a $46-billion effort by the Trump administration to line the southern border with a mix of 30-foot steel walls, vehicle barriers, roads and surveillance technology.
Judge Kathleen Cardone said in her ruling that the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits of at least one of the claims in suit, that there is a likelihood that they will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest weigh in their favor.”
Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Opponents of the border wall project have argued that the Big Bend region is so remote and the landscape so rugged that it serves as its own deterrent to illegal immigration, and that the administration violated the law when it issued a swath of waivers allowing it to bypass numerous regulations in order to speed up border wall infrastructure projects.
Laiken Jordahl, with the Center of Biological Diversity that brought the suit, called Cardone’s ruling a “total victory.”
“The bulldozers are going to be sent packing until she rules on the merits,” Jordahl said. “This is such a historic day for Big Bend and for Texas and the Constitution.”
The court’s decision comes just weeks after the administration erected the first border wall panels in the Big Bend sector in the middle of September.
![Lipan Apache tribe member Joey Montoya attends a rally opposing border wall construction in Big Bend National Park outside the US federal courthouse during an emergency hearing for a Petition for a Temporary Restraining Order against the Department of Homeland Security, in San Antonio, Texas, US, August 28, 2026 [Joel Angel Juarez/Reuters]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/2026-10-03T005837Z_737004234_RC2R7NAH97N9_RTRMADP_3_USA-MIGRATION-BIG-BEND-1792629816.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)
