Author: admin

• Dad and I were flying across the Atlantic because I had a business launch, and he was my plus one.
• When we checked in, we realized that my dad had accidentally bought Mom’s passport instead of his.
• He was distraught, and I calmed him down, as if I were the parent. Still, I left him at the airport.

I was a Londoner and had recently accepted a job at a magazine in New York City. The new company paid for my father and me to fly to America so I could celebrate its relaunch, meet my editors, and search for apartments.

Dad, then 69, was up for an adventure as my plus one. He traveled by coach from his home in northern England, and we then got a 4.30 am cab from my house to Heathrow Airport.

A Virgin Atlantic representative asked to see our passports as we checked in for our flight to John F. Kennedy.

Dad brought Mom’s passport by mistake

We handed them over. The rep examined the documents and reached for her glasses.

“That’s your wife’s passport,” she said to my dad, looking amused. “I need to see yours.”

Dad hesitated. Then his face fell, and he started to shake.

“What’s wrong?” I said. Dad held his head in his hands. He’d brought Mom’s passport by mistake, grabbing it from the filing cabinet without thinking and leaving his behind.

He was terribly forgetful

I’d never seen him so upset. His body seemed to crumple as he absorbed the shock.

There was no chance we could get the passport in time for our flight. We rang my 74-year-old mom, who delivered the equivalent of a Howler in Harry Potter, yelling at my dad for being so stupid (her words).

Unfortunately, Dad was terribly forgetful and had a history of it.

Once, the Gatwick Airport information desk issued a tannoy announcement informing “a Mr. Ridley traveling to Ajaccio” that our passports and boarding passes had been found in a bathroom.

Then there was the family vacation to Egypt in the mid-70s, when Dad had to make a 5-hour round trip, retracing our steps. We waited while he took a taxi back and forth across the desert to collect our passports from the previous night’s hotel.

I had to take charge of the situation

I was first inclined to berate my dad, as Mom had. I was deeply embarrassed by the prospect of missing the meeting. What on earth would the bosses think of me?

Then, as Dad sat in despair, I felt bad. He was already beating himself up, so pointing fingers would have made matters worse.

I remembered the times he had forgiven me for losing something important as a child.

In that moment, I recognized that I had to take charge. It led to a change in the dynamics of our relationship. I needed to step into my dad’s shoes and be the responsible adult.

We were transferred to a later flight

I called my brother-in-law, who worked as a police officer at the small airport near my parents’ home. Then I got Mom to drive to meet him with Dad’s passport.

A pilot, who was headed to Heathrow around lunchtime, offered to bring it down. I coordinated our rendezvous inside the terminal.

Virgin Atlantic was great because they managed to get us on a flight to Newark, New Jersey, albeit in the late afternoon.

Still, I was concerned about missing the events in New York when I was supposed to make a good impression. I felt as distraught as my dad when he realized his mistake.

It sounds selfish, but I decided to rush to board the original flight. Dad was almost back to his old self, and the arrangements for retrieving his passport were in place.

He said he’d be OK and not to worry.

I flew to JFK alone, super-stressed as the plane took off. I felt guilty and horrible for leaving my dad behind. It was as if I’d abandoned him and put my own needs first.

We’ve dined out on the story

I arrived on time for the meeting and the big launch in Manhattan. I somewhat shamefully sipped champagne, while wondering how Dad was getting on.

We reunited much later that night after he frugally took a bus from Newark to Port Authority and then walked across the city to our hotel. It was lovely to see him, and I hugged him tight.

We have since dined out on the story, along with all the others of his absentmindedness. Still, at least one good thing came out of the fiasco: Dad is now 90, and though he doesn’t fly anymore, he hasn’t forgotten his passport since.

• DoD announced big awards for the development of new laser weapons.
• Projects involving lasers and other directed-energy weapons are seen as low-cost defense options.
• With these weapons, there have long been concerns about the technical hurdles and power generation.

The Department of Defense is investing millions of dollars in new laser weapons that can shoot down enemy drones and cruise missiles.

Laser weapons are experimental, and the US has spent years developing the concept for land, air, and sea. Officials believe lasers could add to defensive arsenals and help reduce the strain on traditional interceptors as a lower-cost-per-shot option.

On Thursday, DoD announced agreements in support of its Joint Laser Weapon Systems program with nLIGHT Defense, a high-power laser developer, and Lockheed Martin Aculight, the prime’s laser weapon division. The initial DoD award value is $86 million with a total program maximum of $847 million.

“By developing containerized high-energy laser weapons, the Department aims to provide combatant commanders with scalable, cost-effective intercept solutions for asymmetric and high-tier adversary threats,” the Pentagon said in a press release.

Due to “urgent operational demands,” the initial laser weapon prototypes will have approximately 150 kilowatts of power, but DoD expects to boost that to a range of 300 to 500kW, which is the anticipated power needed to counter cruise missiles.

The announcement said that a separate “laser source” will develop a 500kW solution as part of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI).

“We must actively defend the homeland against emerging threats,” Emil Michael, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said, per the release. “We are partnering with industry to rapidly deliver deep magazine directed energy capabilities to the Joint Force that can be seamlessly deployed across multiple domains.”

DoD has long looked to lasers as cheaper, more sustainable air defense options, especially for hitting inexpensive targets like drones rather than expending high-value missiles or interceptors.

The defense department said “these prototype systems offer critical operational advantages over traditional kinetic systems, including speed-of-light engagement, exceptionally deep magazines and significantly lower cost-per-intercept, attributes essential for countering high-volume UAS [Uncrewed Aerial Systems] swarms and advanced cruise missile threats.”

With sufficient electricity, laser weaponry could fire repeatedly at a much lower cost than missiles. But bigger targets require more power, and the weapons generate intense heat, making strong power and cooling systems essential.

The Navy has looked at battery packs that could supply lasers with extra power, while the Army has tested lasers mounted on Stryker vehicles to shoot down drones and incoming rockets. The services are also working on other types of directed-energy weapons; however, many of these systems are still experimental, and some programs have been cut or canceled because they proved too difficult or costly to make practical.

Last month, DoD held a demonstration of several laser and directed energy weapons for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Laser Wars reported. It’s the first publicly known instance of a defense secretary observing a live-fire event for these weapons.

• OpenAI integrates Codex into its ChatGPT app, creating a hub for work and AI tools.
• OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 models are designed to meet varying user needs with different price points.
• The wave of models and product releases comes amid fierce competition in both areas.

OpenAI has built a super app for work.

On Thursday, the company announced it is now merging its popular Codex AI coding tool into its ChatGPT desktop app, a move to turn the flagship AI app into a one-stop shop for engineers and other professionals. OpenAI also revealed a Work setting for the ChatGPT app and a batch of state-of-the-art AI models in its new GPT-5.6 family.

The latest wave of releases encapsulates OpenAI’s ambitious strategy: train uber-powerful AI models, deliver them to ChatGPT’s massive user base, and become an indispensable part of life for millions of workers. ChatGPT has almost 1 billion users, OpenAI engineer Thibault Sottiaux said on a Thursday livestream.

OpenAI, which had an early lead in the industry, is fighting to stay at the forefront of AI capabilities, duking it out release by release with rival Anthropic and trying to stay ahead of Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, and cheaper Chinese AI models. Meta also announced its first paid AI model on Thursday.

OpenAI originally launched Codex as a software engineering tool and has since expanded its reach to a broader market. In June, the company released a report that said areas like data analysis and research were growing faster than traditional coding uses on Codex and that 5 million people use the tool each week.

Codex leader Andrew Ambrosino called Thursday’s merger of Codex into ChatGPT “only the first” step: “We’re working to unify the experience across web, mobile, and desktop—but we want to do it thoughtfully, not smash two things together with a toggle and call it a day.”

On OpenAI’s Thursday livestream, Sottiaux and other colleagues showcased the desktop app’s new Work feature, which will incorporate popular aspects of Codex, such as the ability to modify a computer’s files and to operate autonomously in a browser.

OpenAI has filed the confidential paperwork to go public. The AI competition, government involvement, and research progress could affect the timing of the company’s initial public offering.

When asked by CNBC on Thursday if OpenAI would go public this year, CEO Sam Altman said, “I don’t know.”

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• With three friends, I embarked on a whirlwind road trip to four national parks in six days.
• Limited time at parks led to rushed visits, especially at Yellowstone and Glacier National Park.
• Weather impacted the experience, but overall, the trip was considered a success despite challenges.

In June, three of my friends and I embarked on a long, ambitious, and, at times, tiring road trip from Wyoming to Seattle. We had planned to stop at four national parks in six days, spending a few hours in each.

We knew from the start that we wouldn’t be able to see everything in any of the parks, and we were fine with that. When else were we going to fly to Montana or Wyoming?

We wanted our trip to include a mix of national parks, state parks, urban exploration, and open roads.

When we went to Yosemite National Park last October, we wished we could have stayed forever, but we had no regrets about spending one night there, so we assumed the same would be fine this time around.

Seeing four of the most stunning national parks in one week — Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Mount Rainier — was hard to put into words.

However, I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to see and knew I would likely have to return to get the full experience.

We didn’t have enough time to explore each place

We spent the most time in Grand Teton National Park, staying two nights in Jackson, Wyoming, at a motel. We spent plenty of time at Jenny Lake, went horseback riding with the mountains in the background, and viewed Grand Teton’s snowy peak for hours.

When it came time to go to Yellowstone, though, we calculated we could spend only five hours there, since we had to drive another hour north to Livingston, Montana, to reach our hotel.

As soon as we arrived, we headed straight for Thumb Geyser. It was less crowded than but not as stunning as Old Faithful, which we rushed to 15 minutes later. Then, we bolted to Grand Prismatic Spring.

By then, we were hungry and knew we had to find an open restaurant on the Montana side of the park, so we drove out and stopped for a few pictures along the border.

I was so enamored by Grand Teton that I definitely did not give Yellowstone enough of my enthusiasm and time.

For the next two days, we drove through Montana’s major cities, stopping in Bozeman, Helena, Butte, Missoula, and Kalispell en route to Glacier National Park.

Given our tight schedule and an added delay from getting lunch at a restaurant with very slow service, Glacier somehow felt more rushed.

We had time for about an hour of kayaking on Lake McDonald before heading up Going-to-the-Sun Road to Avalanche Lake, where the road had closed due to ice. I left wishing I could have done much more in what many consider America’s prettiest national park.

Though we only spent about three hours in Mount Rainier, I was more satisfied with what we saw. The mountain was stunning from every angle, and I didn’t feel the longer hikes would have been as fulfilling as staring at Mount Rainier’s reflection on the lake.

As the trip progressed, all of the nature seemed to blend together

Every park had its unique beauty, and the mind-bending geysers of Yellowstone complemented the tranquil, deer-filled trails of Glacier.

By the time we got to Mount Rainier, though, I had felt natured-out. We had seen so many waterfalls, valleys, mountains, and wildlife that I almost felt numb to the views at the latter two parks.

On one occasion, we passed by an overlook that I was convinced we had seen before, only to realize it was an entirely different viewpoint.

Aside from the major distinguishing sites, many of the trails and roads in the latter parks felt like repeats of those in the earlier ones we visited, which I’m confident would not have been the case if I had visited them on separate trips.

I know I missed much of the nuance in each park; every moose or bison I saw on the side of the road was just “another bison.”

Since our schedule was so tight, we were stuck with whatever weather we got

Given that we only had a few hours in each park except Grand Teton, we had to deal with whatever the weather turned out to be.

We were lucky overall, with mostly clear skies, though we got stuck in a storm at Grand Teton that prevented us from doing more ambitious hikes.

The mountains disappeared behind heavy clouds, and visibility was low. This was also the case in part at Mount Rainier, where clouds blocked most of the mountain at a few viewpoints.

Of course, if we had stayed longer at any of these parks during a rainy week, the outcome could have been worse. Still, our tight schedule left too little of a cushion for adverse weather.

I have no regrets, but I wouldn’t do this trip again

After a few weeks of reflection, I have no regrets about how we planned this trip. Every park visit worked out, the road trip was smooth, and everywhere we went was beautiful.

My friends and I paid only $80 combined to get into the parks because we had America the Beautiful annual passes that covered parking, plus entrance and standard-amenity fees. It felt like a great deal, and we can still use our passes until they expire to visit other parks and federal recreational lands around the US.

As much as I wish we’d spent more time at each stop, the reality is we all have limited vacation days, travel budgets, and so much else we want to see in the world.

We probably wouldn’t have been able to see all four of these parks in the next few years if we had broken the trip into two or three parts.

Still, I likely would have been able to enjoy the national parks more if I divided the trip into Grand Teton and Yellowstone, then a separate trip doing Glacier, Mount Rainier, and Olympic National Park outside Seattle.

To get the full experience of most of these places, though, I do feel I need to plan some return trips.

• On Thursday, Meta launched a new model, Muse Spark 1.1, for coding and AI agents.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg said pricing will be “very aggressive,” calling out other labs for high costs.
• The move comes as companies throttle their employees’ AI spending due to huge bills.

Meta could spark a price war in the booming AI coding market.

The tech giant announced its latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.1, on Thursday, saying it performs well on industry tests for coding and AI agents. It’s Meta’s first AI model that it charges users for.

In comments on X, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the model has a “very low price.”

Zuckerberg called out other AI companies for pricing their chatbots at “very extreme” levels in comments to Bloomberg. He told Bloomberg that the model outperformed Google’s Gemini in several categories, including agents, coding, and other capabilities.

“We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost,” Zuckerberg told the outlet.

The model, which isn’t fully available to developers yet, marks the latest milestone for Meta’s AI efforts — and shows the company intends to compete on price.

If Meta’s new AI models can compete with widely-used coding tools from rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor, that could represent a huge new source of revenue. Meta’s stock was up nearly 2% on Thursday.

Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, told CNBC that the company will charge $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens — lower than the pricing for Google and OpenAI’s flagship models.

The cost of using AI has become a growing concern for companies as employees incorporate the technology into more of their day-to-day work. Companies have been throttling their employees’ use of AI in recent months as vibe coding takes off. Coinbase, for example, now limits its engineers’ weekly AI spending to $500 to $5,000 a week.

Meta quoted one of its customers, AI coding startup Cline, saying that the new AI model’s price point makes it easy to run heavy AI coding tasks at scale.

“That combination is rare, and it’s exactly why we wanted Cline developers to have access early,” Saoud Rizwan, the Cline CEO, said on Meta’s website.

Meta is spending massive amounts of cash on AI, raising its capital expenditure guidance for this year to $125-$145 billion, up from a previous estimate of $115-$135 billion. Meta remains highly dependent on its ads business, which accounts for about 98% of its total revenue, according to its first-quarter earnings results.

“We believe Meta is well positioned to generate ample revenue to support its spending, driven by monetization of its own AI initiatives, advertising share gains, incremental subscription revenue, an optionality of cloud offering, and fees for external use of its AI models,” BNP Paribas Equity Research senior analyst Nick Jones wrote in a note to investors on Thursday.

Joe Tigay, Equity Armor Investments portfolio manager, said that undercutting prices signals that Meta’s AI lags behind Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s.

“They are forced to compete on price and raw computing real estate rather than model superiority,” he told Business Insider.

Meta is also working on a coming AI model codenamed “Watermelon,” which Wang said has caught up to one of the latest versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The model uses “an order of magnitude” more computing power than Meta’s previous model, Wang told staff last week, Business Insider reported earlier.

Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Correction: July 9, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misspelled an analyst’s name. It should be Nick Jones. This story has also been updated to include Wang’s comments to CNBC on the model’s pricing.

Have a tip? Contact Charles via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• My son, 11, is a huge soccer fan — so much so that he’s gotten me into the sport.
• I wanted so badly to get tickets to the World Cup for us, but it started to seem impossible.
• I wrote about my quest and got an email from Sugar Land, TX, that I worried was fake. It wasn’t.

My son, 11, is a die-hard soccer fan who did the impossible: He got me to love soccer and soccer culture. Long before the World Cup began, he begged me to go to a match. He typically plays soccer five days a week, often following a skills class with travel team practice. He almost exclusively wears soccer jerseys and knows minute facts about soccer players and teams.

I assumed getting tickets to the World Cup would be difficult but possible. I entered every ticket lottery and opened a credit card that promised priority access, but struck out at every turn. Because I am a storyteller, I wrote about our quest to see a match. When getting tickets proved far harder than I anticipated, my son was despondent but still hopeful.

We still planned a great World Cup experience — until a concussion thwarted our plans

Even though we didn’t have tickets to the World Cup, we decided to make the best of the tournament. We planned to attend watch parties and tune in to as many games as possible. My son, a graduating 5th grader, was looking forward to an all-day World Cup-themed extravaganza at school to celebrate.

However, the night before the World Cup started, an angry teammate threw a soccer ball directly at my son’s head, leaving him with a concussion. Instead of a joyful World Cup opener and the end of elementary school, my son was coping with a raging headache, nausea, and fatigue.

He missed celebrating the World Cup’s first match with his friends. Because he had to significantly limit screen time and loud noises hurt his head, we couldn’t go to watch parties or view more than a few highlights of early games. My son also missed playing with his soccer team for the last match of the season and spent much of his graduation ceremony with a splitting headache.

We spent my son’s time convalescing, sorting through Panini World Cup stickers, and swapping with other soccer fans so he could fill in his World Cup book with all 980 stickers. We built Legos, including a new Ronaldo set released for the World Cup.

My son’s grace in handling the loss of so much he had been looking forward to made me even more determined to get him to a World Cup match. However, sky-high ticket prices, combined with loss of income from having to take off work and medical expenses, meant a match was more out of reach than ever.

A too-good-to-be-true email landed in my inbox

In the midst of World Cup excitement that seemed out of reach, an unexpected email landed in my inbox. A representative from Sugar Land, TX, just outside the World Cup host city of Houston, read about our determination to see a World Cup game. “Would my son and I like to attend a game in Houston and visit Sugar Land?” they asked.

My response was an immediate and enthusiastic yes, although I didn’t tell my son about the offer right away because it seemed not just improbable but impossible. If I could get my son to Texas, Visit Sugar Land, an official supporter of the World Cup in Houston, would provide us with tickets to a match, and I could bring my daughter too. I spent several hours wondering if the offer was real. However, after a few days of ironing out logistics and no odd requests for our Social Security numbers or my mother’s maiden name, I bought our plane tickets. We started counting down the days until the match.

The match was so much better than we expected

When it was time to fly to Sugar Land, my son wasn’t completely recovered, but his doctor cleared him to travel. He boarded the plane in complete shock that he was actually headed to see Brazil face off against Japan in a knockout match.

My son barely slept the night before the game. When the hour to head to the match finally arrived, he wore a customized Brazil jersey that a friend brought for him straight from Rio de Janeiro a few years ago. The jersey was a little too big then, but it fits perfectly now, perhaps a sign that this was meant to be.

My son insisted that we get to our seats over an hour early so that we didn’t miss a second of the pre-game ceremonies. He screamed when the countdown clock hit zero, and the kickoff began. The energy in the stadium was electrifying. After about 30 seconds of play, my son turned to me and said, “This is a thousand times better than I was expecting,” a bold statement since he had impossibly high expectations to begin with. At half-time, my son told me that our trip to Sugar Land was the best one he had ever taken. That night, drifting off to sleep, he said “the whole match” was his favorite part of the day.

Our World Cup trip turned into an unexpected getaway

Although our trip to Sugar Land started as a pilgrimage to the most storied soccer tournament of all time, it turned into a fun family trip to a place we might not otherwise have visited. We saw the Sugar Land Space Cowboys win a minor league baseball game, explored the city’s natural history museum, and enjoyed a ropes course in a forest.

We ate delicious food, from Thai to Tex-Mex, that reflects the Houston metro area’s reputation as one of the most diverse parts of the country. Throughout it all, my son and I were on a high that lasted well past the match, almost erasing everything we had to cancel during the worst of his concussion. This is truly the spirit of the World Cup: learning about new places and bringing people together.

Thanks to the kindness of strangers, my family had a World Cup experience we will never forget — and I fell even deeper into my love of everything soccer.