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Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up HIGHER EDUCATION Advertisement UMass Chan Medical School lays off or furloughs about 200 employees after NIH funding shortfall Advertisement UMass Chan Medical School has laid off or furloughed an estimated 200 employees, a spokesperson said Wednesday. UMass Chan Medical School UMass Chan Medical School has laid off or furloughed an estimated 200 employees, a spokesperson confirmed Wednesday. The cuts come after the school saw a $30 million funding shortfall from long delays in funding new research grants from the National Institutes of Health after President Trump took office in January, said Sarah Willey, the UMass Chan spokesperson. UMass Chan received $193 million from the NIH last year, Willey said, and is preparing for uncertain federal funding in the coming year. Under the Trump administration's proposed caps on indirect NIH funding, the school projects a $50 million loss in funding. The school has also paused faculty recruitment and significantly reduced the incoming class size of the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. All hiring and discretionary spending has also been paused, the spokesperson said. During a Tuesday visit to the school, which employs 6,000 people and contributes more than $2 billion annually to the economy, Governor Maura Healey highlighted the dangers of lost and unstable funding on the state's only public medical school. 'The funding cuts are very extensive, including supporting critical work in gene therapy, rare disease research, HIV research, digital medicine, neuroscience, and more,' Healey said. 'UMass Chan has held groundbreaking clinical trials of new genetic therapies for devastating conditions like ALS and so many other diseases. 'But this kind of progress is now at risk, and with that, hope is being stripped away from patients and families.' — MAREN HALPIN ACQUISITIONS Lyft to buy Freenow app for $197 million in global expansion Lyft signage on a vehicle in New York. Shelby Knowles/Bloomberg Lyft Inc. agreed to buy the European taxi-hailing app Freenow for about $197 million, marking its first global expansion beyond the United States and Canada. Lyft will acquire the app from BMW Group and Mercedes-Benz Mobility in a cash transaction expected to close in the second half of 2025, according to a statement Wednesday. Freenow will continue operating in nine countries and more than 150 cities across Ireland, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Poland, France, and Austria, Lyft said, but added that the two companies will be working on integration so riders can use either app 'seamlessly' across the Atlantic. Bloomberg reported last month that BMW and Mercedes were considering selling Freenow. While well known in the United States and Canada, Lyft currently doesn't operate outside of North America. In contrast, Lyft's much-larger ride-hailing rival, Uber Technologies Inc., operates in more than 70 countries globally. — BLOOMBERG NEWS Advertisement TECH On the stand, Zuckerberg says TikTok is a major competitive threat Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, left the federal courthouse in Washington on Wednesday. TOM BRENNER/NYT Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, took the witness stand in a landmark antitrust trial for a third day, saying on Wednesday that the video app TikTok has emerged as a serious competitor in social networking. In a friendly exchange led by lawyers for Meta, Zuckerberg said that the fast growth of the Chinese-owned app was 'probably the highest competitive threat for Instagram and Facebook over the last few years.' Zuckerberg's lawyers were trying to poke holes in the case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, which went to trial on Monday. The FTC has accused the social media company, which was previously known as Facebook, of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny startups in a 'buy-or-bury strategy' to snuff out competition. Meta's core function is connecting friends and family, making Snapchat its only serious social media competitor, the FTC has said. Zuckerberg countered during his more than seven hours of testimony so far this week that Meta faces significant competition in the world of social networking, including from TikTok and Apple's iMessage. On Wednesday, he said Meta's addition of a short-video feature known as Reels to Instagram and Facebook was in large part a response to TikTok's rise. Users continue to engage more on TikTok than with his apps, he said. 'TikTok is still bigger than either Facebook or Instagram, and I don't like it when our competitors do better than us,' Zuckerberg said. — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement FINANCE Court scraps $8 credit card late fee limit, at Consumer Bureau's request A shopper paid with a credit card at a farmer's market in San Francisco. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg A government-imposed $8 limit on most credit card late fees is the latest consumer protection regulation to be scrapped by President Trump's administration. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau adopted the fee cap last year, estimating that it would save households $10 billion a year. A coalition of banking and business trade groups immediately sued to block the rule, arguing that the bureau had exceeded its statutory authority, and won an injunction that prevented it from taking effect. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas vacated the fee limit at the joint request of the banks and the consumer bureau. Now under the leadership of Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office leader who is also serving as the bureau's acting director, the consumer bureau reversed its stance and said in court filings that it agreed with the banks that the fee limit illegally stretched beyond the agency's bounds. Banks and lenders, whose late fees typically average around $32, celebrated their victory. 'If the CFPB's rule had gone into effect, it would have resulted in more late payments, lower credit scores, higher interest rates and reduced credit access for those who need it most,' the lawsuit's plaintiffs said in a joint statement. The group included the American Bankers Association, the Consumer Bankers Association, and the United States Chamber of Commerce, along with three Texas business associations. Consumer advocates took the opposite stance. 'This decision will allow big banks to exploit consumers to the tune of $10 billion annually by charging inflated late fees that far exceed what late payments cost them to collect,' said Chi Chi Wu, a senior lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement MEDIA Don't like a columnist's opinion? Los Angeles Times offers an AI-generated opposing viewpoint. The Los Angeles Times newspaper logo is seen at its headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press In a colorful commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Matt K. Lewis argued that callousness is a central feature of the second Trump administration, particularly its policies of deportation and bureaucratic cutbacks. 'Once you normalize cruelty,' Lewis concluded in the piece, 'the hammer eventually swings for everyone. Even the ones who thought they were swinging it.' Lewis's word wasn't the last, however. As they have with opinion pieces the past several weeks, Times online readers had the option to click on a button labeled 'Insights,' which judged the column politically as 'center-left.' Then it offers an AI-generated synopsis — a CliffsNotes version of the column — and a similarly-produced opposing viewpoint. One dissenting argument reads: 'Restricting birthright citizenship and refugee admissions is framed as correcting alleged exploitation of immigration loopholes, with proponents arguing these steps protect American workers and resources.' The feature symbolizes changes to opinion coverage ordered over the past six months by Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who has said he wants the famously liberal opinion pages to reflect different points of view. Critics accuse him of trying to curry favor with President Trump. — ASSOCIATED PRESS