The Washington Post

The chief executive at the mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac was fired in an ongoing government overhaul of federal housing regulators and the firms they oversee. Diana Reid, who took over the company in September, was let go by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to multiple people close to the company. It is unclear what immediate impact the dismissal will have, or who will take over Freddie, which plays an enormous role in America’s mortgage market. As of Thursday evening, Reid’s LinkedIn no longer listed her as Freddie’s CEO, saying she served in the role until March 2025.

When inventor Thomas Edison would hit a creative block, he would use a trick to help his mind get unstuck. He would sit in his favorite chair holding steel balls in his hands and begin to doze off. Once his muscles relaxed enough, the balls would slip from his hands into pans on the floor. The loud noise would jar him awake. Scientists are finding experimental evidence that the transition between wakefulness and sleep is a portal for creative thought.

If you own one of Amazon’s voice assistant gadgets, everything you say to Alexa is beamed to Amazon’s cloud and saved forever on the company’s computer systems. Amazon uses those Alexa voice recordings to answer your commands and train its artificial intelligence. Now Amazon is removing a setting that gave some Alexa device owners a more privacy-preserving option. Few people used that setting, but the change is a reminder that Alexa is a data hog and likely growing more so. Even if you don’t own an Alexa device, Amazon shows the potential personal toll in the age of AI. Digital bits of ourselves are being fed into corporations’ computers and we can’t know how they might be misused. We may need personal empowerment and regulation to wrest back some control.

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Concerns are heightening that the U.S. economy is heading toward a recession as the stock markets slide amid the Trump administration’s implementation of tariffs. President Donald Trump and his senior advisers appeared optimistic that an economic boom is on the horizon, even as economists warn that the likelihood of a recession is being amplified by the White House’s sweeping tariffs. Wall Street has been worried. The benchmark S&P 500 stock index on Thursday fell into correction territory — defined as declining 10 percent from a recent peak — a week after the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index did so.

The Internal Revenue Service’s burgeoning efforts to more closely inspect the taxes of some of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies are stalling because of layoffs imposed by the Trump administration, current and former IRS employees say. Employees don’t know who will take on pending audits amid these staff cuts. But some say one demographic stands to benefit. “The wealthy. One hundred percent,” said Anthony Kim, a longtime IRS attorney now in private practice. It’s a sharp turnaround from 2022, when Congress gave the IRS $80 billion over a decade under the Inflation Reduction Act, including funds to beef up its auditing of the wealthiest Americans.

Traffic on a busy roadway in Canada has halted for several weeks — not due to construction or road repairs, but to protect a tiny, slithery creature: the Jefferson salamander. The city of Burlington, about 37 miles southwest of Toronto, has closed off a portion of King Road for the past 13 years to make way for the annual migration of the Jefferson salamander, which is endangered in Ontario. The road was closed on March 12 and will remain blocked until April 9. Jefferson salamanders are about four to eight inches long, and they are gray or brown in color, often with blue flecks. The species is native to the northeastern and midwestern United States, where it is not endangered, but in southern Canada, it is facing “imminent extinction.”

The Trump administration has frozen $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the Ivy League school’s past policies supporting transgender athletes, the White House announced Wednesday. The administration announced the action in a post on one of its X accounts, accusing the university of “forcing women to compete with men in sports” and heralding the penalty as “promises kept.” The decision is the latest salvo in President Donald Trump’s growing fight with universities over campus culture and diversity initiatives. The Penn announcement comes weeks after the Trump administration paused $400 million in contracts and grants to Columbia University.

Ben & Jerry’s parent firm threatened then ousted the ice cream brand’s chief executive for defending its “social mission,” a Tuesday court filing alleges. Officials with consumer packaged goods company Unilever told Ben & Jerry’s independent board that it planned to remove chief executive Dave Stever on March 3, and pressed the board to quickly rubber-stamp the decision, according to the court filing from Ben & Jerry’s and board directors. The company prevented Ben & Jerry’s from issuing a post commemorating Black History Month, the filing said. It also blocked Ben & Jerry’s from calling for the protection of political speech when a Columbia University graduate was detained after protesting Israel and the war in Gaza.

As President Trump accelerates his push to slash the civilian workforce, less than half of the federal workers who voted for him think he will improve the ability of their agency to fulfill its mission, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll. Federal workers overall predict Trump will worsen the government’s service to ordinary Americans and say their workplace satisfaction has tanked. Fifty-seven percent of current federal workers believe most or all of Trump’s executive orders affecting their agency are illegal. Seventy-one percent of federal workers are concerned that the government may not be able to function if large numbers of federal workers are laid off.