Archaeologists have discovered a faience workshop at a major temple complex in the ancient Nubian capital of Napata, showing how the rulers of ancient Kush used specialized craft production to reinforce royal power.
The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward with a higher offer.
Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control. METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems. A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security and humanity at large.Read full article Comments
Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives. Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior. Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.Read full article Comments
Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were. Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.Read full article Comments
The trucking industry has fallen in love with two phrases that get tossed around in conference rooms and press releases without anyone stopping to explain them, and if you have heard the terms truck as a service and driver as a service and nodded along while quietly wondering what they actually mean for the money coming out of your account every month, you are not alone, because at a recent candid session with Daimler Truck and Daimler Truck Financial Services leadership, these concepts got pulled apart in a way that finally makes them concrete for a working carrier. Both ideas come down to the same underlying shift. For as long as most of us have been in this business, buying a truck meant buying a truck, then arranging financing as a separate step, then paying for maintenance, insurance, and everything else out of your own pocket as those bills came due. The model now being pushed by the manufacturers flips that. Instead of a truck plus a stack of separate costs, you get a service, a single arrangement that folds many of those costs into one predictable payment. Understanding how that works, and where the catch is, matters whether you run one truck or a hundred. What Truck As A Service Actually Is Strip away the buzzword and truck as a service is bundling. It is the manufacturer taking the pieces you used to buy and manage separately, financing or leasing, scheduled maintenance, repair contracts, insurance, telematics, extended warranty, and the eventual resale or residual value of the equipment, and wrapping them together into one monthly rate. Stephan Unger, who chairs Daimler Truck Financial Services, framed the company’s own evolution exactly this way, describing a shift from being a pure financing company into an integrated solutions company. The logic he laid out is that customers increasingly want ease of doing business. The fewer separate vendors, invoices, and decisions a carrier has to juggle, the more time it can spend actually moving freight, and bringing all of those services together into a single rate is the advantage the manufacturer is selling. The most complete version of this is full-service leasing and rental, where you are not really buying the truck at all, you are paying to have a working truck available. Unger pointed to a Daimler unit in Europe called Charterway that runs more than 6,000 trucks for customers on short-term and long-term rental, with the pitch being that the customer concentrates on moving goods while the provider takes care of the machine and everything around it. The selling point that lands hardest is uptime. In that model, if a truck goes down, the provider hands you a replacement from the rental fleet so you can keep your commitments to your own customers. In North America, Daimler delivers that kind of full-service leasing through partnerships with Penske and Ryder rather than running the fleet itself, while the rest of the bundle comes through the manufacturer side. Daimler is not a small player making a small bet here. The financial services arm operates in 21 countries with more than 30 billion euros in assets under management and leans on an A credit rating, so when the manufacturer talks about bundling the whole lifecycle of a truck, it has the balance sheet to back the offer. What Driver As A Service Means Driver as a service is the newer and stranger of the two, and it exists because of autonomous trucks. When the driver is no longer a person in the seat but a software system guiding the truck, the question becomes how you pay for that software, and the answer taking shape is a subscription. Daimler described a model where the revenue streams are deliberately separated. You buy or finance the truck and the chassis the way you always have, and then the virtual driver, the autonomous system that actually does the driving, comes as a per-mile software-as-a-service charge layered on top. In other words, the truck is a capital purchase and the driving is a running subscription billed by the mile. The company’s autonomous program centers on a redundant Freightliner Cascadia paired with a virtual driver from its subsidiary Torc Robotics, and leadership said it expects to get the driver out on a first route by the end of this year, building toward commercialization at scale around 2028. For financing, Daimler said it is prepared to structure around whatever shape that autonomous model ultimately takes. The point for carriers is that driver as a service is not a far-off abstraction. It is a payment model being designed right now, and it splits the cost of a truck into owning the metal and renting the capability. The Ownership Question Nobody Wants To Answer Here is where it gets philosophical, and where a reporter in the room cut straight to the heart of it by asking, if all these services are bundled into the financial contract, what does a customer actually own, and do they even have an interest in owning? The honest answer from Daimler’s leaders was that it depends on what you choose, and that flexibility is the whole point. Unger described a menu of states, from straightforward financing where you own the truck, to leasing, to arrangements more common in Europe, with service elements added into the contract according to what the customer prefers. Kevin Bangston, who leads the financial services arm in North America as president and CEO of Daimler Truck Financial Services USA LLC, was clear that a fleet can still decide what suits it best. You can own the equipment and make monthly installments over three years, then sell and remarket it yourself. You can take an operating lease with its own financial advantages and run it for a period. Or you can layer the full ecosystem on top in whatever combination serves your cash flow and flexibility. Importantly, Bangston said North America has not seen a fundamental shift out of ownership and into leasing, no dramatic change in the mix at this moment, just more interest in the bundling concept. So the picture is not that ownership is dying. It is that the options around it are widening, and the manufacturer is increasingly happy to sell you access to a working truck rather than only the truck itself. One force quietly pushing carriers toward these models is residual-value uncertainty, especially with battery-electric trucks. Nobody is fully sure what a used electric truck will be worth in a few years because the battery is the big unknown. Unger noted that Daimler is willing to take on that residual risk because its battery management systems and the data it collects give it a read on the health of the truck and its battery that an individual owner does not have. When the resale value is murky, letting the manufacturer carry that risk through a lease or bundle starts to look more attractive, which is exactly why these as-a-service models tend to grow fastest around new and uncertain technology. The Real Trade-Off For A Small Carrier None of this is free, and the trade is straightforward once you see it. Bundling buys predictability. One monthly rate that covers the truck, the maintenance, the insurance, and the warranty means fewer surprises, and when cash flow is tight, an unexpected major repair that would otherwise sink a month becomes someone else’s problem to absorb. For an operation running thin, that certainty has real value. What you give up is the upside of ownership. When you own the truck outright and maintain it well, you capture the resale value yourself, you build equity, and a paid-off truck becomes a margin machine. Hand the lifecycle to a provider and you trade that equity and that upside for convenience and predictability. Neither choice is automatically right. The answer depends on your breakeven, your cash position, and how much you value a steady number over a shot at the upside. The one mistake is signing into a bundle because it sounds modern without running it against what owning would actually cost and return over the same years. Why It Matters The move from owning trucks to subscribing to them is not a marketing trend, it is a restructuring of how capital, risk, and cost sit on a fleet’s books, shifting maintenance, insurance, warranty, and residual exposure off the operator and into a single recurring rate the manufacturer controls. For any leader responsible for fleet economics, the decision is no longer just which truck to buy but how much of the lifecycle to own versus rent, and getting that balance right against total cost of ownership and residual risk, especially as electric and autonomous equipment make resale values harder to predict, is becoming one of the more consequential financial calls a fleet makes. This article is based on a panel discussion with Daimler Truck and Daimler Truck Financial Services leadership at the DTFS North American headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, featuring Eva Scherer, CFO of Daimler Truck Holding AG, Stephan Unger, chairman of Daimler Truck Financial Services, and Kevin Bangston, president and CEO of Daimler Truck Financial Services USA LLC. Figures and forward-looking statements are as presented by the executives. The post The Shift From Owning Trucks To Subscribing To Them, And What It Means For Fleet Finance appeared first on FreightWaves.
A California trucking company owner pleaded guilty to a $2.1 million fraud scheme involving nearly 100 stolen identities. Hasan Korkmaz, 45, of Las Vegas, operated San Diego Logistics Group Inc. in Santee, California. Federal prosecutors detailed how he processed fraudulent credit card transactions through several businesses, including his trucking operation. Individual charges reached $18,500, ultimately causing more than $2,103,000 in losses across two banks. Korkmaz admitted to all 18 counts involving bank fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft on October 15. The operation ran during 2022 and 2023, using personal information belonging to real individuals. Prosecutors traced proceeds into financial accounts he controlled in Turkey. Korkmaz remained overseas for approximately 18 months before returning to the United States, where authorities arrested him in June 2025. How the credit card scheme worked Korkmaz obtained names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and other identifying information to open numerous fraudulent credit card accounts. Prosecutors described the operation as a credit card “bust-out” scheme. The method involves establishing accounts under stolen identities and exhausting available credit without intending to repay the balances. He also submitted checks from nonexistent accounts or those lacking sufficient funds, temporarily restoring credit limits for additional purchases. San Diego Logistics Group was among the businesses that processed the fraudulent credit card charges. Some individual transactions reached $18,500. Prosecutors did not identify the services associated with those payments. Court filings cited in the DOJ announcement do not establish whether the transactions involved actual freight shipments. window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { var gptSlot = googletag.defineSlot('/21776187881/FW-Responsive-Main_Content-Slot1', [[300, 100], [320, 50], [728, 90], [468, 60]], 'div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0').defineSizeMapping(gptSizeMaps.banner1).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag.enableServices(); setInterval(function() { if (!document.hidden) { googletag.pubads().refresh([gptSlot]); } }, 60000); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0'); }); Federal records reveal trucking company’s operating history Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration records identify San Diego Logistics Group Inc. under USDOT 3210732 and MC 1002578. The company reported three trucks, five CDL drivers and 2,948,000 miles traveled in 2022. Its registered cargo categories included general freight, refrigerated food, fresh produce, meat and U.S. mail. The figures came from the carrier’s November 2023 MCS-150 filing. Divided among three trucks, the reported mileage equals approximately 983,000 miles per truck in one year. The American Transportation Research Institute reported an industry average of 78,863 miles per truck in 2022. That makes San Diego Logistics Group’s reported mileage more than 12 times the industry average. An inaccurate mileage filing or a larger fleet operating during 2022 could explain the discrepancy. Neither explanation has been confirmed, and the mileage figures come from the carrier’s own filings. Its registered cargo categories also do not independently establish completed freight deliveries. For brokers, discrepancies like this highlight why carrier verification must go beyond checking operating authority. Federal records do not establish whether the mileage discrepancy had any connection to Korkmaz’s criminal conduct. FMCSA granted the company’s common carrier authority on December 6, 2021. The agency initiated six involuntary revocation proceedings during 2022 and 2023, subsequently discontinuing each one. FMCSA commonly starts these proceedings when required insurance coverage lapses and may discontinue them after carriers restore compliance. Available records do not establish what triggered each action against San Diego Logistics Group. Regulators ultimately revoked the company’s common carrier authority on January 2, 2024. Its current registration profile lists both common and broker authority as inactive. Insurance records show previous cancellations and no active primary liability coverage. Federal filings do not establish any connection between those regulatory issues and Korkmaz’s criminal conduct. Sentencing scheduled for January The indictment included 12 bank fraud counts, two money laundering charges and four aggravated identity theft offenses. Bank fraud carries a maximum sentence of 30 years per count. Money laundering carries up to 10 years per count under 18 U.S.C. Section 1957. Aggravated identity theft requires a mandatory consecutive two-year prison term. These statutory penalties do not establish the sentence Korkmaz will ultimately receive. U.S. District Judge James E. Simmons Jr. scheduled sentencing for January 8, 2027, at 9 a.m. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Mokhtari and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine Rookard are prosecuting case 25-cr-1405-JES. The Justice Department has not identified the banks or explained how Korkmaz obtained the victims’ information. window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { var gptSlot = googletag.defineSlot('/21776187881/fw-responsive-main_content-slot3', [[728, 90], [468, 60], [320, 50], [300, 100]], 'div-gpt-ad-1665767553440-0').defineSizeMapping(gptSizeMaps.banner1).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag.enableServices(); setInterval(function() { if (!document.hidden) { googletag.pubads().refresh([gptSlot]); } }, 60000); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1665767553440-0'); }); Why It Matters A registered trucking company became part of a financial fraud operation that caused more than $2.1 million in losses. The case highlights the importance of examining company ownership, operating authority and financial activity when evaluating transportation businesses. window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { var gptSlot = googletag.defineSlot('/21776187881/fw-responsive-main_content-slot4', [[300, 100], [320, 50], [728, 90], [468, 60]], 'div-gpt-ad-1709668086344-0').defineSizeMapping(gptSizeMaps.banner1).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag.enableServices(); setInterval(function() { if (!document.hidden) { googletag.pubads().refresh([gptSlot]); } }, 60000); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1709668086344-0'); }); Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phil Brink. 25 charged after drug ring used unsuspecting truckers to haul cocaine from California to Florida – FreightWaves Nebraska deputies recover $250K stolen copper load 50 miles past Iowa destination – FreightWaves Freight Fraud Awareness Day returns as strategic cargo theft reshapes trucking – FreightWaves window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { var gptSlot = googletag.defineSlot('/21776187881/fw-responsive-main_content-slot5', [[728, 90], [468, 60], [320, 50], [300, 100]], 'div-gpt-ad-1665767778941-0').defineSizeMapping(gptSizeMaps.banner1).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.pubads().collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag.enableServices(); setInterval(function() { if (!document.hidden) { googletag.pubads().refresh([gptSlot]); } }, 60000); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1665767778941-0'); }); The post California trucking owner pleads guilty in $2.1M identity theft scheme appeared first on FreightWaves.
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