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Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said on Monday he will step back from all public commitments, days after President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate his and other prominent Democrats’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, where he is a professor, told the university’s student newspaper that the move was to allow him “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” The announcement came after the House Oversight Committee released thousands of files related to Epstein last week, including documents that showed personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein. “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein, Summers told The Crimson. “While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort,” Summers added. Summers, a Democrat, served as former President Bill Clinton‘s Treasury Secretary and former President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council director. He currently serves on the board of OpenAI and as a director of the Harvard Kennedy Schools Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. OpenAI and Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Summers also did not immediately respond. The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trumps side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. Many Trump voters believe Bondi and other Trump officials have covered up Epsteins ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019. The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on forcing the release of investigative Epstein files after Trump, who had initially opposed the vote, called on fellow Republicans to support it. Jasper Ward, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Over the last decade, dozens of cities have reshaped streets around cycling and slower, safer, healthier travel. Take Paris: at rush hour, boulevards that were once packed with cars are now filled with thousands of people on bikes, newly planted trees, and cleaner air. In a detailed new analysis, the urban design consultancy Copenhagenize ranked 100 global cities on how far they’ve come to make it easier to bikeexamining everything from changes in bike infrastructure to whether cities are promoting cargo bikes for delivery and teaching kids to bike in school. Nearly all top-ranked cities are in Europe, where strong pro-bike policies have lowered speed limits, added separated bike lanes, and created new bicycle streets where bikes take priority over cars. But the benchmarking report, the most comprehensive of its kind, also looks at progress in cities worldwide, from Nairobi, Kenyawhere “bike trains” of hundreds of riders make commuting by bike saferto Minneapolis, where some car lanes have been converted to two-way bike paths. If any politicians have doubts about adding new bike infrastructure, “they can look at this report and see that everywhere in the world, other cities are investing in cycling, and they are getting back all the benefits from active mobility,” says Clotilde Imbert, director of Copenhagenize. Cities like Paris show that massive changes can happen fast. “If you want to transform your city quickly, you can,” says Imbert. For the full breakdown, see the reportbut here’s a snapshot of the top 30 cities for cyclists. [Photo: Konstantinos/Adobe Stock] 1. Utrecht, Netherlands In the index’s top-ranked city, nearly a third of all trips happen by bike. The Dutch city continues to shrink space for cars, taking away some parking spots and car lanes to make room for more bike lanes and trees. A new car-free neighborhood designed for 12,000 residents is now under construction. The city also includes amenities like the worlds largest bike parking garage, part of more than 100,000 bike parking spots throughout the city. Low-income residents can buy refurbished bikes for 30 ($34) through a program that also includes a year of free repairs. [Photo: Lightfield Studios/Adobe Stock] 2. Copenhagen Protected bike lanes cover more than half of the streets in the Danish capital, and other roads have been converted to “bicycle streets” that prioritize bikes over cars. The city is continuously improving its bike infrastructure; 29% of all trips happen by bike and nearly half of all commutes to work or school are on bikes. On a typical weekday, Copenhageners collectively ride 2.75 million kilometers (1.7 million miles). [Photo: Dmitry Rukhlenko/Adobe Stock] 3. Ghent, Belgium Over the last few decades, Ghent has redesigned streets to prioritize biking, walking, and public transportation. With more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) of protected bike lanesalong with low speed limits for cars and two dozen bicycle streets, the number of car trips keeps dropping. More than a third of trips now happen by bikes, up from 22% a decade ago. [Photo: Kirill/Adobe Stock] 4. Amsterdam One of the worlds most famous cycling cities keeps improving. Amsterdam now has around 560 kilometers (350 miles) of protected bike lanes and 11,000 bike parking spaces, including the worlds first underground bike garage. Most city streets now have a 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limit. A school street program blocks off traffic in front of schools when kids are arriving and leaving, making it safer for kids to walk or bike to school. Thirty-seven percent of all trips happen on bikes. [Photo: UlyssePixel/Adobe Stock] 5. Paris Over the past decade, Paris has transformed. Some major streets are now car free, and on others, parking spaces and car lanes have been removed to put in bike lanes. A 30-kilometers-per-hour (19-miles-per-hour) speed limit is the norm. There are more than 122,000 public bike parking places. Local businesses have used city subsidies to buy 1,500 cargo bikes. The bikeshare system had 56 million trips in 2024. In the last five years, bike trips jumped from 5% of all trips taken to 11%. [Photo: Lev Karavanov/Adobe Stock] 6. Helsinki To help make it easier to bike in Finlands frigid winters, the city clears snow from 150 kilometers (93 miles) of bike lanes. The city now has an extensive network of separated lanes, along with traffic calming, redesigned intersections, and awareness campaigns focused on safety. It also continues to add bike parking, including a new parking garage at the central train station. [Photo: Schroptschop/iStock/Getty Images Plus] 7. Münster, Germany In Münster, a compact university town, 40% of city streets have protected bike lanes. The city also has a network of bicycle streets, coated in red to remind drivers that bikes have priority, and a new scenic bike route along a canal. Nearly half of all trips take place on bikes. To nudge people to bike even more, the city uses public billboards to display stats from bike counters that show how many people are riding. [Photo: Matthias De Boeck/iStock/Getty Images Plus] 8. Antwerp, Belgium Antwerp has nearly 600 kilometers (372 miles) of protected bike lanes and continues to expand them through its 100 Missing Links program, which includes underpasses and bridges for direct, continuous routes. About 70% of streets are limited to 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour). To help add more bike parking in dense neighborhoods with little extra space, the city has been converting some unused buildings into secure subscription-based bike parking. They now have more than 60 neighborhood sites with 1,600 spaces. Cycling in the city is inclusive, with children and seniors on the road, and women make over half of daily commuting bike trips. [Photo: pony/Unsplash] 9. Bordeaux, France Nearly 90% of Bordeauxs streets have speed limits of 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour) or less, and the city has been closing major gaps in its bike network, including new two-way cycle tracks along both riverbanks. Former car lanes on streets like the Quai des Queyries have been converted into continuous, green-framed bikeways. Bicycletteries in the historic center offer video-protected, resident-only parking. The city also uses cargo bikes for waste pickup and deliveries. 10. Nantes, France Nantess Grandes Voies Vélo network provides high-quality, well-marked bike routes across the city. Almost 90% of streets have low speed limits, complemented by car-free areas, shared streets, and low-traffic neighborhoods. The main train station offers 1,200 secure parking spaces, with more on-street racks throughout the city. Awareness campaigns support a steadily growing bike culture. [Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images] 11. Bonn, Germany Bonn is shifting from painted lanes to a growing protected network; about 20% of streets now have protected bike lanes, and over half the city has 30-kilometer-per-hour (18-mile-per-hour) speed limits. The city remains relatively car-dependent, but bike counters show rising use, and cycling mode share has increased from 15% in 2017 to 21% in 2024. [Photo: oliver de la haye/Adobe Stock] 12. The Hague, Netherlands The Hague has an expanding network of protected bike routes, with 60% of streets at or below a 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limit and major investments since 2020. The central station holds 8,500 bikes, with 47,000 more spaces on streets. The city continues linking suburban routes and opened the 335-meter (1,099-foot) Jan Linzel bike bridge over the A4. Its “Den Haag Fiets!” program includes kids bike lessons from age 2, free or low-cost bikes for families, and subsidies for shared and cargo bikes. [Photo: Kseniia Penkova/Unsplash] 13. Strasbourg, France Strasbourgs Velostras network links the entire metro area, giving the city one of the most recognizable and complete bike systems in Europe. It still needs slower speed limits and redesigned streets, but cycling culture is strongits annual Bike to Work challenge brings new riders, and the city offers over 400 bike parking spaces per 1,000 residents, among the worlds highest. Cargo bikes are widely used for deliveries. [Photo: Chris Barbalis/Unsplash] 14. Lyon, France Nearly three-quarters of Lyons streets have 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limits or below, and the branded Voies Lyonnaises network makes navigation easy. The city is redesigning major corridors with protected routes, tunnels, and new riverside bikeways, and opened Frances largest secure bike parking hub at its main station in 2025. Its long-running bikeshare now includes low-cost plans for broad access. [Photo: imageegami/Adobe Stock] 15. Montreal The highest-ranked non-European city on the list, Montreal has rapidly expanded its protected network with clear, cohesive design and safer intersections. The Saint-Denis corridor hit 1.3 million trips in the first nine months of 2025, helping revive local businesses. Bixi, the city’s bikesharing program, set a record 13 million rides in 2024 and now operates year-round with bike trailers. Montreal pioneered North Americas first bicycle streets and continues to grow ridership. [Photo: Marek Lumi/Unsplash] 16. Malmö, Sweden Malmös bike mode share reached 27% in 2024, supported by a dense network with 49 kilometers (30 miles) of protected lanes per 100 kilometers of road. A new regional bike highway is adding underpasses and bridges to close gaps. The city provides extensive parkingincluding 5,000 spaces at train stationsplus air pumps, footrests, and school streets. Cargo bikes are common, and developers are encouraged to include bike pools in new housing.
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E-Commerce
Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Googles self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test modewith humans in the drivers seats ready to take over, just in casethat its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality. Since last year, however, Alphabets robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. Its now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that its testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks. For now, the only passengers will be Waymo employees. But the news is one of the final big milestones before the company offers rides to the public in those five cities, which it says it expects to do next year once all the necessary logistics are in place. In most of the cities, Waymo began driving with an in-car supervisor late last May. (Remote human monitoring and control remain part of the system in all service areas.) By autonomy standards, taking the human out of the drivers seat in five cities over such a short period is a one-fell-swoop sort of move. According to Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi, the 10 million driverless rides the company has already completed helped it reach this point. Having dealt with high-speed roads in Phoenix and very narrow corridors in San Francisco, L.A. was faster, he told me. Austin was faster than that. Atlanta was faster than that. So this is just the next step. The five cities that are part of todays announcement represent only a portion of those where Waymo has announced its intention to add service. Seven moreDenver, Detroit, Las Vegas, London, Nashville, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.are coming soon but not yet ready to do without a human driver aboard. Yet another sevenBoston, Buffalo, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Tokyoare in an earlier stage, where the company is driving and collecting data. Thats a lot of places that are at least partway down the road to being Waymo cities. Each is different when it comes to their roads and the challenges they present. As Panigrahi notes, even specific intersections can present idiosyncrasies that the companys Waymo Driver platform must map out individually. But he says that localities that might at first blush seem quite different can boil down to similar problems for the Waymo Driver to solve. You can imagine how when we’re serving the civic center in San Francisco, [after] a Warriors game, he says. It’s not that dissimilar to a whole host of pedestrians coming from the beach and crossing over in Miami Beach. Panigrahi adds that Waymo highway drivingwhich came to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area last week, after years of anticipationshould also scale up to new markets more quickly. Highway is a super hard technical problem, and that’s why we took our time to build it and validate it over multiple years, he says. But once you do get that, then the highways do look much more similar across states. There are more nuances in surface streets. Waymos time as the only company offering a fully commercialized robotaxi service in the U.S. may be winding down. When I tried Teslas robotaxi service last month in San Francisco, a human attendant was in the drivers seat, greatly reducing the amazingness of the experience. But Tesla plans to offer truly autonomous rides to the public by the end of this year, at least in Austin. Earlier this month, the company said that it also plans to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix, portending eventual head-to-head competition with Waymo in all those areas. Tesla also says it intends to begin mass production of its two-seater Cybercab in April and is rethinking its original plan to remove the drivers seat and steering wheel altogether. Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Zoox just announced that its begun Zoox Explorers robotaxi service in San Francisco. That means its allowing waitlisted members of the public into its app and giving them free rides in return for feedback. Zoox is already in Explorers mode in Las Vegas. Should a critical mass of American cities grow thick with driverless Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla robotaxis, it might turn autonomy from a futuristic novelty into mundane workaday transportation. That exposure could boost the technologys reputation, which still isnt great among people who havent been for a ride. For example, a February AAA study reported that only 13% of respondents said they trusted self-driving vehicles. In Waymos home turf of San Francisco, its cars are omnipresent and public attitude toward self-driving vehicles has been on the rise. Yet the recent death of a bodega cat who was struck by one of its vehicles sparked more of an uproar than the hundreds of animals who are killed by human drivers in the city each year. Waymos own data, based on 96 million passenger-only miles its cars have driven, shows its record is dramatically safer than that of humans. For instance, cars have been in 92% fewer crashes that caused pedestrian injuries. Panigrahi argues that merely seeing Waymos driving carefully reassures pedestrians and cyclists. After theyve taken a trip in one, its a lot harder to hate them. (In August, The Information wrote that 99% of the 69% of its subscribers whod been in a self-driving car were satisfied with the experience.) Pedestrians notice that we stop to give them that confidence that they can cross and not play a game of chicken, he says. Even skeptical or on-the-fence folks, once they take their first ride, that magical experience changes their heart.
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E-Commerce
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