WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using an H-1B visa as it accuses the company of fraud.
“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” said Vice President JD Vance in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
The H-1B program has long been a target of Trump supporters who say that the program undercuts American workers and is rife with abuse.
H-1B visas are meant for high-skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. Technology companies are the biggest users, with nearly three-quarters of approvals going to workers from India.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Vance announcement came one day after Trump’s Republican administration launched another broadside against international students and their ability to work in the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practice Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.
Vance also called out universities that he suggested were abusing a program to allow international students to come to the U.S. These temporary visas, called J-1 visas, allow international visitors to temporarily come to the U.S. for work and study exchange programs. Vance singled out nine universities that he said merited further investigation for J-1 visa fraud, saying they used the program in greater proportions than their counterparts.

Ahead of the expected imminent launch of the new iPad mini 8, word out of Asia suggests that the device will feature a 60Hz OLED display rather than a ProMotion 120Hz display.
The information comes courtesy of a hit-and-miss tipster running the account “yeux1122” on the Korean Naver blog. “There have been mentions of 120Hz in some overseas reports, but the domestic production quantity has already been confirmed to be LTPS at 60Hz,” the tipster wrote. “That’s it.”
It’s not the first time we’ve heard that OLED iPad mini won’t share the same ProMotion display as the iPad Pro models. In July, the same leaker claimed they had been told by a source in Apple’s supply chain that the unreleased iPad mini is equipped with a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) backplane hybrid OLED panel clocked at 60Hz.
Apple’s ‌iPad Pro‌ models feature two-stack low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) OLED panels‌, which makes the display capable of dynamically adjusting its refresh rate between 10Hz and 120Hz (aka ProMotion). In contrast, LTPS OLED panels are usually paired with fixed refresh rates – such as 60Hz, 90Hz, or 120Hz – and are typically dimmer than LTPO panels.
If the leak is true, it’s likely to disappoint iPad mini fans. Previous reports have not been clear on whether the iPad mini 8 will feature a higher refresh rate than the 60Hz LCD display used in the existing iPad mini 7. Given that the base iPhone 17 uses a 120Hz ProMotion panel, some would have believed it was reasonable to expect the same on the first OLED iPad mini. That said, the iPhone 17e goes to show that Apple is still in the 60Hz OLED business, so it might not consider the iPad mini to be a big enough market to justify the more advanced panel technology.
There are at least some other new features of the new iPad mini 8 that we can expect. It should come with a faster A20 Pro chip, FaceTime camera relocated from portrait to landscape orientation, a redesigned speaker system, and a water-resistant design.
The new iPad mini is expected at some point in October, but Apple has not yet announced a launch date. Apple will unveil some new home products on Tuesday, October 13, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. However, MacRumors’ sources indicate that Apple plans to hold a separate event in the final week of October, so the iPad mini 8 could arrive then.
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The actor who stars as the OpenAI CEO in Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” admits that after working on the film, his “mistrusting of the technology” has deepened.
“I got a bit scared,” he told Variety after the San Francisco-set movie made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival this week. “It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don’t exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible, to me personally.”
“Artificial” focuses on the five-day power struggle that temporarily led to Altman’s ouster as CEO, but it also traces the rise of artificial intelligence and its great promise — and potential threat — to our daily lives.
Garfield stars alongside two fellow Oscar nominees — Yura Borisov (“Anora”) as idealistic OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Bay Area native Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, the company’s former interim CEO — as well as Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI”; and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder who turned into as bitter rival of Altman.
“Luckily, I don’t need (ChatGPT) in my life in the same way that other people in other industries might,” Garfield said. “As an actor, I was using it as a kind of fancy Google for some research purposes. I know that it’s not what it’s meant for.”
But perhaps the biggest compliment Garfield has received is from Altman himself. The tech mogul told Vanity Fair that he marveled at the actor’s replication of his walk and other mannerisms.
“That’s a very generous thing for him to say,” Garfield told Variety. “I imagine it must be incredibly strange and surreal to be a young man, as he is, to know that there’s a film where a version of him is being depicted. I feel quite sensitive and compassionate towards that. I’d personally feel really vulnerable and probably angry. That’s just me. He seems very chill about it.”

Neanderthals did far more with wood than burn it. A new study of 597 wooden remains and imprints from Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades near Barcelona, shows they made weapons, tools and household items from it. They may have built parts of their living space too. The finds span roughly 62,000 to 40,000 years ago and come from 16 archaeological levels.
For decades, stone tools shaped our picture of Neanderthal technology. Wood rarely survives, so a big piece of their material culture went missing. Abric Romaní changes that. The study appears in Science Advances and is led by Palmira Saladié of IPHES-CERCA and Universitat Rovira i Virgili. It’s the first full analysis of the wood recovered during more than four decades of digging at the site.
Other European sites already showed Neanderthals worked wood. What sets this one apart is the time depth. Researchers can follow wood use across thousands of years and many visits to the same spot. Wood turns out to be a steady part of daily life there, not an occasional resource.
So how did wood last this long? Calcium carbonate built up around it. When the wood rotted away, it left natural molds in the travertine rock. These molds hold the original shape with great precision. Some are detailed enough to show the internal tissue structure of the wood.
The same layers also hold hearths, stone tools and animal bones. That lets the team study how Neanderthals organized their activities, handled fire and managed resources in one space.
Most of the 597 pieces are trunks, branches, twigs, roots and piles of firewood. The team picked out 13 pieces that Neanderthals made or used. They include domestic objects, structural parts, tools and weapons.
Two wooden spears came from Level R. One measures 2.45 meters and fits the shape of a thrusting spear, built for close range. The other survives at 1.99 meters and has a pointed tip with clear signs of deliberate shaping. Very few wooden weapons from the European Paleolithic survive. Schöningen and Lehringen in Germany are the best known sites.
Level P produced an odd object. It was carved from a single piece of wood, with a clear handle and a thick, pointed end, so it looks like a mace. Tool marks show someone shaped it on purpose. Nobody knows what it was for, and no known object matches it.
The wood record goes beyond weapons. The team found what look like bark containers or trays. They also found crossed poles that might have formed part of a raised platform for preparing food. One straight wooden piece stretches 5.10 meters. It could have been a structural element, or a way to alter the living area. Piles of firewood show that Neanderthals used different methods to collect, carry and store fuel.
“Neanderthal technology extended far beyond stone,” says Josep Vallverdú of IPHES-CERCA.
The site has a long research history. Systematic excavations began in 1983 under Eudald Carbonell. Dr Palmira Saladié, Dr M. Gema Chacón and Dr Josep Vallverdú now direct the work. Their decades of careful digging let researchers read the wood alongside hearths, bones and stone tools. Together, these finds restore a part of the Neanderthal world that most sites have lost.

The world’s largest memory chipmaker estimated an operating profit of 107.4 trillion won ($80.17 billion) for the July-September period, slightly ahead of an LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won.
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The forecast marks Samsung’s fourth straight quarter of record operating profit, underscoring a deepening global memory chip shortage as AI infrastructure investment ​outpaces supply growth, which has driven chip prices up sharply.
Analysts have also recently trimmed their forecasts due to the sharp appreciation of ​the South Korean currency, which reduces the value of dollar-denominated overseas sales when converted into local currency.
“The market’s focus has shifted to whether the sharp earnings growth that started a year ago would be sustainable,” market analyst Kim Seok-hwan at Mirae Asset Securities said.
Analysts expect profit in the fourth quarter to grow 8.2% from the previous quarter, slowing from ​20% sequential quarterly growth in the third quarter, with chip price growth abating.
Market research firm TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10% ​to 15% in the fourth quarter from the preceding quarter, much slower than a second-quarter surge of roughly 60%.
Third-quarter revenue would likely rise 127% to 195 trillion won from a year earlier, Samsung said.
The company will release detailed results, including a breakdown of earnings by business division, on October 29.
BIGGER-THAN-EXPECTED MOBILE LOSS
Memory chips are expected to account for the bulk of the earnings improvement.
Prices have soared due to the tight supply of conventional DRAM ​and NAND chips as well as ​growing demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), essential ⁠for processing vast amounts of data for AI applications.
But the memory chip boom presents a challenge for Samsung’s other businesses, ​particularly its smartphone and ⁠consumer electronics divisions, which face mounting pressure from higher component costs.
Samsung’s mobile business posted a larger-than-expected loss of more than $1 billion in the third quarter, analysts said.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s contract chipmaking, or foundry, business is expected to remain loss-making because of the burden of fixed costs and still-low utilisation rates, analysts said.
Investors said they would also be closely watching for details of Samsung’s shareholder return policy during its earnings ​call later this month.
($1 = 1,339.5700 won)
Updates shares in paragraph 5, adds analysts’ comments in paragraphs 7-8, 15 and 18
Reporting by Heekyong Yang, Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Sonali Paul