Financial Mindset

A police lieutenant in a Cincinnati suburb has been indicted on a felony charge for allegedly using his department’s Flock license plate reader cameras to track someone he knew. Walter Cordes, 48, a lieutenant with the Sharonville Police Department, searched the Flock system 29 times between Dec. 19, 2024, and April 20, 2026, to find the person’s whereabouts for personal reasons unrelated to police work, according to the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office. A grand jury indicted him Oct. 13 on one count of unauthorized use of a computer, cable or telecommunication property. The charge is a fifth-degree felony that carries up to 12 months in prison under Ohio law. Prosecutors have not identified the person Cordes allegedly tracked or said why he searched for them. The searches came to light in June when Cordes self-reported during a department audit of the system, then admitted to them in an interview, prompting an investigation by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Sh...

Chicago officials are weighing legal action against Barre Seid, the 94-year-old industrialist behind the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, over claims that workers he hires to scatter nuts in Lincoln Park are fueling a rat infestation. Alderman Timmy Knudsen told Axios he is pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid for damage to the park, while Park District officials told the publication they are still weighing their options. In an Aug. 25 letter to Seid, Knudsen called the matter a final warning and said city staff had received photos and video documenting Seid or his staff putting out food daily for squirrels and other wildlife, according to WGN . The letter said the feeding created a public health hazard because it drew in not only squirrels but also pigeons and rats. Knudsen cited repeated violations of a city code provision barring the buildup of garbage or food that could feed or shelter rats, according to Block Club Chicago , and gave Se...

In the White House Situation Room, the hardest calls were never the obvious emergencies. What kept me up were the nights when a fragment of information came in and the debate wasn’t about what to do. It was about whether anything concerning was happening at all. In 2023, my team and I were assessing the nation’s pandemic influenza plans when the Situation Room notified me that H5N1 influenza had infected a father and killed his daughter in a remote Cambodian village. Was the virus spreading between people – the start of a pandemic that could kill millions? The national security adviser asked whether to brief President Biden immediately. If these cases were the first signs, we would need to commit billions of dollars to vaccines and treatments within days. I told him to wait. Not because I thought it was nothing, but because we had already agreed, before the alert came, on what would tell us it was something: sustained human-to-human transmission. We worked with health official...

Hello from Santa Barbara. It’s day two of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit . I sat down with Sarah London, CEO of Centene , on Monday. She offered her perspective on health care’s AI boom. Much of the AI being deployed at scale today, London said, goes toward what she calls “inflationary use cases,” tools that generate more revenue in a fee-for-service system rather than reduce the underlying cost of care. AI can make billing faster, automate paperwork and help providers capture more revenue. But those gains don’t necessarily make health care less expensive. London believes the bigger opportunity lies in changing how care is delivered and who can access it. Centene, a $33 billion company operating Medicaid plans in 29 states alongside marketplace and Medicare Advantage coverage, serves 26 million members. They are, London said, “among the poorest, sickest” people in their communities. Yet those populations are often left behind by health care innovatio...

Asia runs on hierarchy. Nearly every major market in the region scores highly on what psychologist Geert Hofstede called “power distance”—the degree to which people accept that power is distributed unequally—and the landmark GLOBE study of 62 societies found those rankings hold across Asia and outpace the West. And in AI, that’s an enormous lever to get companies to embrace this new technology. Organizations often run the same AI playbook: Tell people to try it, reward those who show curiosity, and see what sticks. That approach may have worked for the first phase of AI adoption. It won’t work for the second. The gap is widening between companies using it mainly for productivity, and those embedding AI into how they operate. The former are simply making existing tasks faster or cheaper; the latter are redesigning workflows and business models. Both may become more efficient, but only the second category is preparing itself for growth. Soon, the gap...

Peter Lee, who recently announced his departure as president of Microsoft Science, plans to join the Mercedes Formula 1 team in a newly created AI advisor role, he told Fortune . Lee spent 16 years at Microsoft shaping its science and research efforts, exploring how AI can help doctors and scientists crack hard problems in the physical, biological, and medical sciences. At Mercedes, he said, he’ll focus on four main goals: using AI to tackle physics problems for the team’s car, breaking down organizational and data silos across departments, building financial and predictive data models, and advising the team on how the sport’s regulators might govern AI use. His exact title is still under discussion, but he’s expected to join on a one-year contract with an option for a second. “I have always wanted to be a racer. When I was young, I grew up racing carts,” Lee said. “I’m completely thrilled, and I’m in disbelief that they would think of me for something like this.” The...

At many large companies, CEOs are squared away in plush corner offices, where they take meetings and receive elaborate lunch orders. But when midday rolls around, Ancestry employees find their CEO Howard Hochhauser taking his meal in the office’s eating area. It’s a habit he picked up from Ace Greenberg when Hochhauser worked at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns in the late 1990s. He held multiple positions within the equity research department, ultimately serving as a vice president and equity research analyst. And when it came time to step away from the keyboard and sit down for their midday meals, the company’s longtime CEO, Greenberg, would eat among his employees.  “Ace Greenberg, who founded the firm, sat on the floor every day, and it stuck with me. Like, gosh, that’s really a visible statement. He’s really accessible,” Hochhauser tells Fortune . “You could talk to him. He wasn’t sitting in some glass office that’s untouchable.” He...