How Hamas Came to Release 2 U.S. Hostages Back to Israel | What Voters Think About U.S. Support for the Wars in Israel and Ukraine | Character.AI’s $200 Million Bet That Chatbots Are The Future Of Entertainment | Taxing Tips: Untangling The Hairy Situation Between Beauty Salons, Restaurants And The IRS.

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How Hamas Came to Release 2 U.S. Hostages Back to Israel - The New York Times

It took American and Qatari diplomacy, and self-interested decisions by Hamas, to bring two hostages safely back to Israel.

On Oct. 7, a few hours after Hamas began its devastating attack on Israel, Antony J. Blinken, the American secretary of state, spoke by telephone with Qatar’s prime minister.

Hamas gunmen had just slaughtered more than 1,400 people and kidnapped more than 200, including Americans, and Mr. Blinken raised the issue of the hostages with the prime minister, according to two senior State Department officials. The hope among many diplomats was that Qatar could play the middleman. That’s exactly what it did.

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What Voters Think About U.S. Support for the Wars in Israel and Ukraine - The New York Times

Interviews with voters in key states show that while there is support for Israel and Ukraine, many are torn about how much the U.S. can or should be involved.

Shawn Hubler reported from Sacramento, Christian Boone reported from Atlanta, Dan Simmons reported from Wisconsin, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Pennsylvania and Jack Healy reported from Phoenix.

Since the Hamas attack on Israeli citizens two weeks ago and Israel’s subsequent bombing campaign on Gaza, protesters have flooded American streets. Emotional debates have deeply unsettled Jewish and Palestinian communities here and divided college campuses. Threats against synagogues and mosques have spiked, and a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in Chicago was stabbed to death.

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Character.AI’s $200 Million Bet That Chatbots Are The Future Of Entertainment - Forbes

Inside Character.AI’s disheveled Palo Alto, California headquarters, employees at first appear to be hard at work, glued to their computer monitors. But rather than coding, many of them are engrossed in lively group chats with their colleagues and the AI chatbot characters that Character has become known for. Now, thanks to a new group chat function the startup launched Wednesday, they were chatting with work friends along with bots that anyone can build to create the illusion that you’re actually talking to the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Tony Stark or Lucifer.

“The feature was good enough that people stopped working sometimes to use it,” cofounder Daniel De Freitas told Forbes. De Freitas, the company’s president, has been particularly partial to gathering team members together to play Ship AI, a chatbot programmed to act like a text-based adventure game that lets group chat participants pretend to be astronauts exploring outer space.

The group chat feature is Character.AI’s latest move in cofounder and CEO Noam Shazeer’s bet that people will want to interact with a variety of different chatbot personas, rather than having a single, all-encompassing AI companion. By allowing the company’s subscribers, who pay $9.99 per month, to interact with each other and some of the startup’s 18 million AI bots in chats at the same time, Character is hoping to establish dominance as the go-to app for AI-powered entertainment while adding to its immediate revenue stream. Shazeer said that after “some period of time,” the company plans to make the feature free “because our goal is to empower everyone with AGI,” or artificial general intelligence.

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Taxing Tips: Untangling The Hairy Situation Between Beauty Salons, Restaurants And The IRS. - Forbes

The holidays are coming and Paige Garland, co-owner of Rachel’s Salon and Day Spa in downtown Memphis, is bracing for a tax hit. Along with springing for more of the salon’s $72 event up-dos and $94 highlights, customers will also be giving more-generous-than-usual tips to their favorite stylists. As a matter of salon policy, those holiday tips will be rung up separately on Rachel’s payment processing system with 100% going to the employee and all of it properly reported as income to the Internal Revenue Service on the stylists’ W-2 forms.

The problem for Garland is this: for every $100 in tips an employee collects, Rachel’s owes the IRS $7.65 as the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes—even though not a penny of that $100 tip goes to the salon, and even though under reporting of tips is widespread in the industry.

If that sounds unfair to an honest salon owner like Garland, get this: If Rachel’s were a restaurant serving cactus, instead of a salon and day spa that serves up $132 cactus fruit hydrating facials, the government would give it a tax credit to offset the full employer’s share of payroll taxes. “Welcome to the salon industry,” she says.

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