Huge Protests Put France on Edge, and How Meta Exploited a Tax Credit to Save Billions

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, Infertracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 6th, here's what we're covering. In France, the country is facing mass demonstrations today, as a growing student-led protest movement has become a national crisis. The anger erupted a few weeks ago, as students started protesting about overcrowded and underfunded schools among other issues. Though many of the demonstrations have been peaceful, some students have barricaded school doors, set buildings on fire, and clashed with police. Hundreds of people have been injured, and there have been roughly 6,000 arrests. Over the weekend, the Prime Minister pledged to address some of their complaints, including by filling vacant teaching positions, but that did not satisfy the protesters. And today, teachers and other public workers are joining the students to rally against proposed salary freezes, and to push back against the government they say is failing to invest in the future of France. French lawmakers are currently in the middle of a contentious debate over a new national budget that would cut back on the country's welfare system and raise taxes. They're trying to save money amid a dire economic outlook with rising debt, elevated fuel prices, and fears that the country could be heading towards a full-blown financial crisis. One expert on those kinds of crises called the situation a slow-motion train wreck. More broadly, one French author and businessman told the Times that the country might be on the brink of a bigger reckoning, about whether its social welfare state can survive long-term. He said, quote, "We're a country that can no longer do what it wants to do." Now two quick updates on the U.S. military. First, "There's a risk that Iran has brought combat drones into the U.K., if that's what you have to remember, I can't tell you that, but if they did, they'll suffer greatly." New details are emerging about why American commanders rushed to move a dozen Air Force bombers away from a base in southern England this weekend. According to U.S. and British officials, the sudden withdrawal was based on new information about a potential drone attack ordered by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The official said the suspected attack was part of a complex plot to strike aircraft and kill American personnel at the base, which the U.S. has used during the war in Iran. Some of the officials the Times spoke to said they believed the potential attack was loosely modeled on an audacious operation that Ukraine launched last year in Russia. In that attack, Ukraine smuggled drones deep into Russia in semi-trucks, before launching them to take out multiple military airplanes. When it comes to threats against the British base, Iran has denied accusations that it was involved. And, U.S. officials tell the Times that the Pentagon has moved a number of drones known as hunter killers to South America, as the Trump administration ramps up its campaign against drug cartels. For more than a year, the U.S. has been targeting alleged drug smugglers in the region with lethal strikes on boats, which a range of experts say are illegal. But recently, a top U.S. military commander in the region said the U.S. plans to expand those strikes to land. The drones the military is now sending to Latin America can carry thermal cameras, missiles, and bombs, and have previously been used in strikes against ISIS and other terrorist groups. The deployment comes as the administration has tried to exert greater influence in South and Central America. That's included building a coalition of regional leaders to take on the cartels. The group's official slogan is, quote, "we do bad things to bad people." But some human rights advocates worry that the escalating campaign against drug traffickers could endanger civilians. A Times investigation has found that the tech giant meta has used its growing number of AI data centers to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes by exploiting a lucrative federal tax break. The tax credit that Meta honed in on dates back to the 1980s and was designed to spur American innovation by incentivizing companies to take risks on cutting-edge experiments. Over the years, many companies have used the credit to offset things like salaries for researchers and engineers. But by colleagues learned that over the past few years, Meta has leaned into a much more aggressive interpretation of that tax break. It's written off billions of dollars of standard chips and computing equipment it's using in AI data centers, claiming those centers are a giant experiment. It's certainly the case that companies like Meta are experimenting with how do you make the best AI model. And part of that experimentation is, like, how do you network these chips together? How close do the server racks need to be? How do you do this using less power, using less water? But the chips themselves are not experimental. They are known to work. Cashmere Hill is a tech reporter for the Times. He's part of a team that found that last year alone, Meta trimmed almost four billion dollars off its tax bill by claiming the research credit, far more than any other major tech company. We talked to a bunch of tax experts and described what Meta was doing. And when I told one how much Meta claim last year, he said, "Wow, that's huge." I asked, "Do you think this will survive IRS scrutiny?" And he said, "This is really wild in out there, use of this credit." And he said, "What would make somebody comfortable making this tax claim is if you were building out a data center to cure cancer. That would be tackling a really novel challenge." But Meta, building data centers across the country that they know are going to work really is not what this tax credit was designed for. Meta declined to answer specific questions from the Times about what made its AI data centers experimental. In a statement, a spokesman said that the company is, "Advancing frontier research, building new technology and supporting American jobs, adding that, like other companies that invest at this scale, we use the tax incentives Congress established decades ago to encourage this type of domestic investment." Still, Kashmir says that Meta's own accountants have recognized that their tax strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in the company's securities filings, it's warned investors that the IRS may try to claw back the money. And finally, I've covered the climate for the time to the last five years. I have reported from around the world on glaciers and melting ice from Greenland to the Himalayas to Antarctica. But there are a few places in the world where the ice is changing as rapidly as it is here in Switzerland. Raymond Jong is part of the Times' climate desk, and he's recently been reporting from the Swiss Alps. Over the past five years, glaciers there have lost about a fifth of their total volume. And Raymond says that at the current pace of global warming, 97 percent of Swiss glaciers could completely disappear by the end of the century. One surprising consequence of the melting ice here in Switzerland is that ancient artifacts that had been frozen in the ice are suddenly emerging, ready for archaeologists to find them here in the mountains. Whoa, whoa, whoa. He found something. This one could be an ice piece. Yeah. These artifacts are from Roman times or even earlier. The Bronze Age, the Iron Age, preserves in the ice for thousands of years. So what have we found, Roma? Yeah, this is the biggest old piece. It is really narrow to one of the pieces that we have dated from the Bronze Age. But as the ice melts, and these objects are exposed to the air and the elements, they're going to decompose quickly. So there's a real race against time here. Archaeologists have a really narrow window of a couple of years, maybe a few decades, to find a lot of these objects before they're lost again to time. Raymond says that unlike other places where ancient remnants are mostly stone, metal and pottery, the Alpine glaciers have preserved organic materials, like a 2,500-year-old wooden ski that archaeologists recently found. We've also discovered a two-foot-long statueette with a human figure carved into it and a fragment of an elm wood bowl that's older than the pyramids and stonehenge. As Swiss archaeologists race to collect the objects that are merging from the melted ice, they're enlisting the public's help with an app called Ice Watcher that lets hikers, shepherds, and anyone else report potential ancient finds in the Alps. Scientists say that overall, the discoveries are challenging old ideas that, historically, the mountains were forbidding off-limits zones. Instead, the Alpine passes apparently bustled with traffic, hunters, herdsmen, traders. As one archaeologist put it, the glaciers are a quote "archive of human existence." Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, what my colleague Eli Tan learned after he handed over his digital life to the most popular new AI agent. When I first started using Mews, I thought I might just use it for certain things, like just calling my insurance or just ordering food. But what I found was that I ended up relying on it for everything, and instead of a lot of times just thinking for myself, my first instinct was to go to Mews and ask it instead. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.