Contestants at the 2026 Miss USA pageant in Miami on August 27.
Ivan Apfel/Getty Images
The 2,400-seat Miami theater lit up like a Coldplay concert when the QR code dropped at the Miss USA pageant. A sea of phones — held up by supportive parents, partners, and past pageant queens — trained their cameras on the massive barcode being projected from center stage, ready to vote for their favored contestant.
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the CIA has released a series of presidential briefing documents showing what United States leaders had been told about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years before the plane hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Taiz, Yemen – Aman Murshed, a mother of five in her 50s, has spent more than five years displaced in a camp in Taiz’s al-Kadaha area, hoping to return to her home where her family farmed and raised livestock.
Violetta Kruglyak, 44, is a real estate broker and makeup and hair stylist living in NYC.
Marissa Alper for BI
Working in NYC real estate, brokering deals for the rich and famous in one of the most desirable property markets in the world, is a "glamorous" business. Yet, for broker Violetta Kruglyak, that does not translate to a glamorous life.
My boss had a proposal: It was time to replace him with AI.
It was late spring, following months of AI-attributed layoffs across the economy that left workers wondering: Am I next? In the name of journalism, my editor and direct manager, Ryan Kailath, agreed to be a guinea pig.
Bitter Christmas is Pedro Almodóvar’s 24th feature film over the course of 46 years. There’s never been more than a three-year gap between his releases. He won Cannes’ best director prize in the 1990s (All About My Mother), an Oscar for best screenplay in the 2000s (Talk to Her) and the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, just two years ago (The Room Next Door). With his latest movie, Bitter Christmas, the 76-year-old Spaniard remains on that restless trajectory, pushing himself deeper into uncharted territory — this time, by turning the camera back on himself.