A former Florida school principal who was forced to resign after students were shown an image of Michelangelos iconic statue of a nude David viewed the masterpiece in person on Friday in Florence.

Cecilie Hollberg, who directs the Accademia Gallery in Florence, where the David is the star attraction, said that Hope Carrasquilla, her husband and two children, came straight to the museum right after they arrived in the city.

Carrasquilla stepped down as principal of Tallahassee Classical school in the Florida city last month after one parent claimed the towering sculpture was pornographic. Other parents complained they werent notified in advance that their children would be shown the nude figure during a lesson featuring the Renaissance.

Hosting Carrasquilla was an immense pleasure, the gallery director said.

I am happy to be able to welcome her and introduce her to the beauties of our museum, besides showing her the David, a sculpture that, I repeat as I have said, has nothing to do with pornography, Hollberg said in a written statement. Its a masterpiece, it represents a religious symbol of purity and innocence, the victory of good over evil.

Hollberg added that the works nudity is a clear expression of the Renaissance, which puts man at the center of attention.

Michelangelos marble sculpture depicts the Biblical David, naked, with a sling over his shoulder and a rock in his hand, ready for battle with Goliath.

A call to Carrasquillas cell phone went unanswered.

Hollberg noted that currently more than 50% of the gallery visitors come from the United States.

I am sure that Mrs. Carrasquilla will find here, in Florence, the welcome and the solidarity that she deserves, the director added.

The Florida school is attended by some 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

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Republican Ron DeSantis would not have to resign as Florida governor in order to run for president if he chooses under a bill given final approval Friday in by the GOP-dominated state Legislature.

The measure, attached to a much broader elections bill, would carve out an exemption to Florida law requiring anyone seeking office to resign from one they already hold after qualifying as a candidate. Only an officeholder running for U.S. president or vice president would not have to resign.

Supporters portrayed the bill as purely a clarification and not intended specifically for DeSantis, who has not yet announced a presidential bid but is widely expected to declare his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the coming weeks. The bill passed the state House 76-34 along party lines and now goes to DeSantis, who is expected to sign it into law.

It is an individual office that is unique. It is the chief executive of our country, GOP Rep. Ralph Massullo said during House debate Friday. This isnt just for our governor, its for anyone in politics.

Democrats called the effort a cynical attempt to clear the way for DeSantis to run while remaining as governor. His current term in Tallahassee would end in January 2027.

We in this body are doing the governors bidding, said Rep. Angela Nixon, a Democrat. He needs to resign to run if he wants to run for president, period. Last time I checked, being governor is a full-time job. Running for president takes a lot of work.

The bill, which makes a number of other changes to Florida election law, passed one day after a federal appeals court upheld a GOP-led election law that was enacted last year. That law was challenged as racially discriminatory by seeking to suppress Black votes, but a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.

Among other things, it would tighten limits and increase fines for third-party voter registration organizations, impose more restrictions on mail ballots and shift responsibility for determining if a voter is eligible from the state to the individual.

Democrats contended the bill is another step to suppress votes of minorities and economically disadvantaged people to benefit Republicans who already dominate state government and Floridas federal offices.

Were back at it again, making it more difficult for people to register to vote. What we are doing with this bill is unnecessary, said Democratic Rep. Anna Eskamni. Its really frustrating.

Republicans, however, portrayed the measure as guaranteeing a legitimate vote, streamlining election operations and eliminating ambiguity in the law.

There is no more sacred thing than our vote, said GOP Rep. John Snyder. It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Should First Republic fail, it would underscore how the impact of risky decisions at one bank can quickly spread into the broader financial system. It should also provide the impetus for policymakers and regulators to address a systemic problem that has plagued the banking industry from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to the financial crisis of 2008 to the recent turmoil following SVBs demise: incentive structures that encourage excessive risk-taking.

The Federal Reserves top regulator seems to agree. On April 28, 2023, the central banks vice chair for supervision delivered a stinging report on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, blaming its failures on its weak risk management, as well as supervisory missteps.

We are professors of economics who study and teach the history of financial crises. In each of the financial upheavals since the 1980s, the common denominator was risk. Banks provided incentives that encouraged executives to take big risks to boost profits, with few consequences if their bets turned bad. In other words, all carrot and no stick.

One question we are grappling with now is what can be done to keep history from repeating itself and threatening the banking system, economy and jobs of everyday people.

S&L crisis sets the stage

The precursor to the banking crises of the 21st century was the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

The so-called S&L crisis, like the collapse of SVB, began in a rapidly changing interest rate environment. Savings and loan banks, also known as thrifts, provided home loans at attractive interest rates. When the Federal Reserve under Chairman Paul Volcker aggressively raised rates in the late 1970s to fight raging inflation, S&Ls were suddenly earning less on fixed-rate mortgages while having to pay higher interest to attract depositors. At one point, their losses topped US$100 billion.

To help the teetering banks, the federal government deregulated the thrift industry, allowing S&Ls to expand beyond home loans to commercial real estate. S&L executives were often paid based on the size of their institutions assets, and they aggressively lent to commercial real estate projects, taking on riskier loans to grow their loan portfolios quickly.

In the late 1980s, the commercial real estate boom turned bust. S&Ls, burdened by bad loans, failed in droves, requiring the federal government take over banks and delinquent commercial properties and sell the assets to recover money paid to insured depositors. Ultimately, the bailout cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Short-term incentives

The 2008 crisis is another obvious example of incentive structures that encourage risky strategies.

At all levels of mortgage financing from Main Street lenders to Wall Street investment firms executives prospered by taking excessive risks and passing them to someone else. Lenders passed mortgages made to people who could not afford them onto Wall Street firms, which in turn bundled those into securities to sell to investors. It all came crashing down when the housing bubble burst, followed by a wave of foreclosures.

Incentives rewarded short-term performance, and executives responded by taking bigger risks for immediate gains. At the Wall Street investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, profits grew as the firms bundled increasingly risky loans into mortgage-backed securities to sell, buy and hold.

As foreclosures spread, the value of these securities plummeted, and Bear Stearns collapsed in early 2008, providing the spark of the financial crisis. Lehman failed in September of that year, paralyzing the global financial system and plunging the U.S. economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Executives at the banks, however, had already cashed in, and none were held accountable. Researchers at Harvard University estimated that top executive teams at Bear Stearns and Lehman pocketed a combined $2.4 billion in cash bonuses and stock sales from 2000 to 2008.

A familiar ring

That brings us back to Silicon Valley Bank.

Executives tied up the banks assets in long-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, failing to protect against rising interest rates that would undermine the value of these assets. The interest rate risk was particularly acute for SVB, since a large share of depositors were startups, whose finances depend on investors access to cheap money.

When the Fed began raising interest rates last year, SVB was doubly exposed. As startups fundraising slowed, they withdrew money, which required SVB to sell long-term holdings at a loss to cover the withdrawals. When the extent of SVBs losses became known, depositors lost trust, spurring a run that ended with SVBs collapse.

For executives, however, there was little downside in discounting or even ignoring the risk of rising rates. The cash bonus of SVB CEO Greg Becker more than doubled to $3 million in 2021 from $1.4 million in 2017, lifting his total earnings to $10 million, up 60% from four years earlier. Becker also sold nearly $30 million in stock over the past two years, including some $3.6 million in the days leading up to his banks failure.

The impact of the failure was not contained to SVB. Share prices of many midsize banks tumbled. Another American bank, Signature, collapsed days after SVB did.

First Republic survived after it was rescued by a consortium of major banks led by JPMorgan Chase, but the damage was already done. First Republic recently reported that depositors withdrew more than $100 billion in the six weeks following SVBs collapse, and now it appears that it could soon fail too.

The crisis isnt over yet. Banks had over $620 billion in unrealized losses at the end of 2022, largely due to rapidly rising interest rates.

The big picture

So, whats to be done?

We believe the bipartisan bill recently filed in Congress, the Failed Bank Executives Clawback, would be a good start. In the event of a bank failure, the legislation would empower regulators to claw back compensation received by bank executives in the five-year period preceding the failure.

Clawbacks, however, kick in only after the fact. To prevent risky behavior, regulators could require executive compensation to prioritize long-term performance over short-term gains. And new rules could restrict the ability of bank executives to take the money and run, including requiring executives to hold substantial portions of their stock and options until they retire.

The Feds new report on what led to SVBs failure points in this direction. The 102-page report recommends new limits on executive compensation, saying leaders were not compensated to manage the banks risk, as well as stronger stress-testing and higher liquidity requirements.

We believe these are also good steps, but probably not enough.

It comes down to this: Financial crises are less likely to happen if banks and bank executives consider the interest of the entire banking system, not just themselves, their institutions and shareholders.

Alexandra Digby is Adjunct Assistant professor of Economics, University of Rochester; Dollie Davis is Associate Dean of Faculty, Minerva Schools at KGI, and Robson Hiroshi Hatsukami Morgan is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, Minerva Schools at KGI.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ChatGPTs maker said Friday that the artificial intelligence chatbot is available again in Italy after the company met the demands of regulators who temporarily blocked it over privacy concerns.

OpenAI said it fulfilled a raft of conditions that the Italian data protection authority wanted satisfied by an April 30 deadline to have the ban on the AI software lifted.

ChatGPT is available again to our users in Italy, San Francisco-based OpenAI said by email. We are excited to welcome them back, and we remain dedicated to protecting their privacy.

Last month, Italian watchdog, known as Garante, ordered OpenAI to temporarily stop processing Italian users personal information while it investigated a possible data breach. The authority said it didnt want to hamper AIs development but emphasized the importance of following the European Unions strict data privacy rules.

OpenAI said it addressed or clarified the issues raised by the watchdog.

The measures include adding information on its website about how it collects and uses data used to train the algorithms that power ChatGPT, giving European Union users a new form they can use to object to having their data used for training, and adding a tool to verify users ages when signing up.

Some Italian users shared what appeared to be screenshots of the changes, including a menu button asking users to confirm their age and links to the updated privacy policy and training data help page.

OpenAIs email included links to new English-language webpages aimed at satisfying the Italian regulators. A spokeswoman didnt respond immediately when asked whether Italian versions were also available.

Stephen King knows weird when he sees it, and the way Elon Musk has rejiggered Twitters blue check marks, he says, qualifies.

The prolific horror novelist has long used the social network, where he has more than 7 million followers. Hes also long enjoyed a blue check mark on his Twitter profile that reassured Kings fans that his account was his and not fake. But that mark is now controversial due to changes wrought by Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year.

Before Musks takeover, King, like other celebrities, received a blue check for free. But Musk now wants Twitter users to pay for the mark with an $8 monthly subscription.  

That makes little sense to someone like King.

The thing is, you know, not to brag or anything, but I get paid to write. I dont have to pay to do it, King told Slate in an interview published Friday. This whole thing has just sort of devolved into something thats kind of a head-scratcher. It doesnt keep me up at night, but its its weird.

Last week, Twitter began removing legacy blue checksthose granted to notable figures under the old regimein earnest, delivering on a promise made by Musk. 

Soon after, a Block the Blue campaign took off, with participants blocking Twitter users who still had the blue check mark. If they still had one, the reasoning went, they must be paying for it, so how better to express displeasure with the new system than to block them?

Musk criticized the campaign.

Then things got weirder. Seemingly at random, Twitter restored the blue check marks of some celebrities who had lost them, without those people asking or paying. 

At first, there seemed to be just a few examples. Musk tweeted that hed personally paid for three: King, NBA star LeBron James, and Star Trek alum William Shatner. 

But the number soon increased, making it harder to assume that anyone with a blue check had actually paid. King tweeted on April 20: My Twitter account says Ive subscribed to Twitter Blue. I havent. 

Musk replied, Youre welcome. 

Last November, Musk called King one of most creative people on Earth, adding, While I may not agree with everything he says, I do actually want to hear it.

 And in the Slate interview, King expressed admiration for Musks accomplishments elsewhere. I think that Elon Musk made the whole electric car stuff serious. he said. The Tesla is a great car. I own one.

Understandably, some celebrities who didnt want a blue check following the changes but received one anyway were upset. Even deceased celebrities began receiving the mark for free, among them NBA star Kobe Bryant and TV host Anthony Bourdain.

Twitter could face legal challenges, since the unwanted check marks might now be considered a false or misleading representation of the facts.

Presumably when consumers see that the celebrity has purchased a product, theyd be more apt to buy that product as well. The fact that its untrue could create problems,  Joseph Lawlors, an attorney with Haynes and Boone who specializes in intellectual property matters, told Bloomberg Law. A lot of these people really protect their images, so I wouldnt be surprised if theyre already sending demand letters.

The check mark has become a source of confusion and a poisonous brand for Twitter, added Santa Clara University technology and IP law professor Eric Goldman. Its unclear how they salvage it.

Goldman noted Musk seems unfazed by the legal implication. That he thinks this is funny shows how little regard he has for the legal consequences of his actions, he said. He gets away with it mostly. But I dont think Twitter will be a functional entity by the time the court finds on these data points.

Interest in Twitter alternative Bluesky, created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has surged of late, partly due to anger over Musks changes to the verification marks.

King, however, plans to stick around on Twitter, despite the chaos.

The thing is, if everybody who doesnt approve of the way things are going, if we all leave, then its just like walking off the field, he told Slate. No, I cant see myself leaving Twitter.

But, he added, I dont tweet as much as I used to, and I dont look at the site as much as I used to.

The number of applications for visas used in the technology industry soared for a second straight year, raising serious concerns that some are manipulating the system to gain an unfair advantage, authorities said Friday.

There were 780,884 applications for H-1B visas in this years computer-generated lottery, up 61% from 483,927 last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a message to stakeholders. Last years haul was up 57% from 308,613 applications the year before.

Each year, up to 85,000 people are selected for H-1B visas, a mainstay for technology giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.

Last year, the government began requiring workers who won the lottery to sign affidavits stating they didnt try to game the system by working with others to file multiple bids under different company names, even if there was no underlying employment offer. By winning at least once, these companies could market their services to technology companies that wanted to fill positions but didnt have visas, effectively becoming labor contractors.

The large number of eligible registrations for beneficiaries with multiple eligible registrations much larger than in previous years has raised serious concerns that some may have tried to gain an unfair advantage by working together to submit multiple registrations on behalf of the same beneficiary. This may have unfairly increased their chances of selection, the agency wrote.

The agency said it has undertaken extensive fraud investigations based on lottery submissions from the last two years, denied some petitions and is in the process of referring some cases to federal prosecutors for possible crimes.

The number of registrations tied to people who applied more than once rose to 408,891 this year from 165,180 last year and 90,143 the year before.

We remain committed to deterring and preventing abuse of the registration process, and to ensuring only those who follow the law are eligible to file an H-1B cap petition, the agency said.

H-1B visas, which are used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, have been a lightning rod in the immigration debate, with critics saying they are used to undercut U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. They are issued for three years and can be extended another three years.

Technology companies say H-1Bs are critical for hard-to-fill positions even as they have had to lay off workers in other areas. As the number of applications have soared in the last two years, major companies have seen winning lottery submissions dwindle.

Andrew Greenfield, a partner at the law firm Fragomen, which represents major technology companies, said the increase in applications is bizarre given widespread layoffs in the industry. His clients had a roughly 15% success rate on lottery entries this year, down from about 30% last year.

Its devastating, Greenfield said. Our clients are legitimate employers that are just unable to source enough talent in the United States to fill all their hiring needs.

Fraud, as outlined by U.S. authorities, may be driving up applications, with companies under different names but the same ownership submitting entries on behalf of the same person, Greenfield said, but there may be other reasons. Some applicants may convince different, independently-owned companies to sponsor them in the lottery, which is perfectly legal. Some companies may overestimate their labor demands when they enter the lottery in March.

The computer-generated lottery in March selected 110,791 winners for the 85,000 slots. Companies have until June 30 to confirm they plan to go ahead with hiring. If confirmations fall short of 85,000, the government may hold another lottery to fill remaining slots.

A few years ago, I planned to leave a generous tip for the waiter after my first meal at a restaurant in Italy. I had found the service first-rate. But my companion said, Nobody tips here.

What! I exclaimed. Why?  

She immediately explained that in Italy, as indeed throughout most of Europe, tipping in a restaurant is neither mandatory nor expected. Restaurant economics are different. Waiters are paid at least the minimum wage and service fees are reflected in the bill. As a result, tips are seldom dispensed, and then only for the most exceptional service. This cultural custom prevails with cab drivers, too.

Now I live in Italy year-round. And luckily enough, I appear to have left the U.S. just in time when it comes to the socioeconomic pressure to tip. Tips for both goods and services are requested and expected more frequently than ever before. The share of remote transactions that offered the availability of online tipping grew from 43.4% in February 2020 to 74.5% in February this year, according to Square.

Further, tips are getting bigger and bigger. The typical 10% tip of the 1950s swelled to 15% in the 1970s and 1980s and currently ranges from 15% to 25%. A Creditcards.com survey last year found the average consumer tipped 21% last year. Some dubbed this phenomenon tipflation.

Tipping evidently originated in Europe in the 17th century, most likely in the taverns of Tudor England. Shortly after the Civil War, wealthy Americans traveling abroad then imported the practice to the United States.

Today, some American visitors might feel relieved at learning they can save a few euros. They can also conserve the energy otherwise expended in calculating a percentage of the bill suitable to leave behind.

Conversely, I found this revelation downright disappointing. Im certifiably pro-tipping. A tip grants me a means for self-expression and the exercise of consumer discretion. I get the opportunity to evaluate the service, assign an economic value to the results, and reward the provider accordingly. Tipping, especially tipping big, still makes me feel like a big shot, all the more so given soaring inflation and how the hospitality industry is still reeling from the pandemic.

Eating out in the United States, mostly in New York City, I closely monitored restaurant service. Was the waiter at least marginally friendly? Was the order delivered correctly? Did he ask mid-meal about our level of satisfaction? After a meal with family, friends, or colleagues, I relished the debates about tipping that ensue around the table. Has the waiter earned 10%, 15% or 20%? Or should we stiff him?   

I dont pinch pennies to signal my displeasure when it comes to gratuities. Rather, my inclination is always to tip well. If the service is excellent but my fellow diners tender a tip that comes up short by my standards, I occasionally sneaked back to the table to lay out another few bucks. One likes to see justice done.

Living in Italy now, I miss the opportunity to tip in a restaurant that Ive long accepted as a given. More broadly, I worry that waiters and waitresses are being robbed of the financial incentive to excel. The whole business feels vaguely anti-entrepreneurial, even anti-free enterprise.

The other night, I dined out in the province of Puglia, where I live, and received exemplary service. Im still an American, so certain habits die hard. Oddly enough, a life without tipping would make me feel not only homesick but also somehow shortchanged.

So I left a tip. After all, it was nobodys business but mine.

Bob Brody is a consultant, essayist, and the author of the memoir Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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