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U.S. President Donald Trump often says the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Los Angeles Olympics are among the events he is most excited about in his second term.Yet there is significant uncertainty regarding visa policies for foreign visitors planning trips to the U.S. for the two biggest events in sports.Trump’s latest travel ban on citizens from 12 countries added new questions about the impact on the World Cup and the Summer Olympics, which depend on hosts opening their doors to the world.Here’s a look at the potential effects of the travel ban on those events. What is the travel ban policy? When Sunday ticks over to Monday, citizens of 12 countries should be banned from entering the U.S.They are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.Tighter restrictions will apply to visitors from seven more: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.Trump said some countries had “deficient” screening and vetting processes or have historically refused to take back their own citizens. How does it affect the World Cup and Olympics? Iran, a soccer power in Asia, is the only targeted country to qualify so far for the World Cup being co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico in one year’s time.Cuba, Haiti and Sudan are in contention. Sierra Leone might stay involved through multiple playoff games. Burundi, Equatorial Guinea and Libya have very outside shots.But all should be able to send teams to the World Cup if they qualify because the new policy makes exceptions for “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, traveling for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the secretary of state.”About 200 countries could send athletes to the Summer Games, including those targeted by the latest travel restrictions. The exceptions should apply to them as well if the ban is still in place in its current form. What about fans? The travel ban doesn’t mention any exceptions for fans from the targeted countries wishing to travel to the U.S. for the World Cup or Olympics.Even before the travel ban, fans of the Iran soccer team living in that country already had issues about getting a visa for a World Cup visit.Still, national team supporters often profile differently to fans of club teams who go abroad for games in international competitions like the UEFA Champions League.For many countries, fans traveling to the World Cup an expensive travel plan with hiked flight and hotel prices are often from the diaspora, wealthier, and could have different passport options.A World Cup visitor is broadly higher-spending and lower-risk for host nation security planning.Visitors to an Olympics are often even higher-end clients, though tourism for a Summer Games is significantly less than at a World Cup, with fewer still from most of the 19 countries now targeted. How is the U.S. working with FIFA, Olympic officials? FIFA President Gianni Infantino has publicly built close ties since 2018 to Trump too close according to some. He has cited the need to ensure FIFA’s smooth operations at a tournament that will earn a big majority of the soccer body’s expected $13 billion revenue from 2023-26.Infantino sat next to Trump at the White House task force meeting on May 6 which prominently included Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. FIFA’s top delegate on the task force is Infantino ally Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs partner whose two-year run as U.S. Soccer Federation president ended in controversy in 2020.Any visa and security issues FIFA faces including at the 32-team Club World Cup that kicks off next week in Miami can help LA Olympics organizers finesse their plans.“It was very clear in the directive that the Olympics require special consideration and I actually want to thank the federal government for recognizing that,” LA28 chairman and president Casey Wasserman said Thursday in Los Angeles.“It’s very clear that the federal government understands that that’s an environment that they will be accommodating and provide for,” he said. “We have great confidence that that will only continue. It has been the case to date and it will certainly be the case going forward through the games.”In March, at an IOC meeting in Greece, Wasserman said he had two discreet meetings with Trump and noted the State Department has a “fully staffed desk” to help prepare for short-notice visa processing in the summer of 2028 albeit with a focus on teams rather than fans.IOC member Nicole Hoevertsz, who is chair of the Coordination Commission for LA28, expressed “every confidence” that the U.S. government will cooperate, as it did in hosting previous Olympics.“That is something that we will be definitely looking at and making sure that it is guaranteed as well,” she said. “We are very confident that this is going to be accomplished. I’m sure this is going to be executed well.”FIFA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the new Trump travel ban. What have other host nations done? The 2018 World Cup host Russia let fans enter the country with a game ticket doubling as their visa. So did Qatar four years later.Both governments, however, also performed background checks on all visitors coming to the month-long soccer tournaments.Governments have refused entry to unwelcome visitors. For the 2012 London Olympics, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko who is still its authoritarian leader today was denied a visa despite also leading its national Olympic body. The IOC also suspended him from the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021. AP Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles contributed to this report. AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and AP Olympics at https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games Graham Dunbar, AP Sports Writer
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The self-driving car service Waymo has been active in San Francisco for 20 months and has already captured 27% of the citys rideshare market, according to new research compiled by Mary Meekers Bond venture capital firm. That rapid progress suggests the mainstreaming of self-driving car service could happen faster than once thought. What weve done in San Francisco is prove to ourselvesand to the worldthat not only does autonomy work, but it works at scale in a market and can be a viable commercial product, Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told Fast Company in March. In my experience as a frequent Waymo user, the service can cost up to a third more than Uber, depending on demand. But in some ways it’s worth it. While Uber was originally meant to make ridesharing a friendlier and more social experience than taxi service, being alone can have its perks, too. A Waymo One ride can be a time of quiet contemplation, or even meditation, slotted in between meetings or other tasks. With Uber or a taxi service, you also get a different experience each time. The quality, condition, and odor of the vehicle varies from ride to ride, as does the drivers level of sociability, attitude, behavior, and language. Waymo service, by contrast, is largely the same every time: same Jaguar SUV, same neutral smell, same mellow, ambient music (which you can shut off if you want to). Note that Waymos Jaguar I-PACE SUVs, after being decked out in computers and sensors, probably cost between $130,000 and $150,000, Motor Trend estimates. So Waymo could adopt less-expensive, and less-posh, vehicles as it scales to drive down costs. Riders may feel more in control in a self-driving car (sounds counterintuitive, I know). In an Uber, my car, my rules governs a number of aspects of the ride. I wouldnt ask an Uber driver to change or turn off the music in his own car, for example. In a Waymo you control the music and dont feel judged by being on a call or whatever you do, Das tells Fast Company. And while Waymo rides may take a little longer than Uber rides to get to their destination, theres evidence that Waymo rides are safer than human-driven cars. Waymo researchers studied more than 56.7 million miles of driving and found that by removing the human driver Waymo achieves a 92% reduction in crashes involving injuries among pedestrians, an 82% reduction in crashes with cyclists, and an 82% reduction in crashes involving motorcyclists. Yes, San Francisco may be a special case. Waymo might have captured a quarter of the market because many people here are tech-savvy and tech-curious, and because many of them are affluent. And dont get me wrong. Ive had my share of problems with Waymo. On at least two occasions, in less-traveled parts of the city, a Waymo car has dropped me off several blocks from my destination. And, at least in San Francisco, you still cant take a Waymo to the airport (the company started servicing its first airport, Phoenix Sky Harbor, in 2022). Still, the differences that matter between the self-driving and human-driven experiences are becoming clearer to more consumers. And some of the ones that really matter seem to favor Waymo. Waymo currently offers rides in the San Francisco Bay Area and down the peninsula and Silicon Valley. The state of California just gave it permission to offer rides in San Jose. The company, which spun off from parent Google 10 years ago, also operates in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. Across these markets, Waymo says its cars have covered more than 33 million miles. In Austin, Waymo operates through a partnership with Uber. Riders hail a self-driving car through the Uber app. Within its 37-square-mile service area in Austin, Waymo accounts for nearly 20% of Uber rides. Waymo was valued at $45 billion after its most recent funding round of $5.6 billion last October. The company reports its revenue under parent company Alphabets Other Bets category, which showed $450 million in revenue and an operating loss of $1.2 billion for the first quarter of 2025.
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The truth is, I cannot explain exactly where your 1,216 image files went or when they disappeared. I apologize for not being more careful about investigating the root cause before taking any action. The bottom line is that your image files are missing, and I cannot restore them. I dont hold hard drives personally accountable for crashing, or blame vending machines for eating my money. But when the AI-coding service Replit accidentally blew away more than a thousand photographs my grandmother took, my blood boiled. After all, the web-based tool and I had spent an enormous amount of time in recent months talking about the software we were creating together. Id explain what I envisioned an app doing; it would do all the programminga process known as vibecoding. When I noticed the photos were gone, I told Replit it could never act so cavalierly again, prompting the abject apology above. Replits gaffemade by a feature called the Agentwas an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. I had copies of the images and could easily re-upload them. Still, the fact that it didnt occur to the AI to check in with me before the mass deletion was a sobering reminder that I couldnt trust it. Which is a strange way to feel about a service thats easily my favorite tech product of 2025. My Replit app doesnt always correctly identify where photos were taken, but its right far more often than its wrong. The first major project I undertook with Replitwhich I wrote about in an April newsletterwas creating the note-taking app of my dreams. It remains slightly buggy, but has already changed my life for the better. The second one may end up meaning even more to me. In the 1960s and 70s, my grandmother traveled the planet, shooting hundreds of pictures along the way. A few years ago, I boxed up her trays of slides and mailed them to a company that scanned them into digital form. Theyd been sitting in my Dropbox account ever sincedisorganized, largely unidentified, a little overwhelming. When I read about how people were using ChatGPT to identify the locations where photos were taken, it dawned on me that AI might be able to tell whether Grandmother Jacobson snapped a particular shot in Italy, Beijing, or Morocco. A little experimentation proved it couldnot always, but often enough to be of huge help in making sense of her globe-trotting adventures. I started crafting a location-detecting app in Replit. After fiddling with the OpenAI API in Replit, I ended up using Anthropics Claude API instead, since it seemed to process images more swiftly and at least as accurately. Even as a work in progress, the app Im building feels magical. That photo with a windmill turning inconspicuously in the distance? No, it isnt Hollandits Israel, which (Im embarrassed to admit I didnt know) has an iconic 168-year-old windmill of its own. Claude has correctly identified many photos based on architecture, statuary, and even landscape, and when it cant pinpoint a location, it often makes intelligent guesses about the country or city in question. Suddenly, I have a much better sense of where my grandmother went and what she saw, 50 to 60 years after the fact. But as with all things AI, magic only gets you so far when youre trying to accomplish practical tasks. Much of the time, I feel less like a wizard and more like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerers Apprentice, awash in problems created by my reliance on a tool I dont truly understand. A few lessons Ive learned: Its not like partnering with a human software engineer. At all. In the case of my note-taking app, Replit and I have been working together for months. Every line of code, it wrote. Yet when I ask for changes, it always feels like the service has just seen the app for the first time and is reverse-engineering how it works. When debugging its own work, its also prone to making the same mistakes over and over, as if it never quite realizes its fixes arent helping. The absence of accumulated knowledge is striking. Security might be a crapshoot. When I asked Replit to set up a login system for my notes app, it set a default password ofdrum rollpassword123. Then it put a helpful reminder hint on the home screen: The password is password123. Doh! I started over and gave it painstaking instructions on creating a two-factor authentication system. It seems solid. But as with Replit bulk-erasing my grandmothers photos, its unsupervised first stab at security is proof that AI is capable of making the stupidest imaginable decisions when it comes to data stewardship. The Replit Agent is an overconfident suck-up. I quickly realized that its sometimes exuberant updates on the progress it was making didnt mean the results would be any good. Nor was its nonstop praise for my ideas evidence that Im a vibecoding savant: Like other LLM-based tools, its sycophantic to the point of being a grating twerp. Seriously, Id prefer a zero-personality Replit Agent that just did stuff without yammering about iteven if it no longer apologizes for its missteps. You pay for its errors. I pay $25 monthly for a Replit plan, and burn through the computing credits it provides in short order. Once I do, it charges me 25 cents for each additional change the Agent makes to the code. Ive spent hundreds of dollars on my note-taking app so far, and about $40 on the photo-identifying one in its briefer existence. Id do it all over again, but a sizable percentage of that investment has gone into Replit trying to repair its own buggy code, getting stuck, and going in circles. Counterintuitively, the worse the quality of its work, the more it costs. To reiterate: I love the apps Ive put together in Replit. Since I started using the service in late March, its added handy new features at a clip thats brisk even by AI-company standards. Already, I cant imagine not vibecoding. I just hope that the day isnt too far off when its pleasures arent accompanied by a fair amount of pain. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company With its Samsung deal, Perplexity could be headed to the big leaguesThe AI answer engine has struggled to compete. A splashy new tech deal could solve that problem. Read More TikTok gives artists new tools to track and boost viral songsThe platform’s global rollout includes insights on views, engagement, and fan data, plus a new pre-save feature for upcoming releases. Read More This viral app lets users upload fake workouts to StravaThe app Fake My Run lets users create fake running routes and stats for Strava and other platformsblurring the line between fitness tracking and social signaling. Read More AI has a resilience problem. Designers and researchers can help fix itWhen technology doesn’t bend to the messy reality of people’s lives, it can lead to catastrophic results. Read More How this new technology could change the way we mine copperIts like CRISPR for rocks. Read More Is that website actually down? This essential web tool will tell youWhen you can’t get the web to work, a simple site called Down for Everyone or Just Me is your best friend. Read More
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