The website-building platform Squarespace is laying off 19 percent of its employees as it works to "simplify" its operations, Squarespace spokesperson Jeff Seedman says in a statement to The Verge. The job cuts will affect around 300 of Squarespace's 1,800 employees.

"The changes are intended to simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities and enable the company to move faster as we position Squarespace for its next phase of growth," Seedman says. "We are grateful for the contributions of our departing colleagues and are providing comprehensive support to help them through the transition." Seedman adds that impacted employees will receiv …

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Former Spanish Employment Minister Fátima Báñez was confirmed Thursday to be among the victims of the deadly train collision outside Toledo, Spain, in which at least 69 people died.

The former minister’s death was announced by CEOE, Spain’s main employers’ association, whose foundation she chaired. “[Báñez’s] leadership, social commitment and strategic vision have left an unerasable mark on this organization and all those who have worked with her,” the CEOE said in a statement.

Within hours of the crash, authorities said the former minister was traveling in one of the carriages most affected by the collision, but were unable to confirm she was among the dead until Thursday.

Báñez served in center-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government from 2011 to 2018 and played a central role in Spain’s response to the eurozone crisis. During that period, she developed a warm personal relationship with Ursula von der Leyen, now European Commission president, who was then her counterpart in Germany’s labor ministry.

As employment minister, Báñez oversaw the conservative government’s controversial 2012 labor-market reform, which made it easier for companies to dismiss workers and drew fierce opposition from trade unions. The administration argued the changes would make hiring more flexible and accelerate the country’s economic recovery.

Speaking from the crash site Wednesday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared three days of national mourning. “All of Spain is mourning,” he said.

“It is unacceptable for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in the same year,” Sánchez added. “We are going to get to the bottom of this, and if there has been negligence, it will be revealed, and if there have been failures in the system, we will act decisively.”

Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the initial investigation suggested the collision was caused by an official at the national railway control center in Madrid who “inexplicably” instructed one high-speed train to proceed along a track where another had stalled.

Puente insisted Spain has “a safe transport system,” but acknowledged that “human action plays a role” and that, despite extensive safety regulations and protocols, “failures can occur.”

Schadenfreude isn’t listed among Airbnb’s amenities — but this week, it’s practically complimentary.

Some Airbnb hosts are threatening to quit the platform, raise their housekeeping fees or pare their rental properties down to the bare essentials rather than accept new restrictions on checkout chores. A segment of travelers, meanwhile, has greeted the uproar with the particular delight of people who have spent years paying cleaning charges while being handed lists of chores. “I’m just here with popcorn to watch,” wrote one Reddit commenter. 

Under new rules announced last week, Airbnb will generally prohibit hosts from requiring guests to wash and put away dishes, strip beds or haul garbage off-site for reservations booked on or after November 20. The changes address a long-simmering grievance among travelers, some of whom have encountered checkout instructions that read less like the end of a vacation and more like the beginning of a Saturday spent doing housework.

There are, of course, always more extreme stories, particularly if one goes looking online. “Our current host is asking us to load trash in our vehicle and drive 20 minutes to a drop-off facility,” wrote one traveler. “Our vehicle is fully packed so we’d have to make an extra trip to do this.” Another, who claimed to have already paid a $300 cleaning fee, described receiving a request for an additional $600 after checkout for allegedly failing to scrub the toilets, stove and hot tub, along with leaving “ONE ‘dirty’ pot (it was just water stains).” The guest said Airbnb ultimately sided with them.

These are individual, unverified accounts, not necessarily representative experiences. Still, one can understand why a guest might object to having a 20-minute pilgrimage to the local garbage facility added to the vacation itinerary, or why a $600 dispute over a water-stained pot might leave a lasting impression.

Some hosts maintain that basic housekeeping is simply part of staying in someone else’s home. Their critics counter that they could spend their holidays doing chores at home for free. 

Eventually, somebody delivers what is meant to be the conversation-ending argument: Then book a hotel.

Except it never quite ends the conversation. A host will point out, with some satisfaction, that a hotel room probably won’t have a full kitchen. The traveler, who was just moments ago swearing off vacation rentals forever, admits that’s exactly the problem: They need a kitchen! And there they are, host and guest, still standing in the same imaginary room, arguing about the dishes.

It’s a lot of emotional freight for four burners and a refrigerator. Which raises the obvious question: Why has the kitchen become both the most persuasive argument for renting someone’s home and the place where the whole arrangement gets so contentious?

For families, people with dietary restrictions or anyone hoping to avoid three restaurant bills a day, a kitchen can be essential. But cooking occupies a peculiar position in domestic life: necessary chore to some, passionate hobby to others, and sometimes both to the same person. I have friends who explore unfamiliar places by running through neighborhoods at sunrise or sketching what they see. I prefer wandering a local market, imagining what I might make for dinner.

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One Thanksgiving, my mom and I debated attempting a traditional holiday meal at a rental on Hilton Head Island. At home, we’re spreadsheet cooks — planning weeks, if not months, in advance — and an unfamiliar kitchen seemed a risky place to make stuffing. Then we opened the cupboards: good knives, cookware in every shape and size, multiple colanders, and a generously stocked spice cabinet guests were welcome to use. Whoever owned the house, we realized, loved to cook.

Soon, I was bicycling to Harris Teeter for cornbread ingredients, where Harry the Happy Dragon — a coin-operated green kiddie ride — stood sentry outside the entrance. Later, I padded barefoot into the yard to snip rosemary for the stuffing. I felt like Ina Garten, albeit one whose charming village market featured a mechanical reptile. We cooked leisurely. If Thanksgiving went sideways, we could always order pizza.

We’ve returned several times since. Mary, the owner, understood that a well-equipped kitchen could be part of the vacation itself.

Not every rental kitchen inspires such confidence. At a North Carolina cabin, I once envisioned mornings of cinnamon rolls, bacon and porch-side coffee, only to discover approximately three plates and no coffee maker. Salvation arrived in the form of a traveling companion who, inexplicably, had packed a French press. (I now appreciate hosts who even roughly inventory their kitchen equipment.)

That’s the peculiar promise of a vacation rental kitchen: You can experience someone else’s domestic life as your own. Their spice cabinet becomes yours; their stove, your stove; their neighborhood grocery store, your little errand. But there’s a contradiction tucked inside that promise. We want the intimacy of a home without necessarily inheriting all the obligations of maintaining one. The pleasures of playing house and the responsibilities of keeping house aren’t quite the same thing, even when they happen in the same room.

I don’t remember cleaning up after our Thanksgiving dinner, though I’m sure there was plenty of it. I remember the rosemary, the bicycle ride, the pleasure of discovering another cook’s cupboards. The rest was simply part of making dinner.

Which is perhaps why, reading through the celebrations of Airbnb’s new rules, I keep imagining the other side of that sink full of dishes. The blender caked with a week’s worth of old food. The plates slowly accumulating a geological record of every meal cooked since check-in. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to my kitchen, or to the kitchen of someone I loved.

I can already hear the response from a thousand comment sections: THEN YOU SHOULDN’T HOST!

Fair enough. I don’t! The possibility of strangers allowing marinara to fossilize on my favorite saucepan is among the many reasons I’ve never considered entering the vacation rental business.

But I do think we occasionally forget that hospitality is a two-way street. Being a good host is a genuine responsibility, as is being a good guest. And we tend to understand both roles more intuitively in situations where nobody is exchanging money. If I were watching a friend’s house while they were out of town, I wouldn’t dream of welcoming them back with a pile of bolognese-crusted pots. If that same friend handed me a list of toilets to scrub before returning the keys, however, I might reconsider the friendship.

Of course, the exchange of money changes things. When I pay a cleaning fee, I expect someone to handle the work of preparing a property for its next occupants: washing linens, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning floors. I’m not volunteering to become somebody’s housekeeper. But I also don’t think loading the dishwasher after making dinner is an especially onerous price to pay for enjoying somebody else’s kitchen.

Now, Airbnb has attempted to draw the boundary more formally. Under its new rules, hosts may ask guests to place dirty dishes in the sink, but generally cannot require them to wash and put those dishes away.

Apparently, somewhere between setting down a dirty plate and turning on the faucet, a vacationer risks becoming a housekeeper.

And perhaps that’s the difficulty with Airbnb’s entire proposition. I loved cooking Thanksgiving in Mary’s kitchen partly because, for a few days, it felt like our own. I could wander into her garden, borrow her spices and imagine that this was simply what my life looked like on a Thursday afternoon. But the pleasure depended on a temporary arrangement, one in which somebody else’s home had been made available for my enjoyment, and in which I understood that eventually I’d have to hand it back.

What does it mean to make yourself at home somewhere when that home is also somebody else’s business? Airbnb has been asking travelers and hosts to negotiate that question for years. Judging by the delight and indignation greeting its new housekeeping rules, we still haven’t agreed on an answer.

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Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India. In a message to employees, Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman writes that this gives staff members "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources" as the company looks to trim staff without another round of layoffs.

Sources familiar with the situation tell The Verge that staffers across Microsoft are eligible for the voluntary exit offers, including those in its AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows + Devices, Xbox, finance, and human resources teams. Microsoft's cloud + AI, MicrosoftAI …

Read the full story at The Verge.

he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.

The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.

The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.

Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.

This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.

The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.

Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.

“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.

It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.

Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.

A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.

The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.

“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.

The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.

In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.

In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.

Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”

The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.

Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.

Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.

A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)

But Trump wasn’t done with Brazil. He and his team have pursued efforts to undercut the current Brazilian government while quietly backing Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his efforts to win the presidency this year. The runoff election is on Sunday, and it’s tight.

World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.

That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)

My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.

The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.

It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.

“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”

I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.

But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”

Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.

Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.

“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”

A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.

He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.

Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.

“He’s going to be angrier,” Murphy predicted.

Few things are more difficult to get down in immutable ink than the history of professional wrestling.

Born on the carnival circuit, the pseudo-sport maintained a here today-gone tomorrow feeling until relatively recently. Promoters scraped out regional fiefdoms where transient performers would fight for a spell before jumping ship in search of better deals. Sometimes they took their name with them; other times they molded themselves to whatever gimmick their new promoter needed on the roster. It makes a mess of any timeline, and that’s before you get to the kayfabe — the illusion — of it all, the fact that all these real men and women are deadly serious about keeping up their fake characters. 

Grasping for concrete facts can leave you with two immutable bits of data: when a wrestler was born and when they died, with everything in between being a show on some level. Get enough of those dates together, and it’s hard not to notice a pattern: These sideshow athletes don’t live very long. 

Gorgeous George, one of the most famous faces of wrestling’s Golden Age, didn’t make it to his 50th birthday. “Macho Man” Randy Savage and his ex-wife/manager Miss Elizabeth both died before reaching Social Security eligibility. High-flying technical wrestler Eddie Guerrero died at 38. Windham Rotunda, who freaked out the WWE for years as a swamp-dwelling cultist named Bray Wyatt, passed away at the age of 36. And earlier this week, All Elite Wrestling star Pac died in the parking lot of an Illinois chain restaurant, just a day after his most recent match. HIs cause of death is still unknown. 

Born Benjamin Satterley in a blue-collar community in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, he first came to national attention stateside in the WWE, where he wrestled under the decidedly English name Neville. He took the cruiserweight title twice before jumping for AEW in 2018. His star rose exponentially as a regular heel for the young promotion. At the time of his passing, he was only 40 years old.

Playing a fake brute who’s willing to take a folding chair to the face to settle a disagreement is hell on a body. Learning how to fall and pretending you have superpowers can’t cancel out physics. If a 240-pound man turns you upside down and drives your head into a padded floor, you’re going to feel it the next day (and probably several days after). The wear and tear is cumulative, adding up over time like it does for all contact sports. Just take a boxer’s blown-out ears and a running back’s trick knee and expand it to account for the fact that, in wrestling, shots to the back of the skull are frequently necessary to move the story along. Recruiting almost exclusively among the huge and jacked — it’s easier to appear larger-than-life on camera if you’re real-world large — makes the list of heart conditions start to pile up. It’s all a recipe for a brief career, and a correspondingly short life.

The situation is exacerbated by wrestling’s employer-employee relationship. Staying true to its seasonal carny roots, almost all professional wrestlers are gig workers. The average star of WWE or AEW signs on as an independent contractor, meaning they are responsible for their own health insurance and are subject to being fired for nearly any cause. The situation has been even worse for wrestling’s women, who spent decades subject to the whims of Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, a wrestler-promoter-extortionist who controlled virtually all of women’s wrestling, loaning out talent to regional promotions and taking cuts of stars’ pay.

Unlike the four major professional sports in the U.S., wrestlers have no pension and no retiree health benefits. If you wrestle for a living, you’re faced with significant pressure to perform for as long as you can, through as many injuries as you can. Unsurprisingly, the list of premature wrestler deaths is heavy on accidental painkiller overdoses and acute toxicity from mixing medications with alcohol. 

The central role of the promoter — and the lack of genuine athletic competition in matches — puts wrestlers and management on remarkably unequal footing. It’s hard to cause trouble for a boss who can simply write rabble-rousers out of the scripted action. Attempts to unionize the talent were mounted in the 1980s, first by hoo-rah heel Sgt. Slaughter, and then by wrestler-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura. The latter seemingly bought into some of the era’s storylines and ringside magic, believing that a rousing speech to the wrestlers in the locker room would convince them to strike. But he was ratted on by company star Hulk Hogan, and promoter Vince McMahon quickly summoned Ventura to let him know that any future outbursts of class consciousness would come with walking papers. 

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“Vince . . .  basically threatened to fire me if I ever brought it up again and read me the riot act,” Ventura explained on The Steve Austin Show. ”I then did WrestleMania 2 and immediately left and did ‘Predator’ and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild now, my union that I get retirement from now, healthcare from, all of that from.”

The situation only got worse as WWE muscled out nearly all regional promotions. McMahon’s anti-union behemoth spent decades as the only game in town for professional wrestlers who wanted the reach of a televised promotion. In recent years, AEW has pitched itself as an antidote to the WWE, but its roster is also almost entirely composed of independent contractors. Stars like CM Punk and Ray Fenix have complained loudly about the way the promotion handles wrestler health.

Pac is the second wrestler who performed in an AEW ring to have died just this month. Andy Williams, the former guitarist for metal-core act Every Time I Die who wrestled under the name “The Butcher,” died after collapsing during a match with an independent, regional promotion on Sept. 5 at 48. (His contact with AEW expired in April, after which he became a free agent.) Williams’ official cause of death is pending, awaiting final autopsy results.

Wrestling’s treatment of its employees is a bit too abstract to be listed on either man’s autopsy report. Coroners are in the business of endings, putting a neat period on decades of damage with phrases like “cardiac arrest.” Still, anyone who has followed wrestling for years can see the way it hobbles its heels and heroes alike. In a sport that heavily encourages everyone watching to follow the narrative, it’s hard not to notice a pattern.

The post AEW wrestler Pac’s death exposes pro wrestling’s labor problem appeared first on Salon.com.