📌 Hollywood Fire, Skills Shortage, More

A state of emergency was in effect for Los Angeles and county Wednesday as at least four fires continue to burn out of control.

A brush fire broke out Wednesday evening in the Hollywood Hills west of Runyon Canyon. Five people have died in the Eaton Fire near Altadena, which left a devastating trail of scorched homes as it spread rapidly through foothill neighborhoods.

The Palisades Fire, which began Tuesday sparked by a backyard fire, has destroyed an as-yet-uncountable number of homes and forced thousands to flee continues to burn, with evacuation warnings issued for Malibu. The fire burned through 17,234 acres as of Wednesday night, according to Cal Fire.

Evacuation efforts were complicated by snarled traffic as masses fled on limited road space. Thousands of households remain without power. A Do-Not-Drink Water order was issued for Pasadena and evacuated zones of the Eaton Fire. The alert comes as "debris and elevated turbidity" may have impacted the water.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that more than 7,500 people are working to fight the wildfires in Southern California.

The global job market could see a significant shift by 2030, says the World Economic Forum in its Future of Jobs Report 2025.

The report projects 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million lost — a net increase of 78 million positions. Job growth is expected to be strongest in the care, education, technology, and renewable energy sectors, while traditional roles are likely to shrink due to automation and technological advances.

The key drivers include advancements in technology, demographic shifts, economic pressures, and the global transition to green energy. The report says artificial intelligence (AI) will be a major factor driving these shifts, with 50% of employers planning to leverage it for new opportunities.

But 41% of companies expect automation to reduce the workforce. Sectors such as technology, data, AI, and renewable energy are seen as areas for rapid job growth, as are frontline roles such as care workers, farmworkers, delivery drivers, and educators.

Jobs in sectors such as graphic design and administrative assistance are on the decline, as automation and AI reshape the labor market. Nearly 40% of the skills required for jobs by 2030 will be new or evolving. The report says nearly 60% of the global workforce will need reskilling or upskilling.

“Trends such as generative AI and rapid technological shifts are upending industries and labor markets, creating both unprecedented opportunities and profound risks," said Till Leopold of the World Economic Forum.

There’s new year cheer for Singapore as it reclaims its place at the top of a quarterly ranking of the world’s most powerful passports.

Holders of this desirable red travel document enjoy visa-free access to 195 out of 227 destinations worldwide, according to the Henley Passport Index, more than citizens of any other place on the planet. Japan is second in the ranking, with an open door to 193 destinations.

The EU states of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are third, along with Finland and South Korea, with access to 192 destinations. Fourth is held by seven EU countries, each with visa-free access to 191 destinations: Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Squeaking into fifth place are five countries: Belgium, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK — all of which have visa-free access to 190 destinations. The US and Estonia are at No. 9, and No. 10 is held by Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Afghanistan remains locked in bottom place, with visa-free access to just 26 destinations, two fewer than a year ago. Syria is at No. 105 (with 27 destinations) and Iraq is at No. 104 (with 31 destinations).

The index tracks global freedoms in 227 countries and territories, using data from the International Air Transport Association.

Elon Musk agrees with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left to train AI models on.

“We’ve now exhausted the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a live-streamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened last year.”

Musk, who owns AI company xAI, echoed themes that former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever touched on at NeurIPS, the machine learning conference. Sutskever said the AI industry had reached “peak data,” and predicted a lack of training data will force a shift away from the way models are developed.

Musk suggested that synthetic data — data generated by AI models themselves — is the path forward. “The only way to supplement [real-world data] is with synthetic data, where the AI creates [training data],” he said. “With synthetic data … [AI] will sort of grade itself and go through this process of self-learning.”

Companies, including tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models. Gartner estimates 60% of the data used for AI and analytics projects in 2024 were synthetically generated.

Training on synthetic data has other advantages, like cost savings. AI startup Writer claims its Palmyra X 004 model, which was developed using almost entirely synthetic sources, cost just $700,000 to develop — compared to estimates of $4.6 million for a comparably-sized OpenAI model.

A study suggests time travel might be feasible without leading to logical contradictions, resolving the ‘grandfather paradox.’

The study combines general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics to demonstrate the potential for time travel. In a universe where all matter rotates, space-time could become so warped that time bends back on itself, forming a loop. A spaceship traveling along such a loop could theoretically return to its starting point, not just in space but also in time.

The behavior of thermodynamics fundamentally changes on a closed time-like curve. On such a loop, quantum fluctuations could have dramatic effects on a time traveler — a person's memories might vanish, and aging would reverse.

This phenomenon could even render irreversible events, like killing one's grandfather, temporary on a time loop, nullifying the paradox altogether, study author Lorenzo Gavassino, a physicist at Vanderbilt University, said.

“My work provides the first rigorous derivation of this self-consistency principle directly from established physics. I applied the standard framework of quantum mechanics … and demonstrated that the self-consistency of history naturally follows from quantum laws.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is facing more international rebuke than at any time in his 12 years in power.

The self-declared socialist is widely believed to have lost last year’s election by a landslide. That sparked criticism by the US and others that the vote was stolen and forced Maduro to turn to security forces to repress and arrest opponents.

Now he’s set to be sworn in for a third term Friday, even as the opposition challenger who claims to have won is vowing to return from exile by then. Since claiming victory in the face of credible evidence of vote rigging, Maduro has relied on the security forces to round up opponents. This week,

González said his son-in-law was kidnapped by masked men. Carlos Correa, a prominent free speech attorney, was also hauled away by masked assailants.

Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said such acts of repression may indicate weakness that could boomerang against Maduro. “The key is the armed forces,” Shifter said. “These regimes are unpredictable and can fall any moment.”

An Ohio news outlet is leading a change in American reporting, which their editor-in-chief calls the “right to be forgotten.”

Chris Quinn, editor of

Cleveland.com

and

Plain Dealer

newspaper is advocating that newspapers remove old stories regarding crimes or misdemeanors that have been atoned for.

Long considered taboo to retract or erase old stories from newspaper archives, those that feature mug shots and report on residents charged with crimes can, in our search engine-powered world, continue to detract from their professional lives years after they’ve paid their debt to society.

Quinn began taking names and mug shots out of the archives in 2018. A recent example was a woman who had rehabilitated herself in healthcare. “She lost her license to work, but as she sought to begin a new career, any Google search of her name brought up our stories about her crime, along with her mug shot.

“Another was a man who stole some scrap metal years ago, completed his sentence, and had his record sealed. Yet our story dogged him.” Quinn said he regularly received phone calls and emails asking for their stories to be taken down. He was tired of “standing on tradition” instead of just being compassionate.

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I just got tired of telling people no,” he said. The practice has since spread to the

Boston Globe

, the

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

, the

Bangor Daily News

in Maine, the

Oregonian

, and New Jersey’s

NJ.com

.