Last week, Apple announced it removed several apps from its store that allowed users to report sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. But the most prominent of these apps, ICEBlock, has pledged to fight the move, which seemed to come directly at the behest of the Trump administration.

‘Under pressure’
Based on “information we have received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store,” Apple said in a statement. ICEBlock is a “crowdsourced platform that allows users to report ICE activity with just two taps on their phone,” the app’s website said, though it does not share personal information about ICE agents. Apple claims the app didn’t comply with App Store guidelines around “objectionable, defamatory, discriminatory or mean-spirited content,” Apple said to ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron in an email obtained by CNN.

The app had more than 1 million users, according to its developer. It seems Apple made the decision after “coming under pressure from the Trump administration,” said The Associated Press. The Justice Department has previously threatened legal action against media outlets for even “reporting on the app’s existence,” said The New York Times.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also said the app was removed as part of a direct government request. The Justice Department “reached out to Apple demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store, and Apple did so,” she said to Fox News Digital. 

Latest company to face Trump’s scrutiny
Apple is only the latest brand to be targeted by the Trump administration. YouTube recently agreed to pay President Trump “$22 million to settle his 2021 lawsuit, which he filed after the company suspended his account following the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot,” said Axios.

Other major companies that have settled lawsuits with Trump include Paramount, Meta and Disney. These brands are “failing to stand up more forcefully to what many inside these industries say are abuses of presidential power,” said the Times, because they are “scared that the president will do more damage if they try to resist.” 

Though companies tout how AI is revolutionizing the workplace, the incorporation of AI is reducing productivity as workers create “workslop,” according to new research. This low-effort AI-generated content is making other people’s jobs more difficult and building resentment among co-workers.

What’s workslop?
AI workslop is the “new busywork,” said a study by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs. It’s defined as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” said the researchers at Harvard Business Review.

Of the 1,150 U.S. full-time employees surveyed, 40% received AI workslop in the last month. And it takes an average of two hours to resolve each workshop incident. 

How does it affect the workplace?
The prevalence of workslop is an “evolution of ‘cognitive offloading,’” said Futurism. This is the term that “psychologists use to describe outsourcing your thinking to a piece of technology, be it a calculator or a search engine.” Unlike previous iterations of cognitive offloading, workslop “uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being,” said the researchers.

This can build up resentment in the workplace. If your coworker “foists lengthy, useless docs generated by AI onto your desk, it can feel like they are not pulling their weight or not capable of doing the work themselves,” said Insider.

There’s also a “deeper dread that comes from toiling in workslop,” said CNN. Workslop is the “inevitable (and avoidable) result of companies blindly adopting tools that don’t work simply because a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires declared that chatbots were the next internet.”

Ultimately, “writing, coding or designing is about communicating ideas to others,” said Insider. There may come a time when people disavow the supposed power of AI. If work is “outsourced to gen AI with little to no human oversight, there may be little value for the human on the other end who has to read it.”

A child carries food between makeshift tents outside Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. Representatives of Hamas, Israel and the U.S. are holding indirect talks in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh today in an attempt to agree on a draft peace proposal.
Khames Alrefi / Anadolu / Getty Images

For decades, audiences around the world have been drawn to the seductive, ultraviolent world of organized crime. Mob stories have become a genre filmmakers return to over and over again, despite the well-worn narrative arcs, stock characters and fundamental repulsiveness of what gangsters do for a living. Creating a list of the best mob movies is therefore not for the faint of heart and is sure to inspire many exclamations of ”Get outta here!”

‘On the Waterfront’ (1954)
Director Elia Kazan’s film (pictured above) showcases the agonizing moral quandaries that organized criminals often create for ordinary people. It “fused elements of neorealism with the German-influenced expressionism of popular noirs to achieve an unusual tone of gritty fantasia,” said Slant.

‘The Godfather’ (1972)
While it sometimes has the “quality of a romantic fable whose principal characters are in some ways charmed,” the classic Francis Ford Coppola film also offers “as dark and ominous a reflection of certain aspects of American life as has ever been presented in a movie designed as sheer entertainment,” said The New York Times.

‘A Prophet’ (2009)
Most of director Jacques Audiard’s celebrated movie is set in a bleak French prison and follows 19-year-old Malik El Djebena, an illiterate Algerian petty criminal. The film is an “acknowledgment of social conditions that create smarter, better criminals,” said Deep Focus Review, “as opposed to rehabilitating them.”