By Zoe Sottile, Sara Smart, Sarah Hutter, CNN

(CNN) — It took just 30 minutes for Brytney Quinn to lose everything.

On Tuesday, the mother was going through the motions of a normal day in southeast Georgia’s Brantley County: getting her children ready for school as her husband prepared for work.

But around noon, multiple firetrucks and police cars swarmed their neighborhood, urging them to evacuate. A massive wildfire – believed to have been sparked by a children’s party balloon landing on a power line – was fast approaching, primed to destroy more homes than any wildfire in the state’s history.

She grabbed her daughter and her pets and left the house around 12:20 p.m.

Around half an hour later, she checked her surveillance cameras and saw her home in flames.

“My house is gone,” Quinn said tearfully in a video she shared with CNN showing the burned remnants of her house.

The Highway 82 Fire that engulfed Quinn’s home has devoured thousands of acres in south Georgia, destroying dozens of buildings and forcing hundreds to evacuate from their homes. It’s just one of several dangerous wildfires burning across Georgia and Florida, fostered by the worst spring drought conditions on record.

And Quinn isn’t the only one facing huge losses from the massive blazes. The Highway 82 Fire and the larger Pineland Road Fire have together destroyed more than 120 homes, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday, when around 4,000 homes were still in the evacuation zone.

“We got the two most dangerous, biggest problematic fires anywhere in the United States within really just a very small area that we’re having to fight,” he said.

Glowing red flames raced through the dry vegetation of southern Georgia, whipping up massive clouds of dark smoke that hung heavily over the region. The fires left behind the desiccated husks of vehicles and homes and blanketed neighborhoods with ash.

Residents found themselves clutching medications and family heirlooms before racing away from their homes, unsure if there’ll be anything left to come back to.

Across the state line, a volunteer firefighter died after a “medical emergency” while fighting the Old Dixie Highway Fire in Hilliard, Florida, according to the sheriff’s office.

For Quinn, the losses are devastating.

“My babies lost their home and the only place they felt safe,” she said. “Now we have nothing to go to but rubbish … how are we going to recover from this?”

‘We’ve just got to start over’

Like Quinn, grandparents Elizabeth and Tony Spear had just minutes to evacuate from their Brantley County home Tuesday.

“Firetrucks came down the road and said we had to leave immediately,” Elizabeth Spear recalled. “I threw a few things in a bag — our medicine, cellphone, charger, just very minimum — and went flying out the door, jumped in our little car and just left.”

Originally thinking they were safe, the Spears didn’t plan to evacuate.

It wasn’t until Thursday that they returned to the site where their house of 17 years once stood. Instead of seeing their family home, they were faced with ashen land, a destroyed shed and two burned-out vehicles.

“All of my grandma’s jewelry was lost and things from her mom who passed,” their granddaughter Ashleigh Anderson said. “All of their possessions were burned. They were only able to bring about two pairs of clothes.”

The couple also lost three pets in the blaze: two chihuahuas and a black lab.

“We lost everything,” Elizabeth Spear said. “It’s just total ashes.”

The Spears are striving to center their faith and love as they look to rebuild what they lost.

“It’s just stuff. You can re

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN

(CNN) — Just looking at the raw numbers, less than 1% of filers have been audited by the IRS in recent tax years. Based on the latest data available, for example, in tax year 2021 the IRS pursued a mere 0.3% of filers overall.

The audit rate has been higher for select groups of taxpayers based on certain characteristics – like the amount or types of income they report or specific tax breaks they claim. But even there, with very few exceptions, audits typically affect less than 10% of any given group and often a far smaller share – smaller as in, again, less than 1%.

But a lot has changed for the IRS in the past year.

A large percentage of employees were laid off or resigned, including many highly experienced in areas of enforcement and complex audits. Just over a quarter of both tax examiners and revenue agents were among them, according to a July 2025 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

And a majority of funding for enforcement promised under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was rescinded and the Trump administration is seeking to cut IRS funding further next year.

At the same time, the agency has been modernizing its antiquated systems and increasing its use of AI in a number of areas, including enforcement. “The IRS is using artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to identify high-risk areas of non-compliance and fraud with greater accuracy,” IRS CEO Frank Bisignano said in written testimony before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month. Among his stated goals for the agency: “Advancing a strong compliance agenda while improving collections beyond historical norms.”

How will the combination of these big changes affect any filer’s chance of being audited in the coming years?

It’s not clear, for several reasons, not least of which are a) whether the technology will be used responsibly and strategically, as former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel put it; and b) whether there will be a sufficient number of experienced IRS employees to successfully select and audit returns that AI identifies as potentially suspect.

AI’s promise of better-targeted audits

Ideally, AI will help keep the IRS off the back of perfectly compliant tax filers – thereby reducing the rate of so-called “no change” audits. Those are audits undertaken by the IRS which result in no revenue raised because, well, it found nothing wrong.

And it can help better identify anyone underreporting their income or otherwise violating tax rules.

“It will make the IRS more efficient in finding noncompliance,” said Barry Johnson, former chief data and analytics officer at the IRS who, among other things, oversaw how the agency used AI.

AI has the capacity to search and identify patterns in tax returns that would take humans and the IRS’ older statistical models a lot longer to unearth, if ever. It can identify returns with anomalies, which might indicate anything from a filer mistakenly underreporting income to committing outright fraud.

“AI gives us a forensic edge to select the right returns for audit,” Werfel said. “It’s almost like purchasing night-vision goggles. They help figure out which returns to select, and where the tax evasion is.”

How AI may raise audit rates

If used responsibly, he added, AI could lead to more taxpayers with unpaid balances being contacted.

By responsibly, he means that the IRS will have to balance “the use of AI with a human review – double checking and

Por Alicia Wallace, CNN

Los estadounidenses siguen sintiéndose mal respecto de la economía y temen que la guerra entre Estados Unidos e Israel con Irán siga empujando los precios al alza.

La lectura final de abril del índice de confianza del consumidor de la Universidad de Michigan se ubicó en 49,8, una leve mejora frente al informe preliminar de principios de mes, pero aún en el nivel más bajo de la historia en registros, que se remontan a 1952.

“Después de que se anunciara el alto el fuego de dos semanas y los precios de la gasolina cedieran un poco, la confianza recuperó una porción modesta de sus pérdidas de comienzos de mes”, escribió en un comunicado Joanne Hsu, directora de las Encuestas de Consumidores de la universidad.

El conflicto en Medio Oriente ha sacudido la economía global y ha dejado a los estadounidenses lidiando con precios de la gasolina marcadamente más altos, un repunte de la inflación y una creciente incertidumbre sobre sus finanzas.

Las finanzas personales actuales empeoraron un 9 %, en abril, y cerca de la mitad de los consumidores encuestados mencionaron espontáneamente que los altos precios estaban erosionando su nivel de vida, señaló Hsu.

Las expectativas de inflación a un año de los consumidores se dispararon este mes, al subir a 4,7 %, desde 3,8 %, en marzo. Fue el mayor salto mensual desde abril de 2025, un mes en el que el presidente Donald Trump anunció un amplio paquete de aranceles elevados para muchos países.

La guerra y sus consecuencias económicas llegan en un momento en que los estadounidenses ya estaban afrontando un alto costo de vida tras el repunte inflacionario posterior a la pandemia y años en los que los precios subieron mucho más rápido de lo habitual.

La confianza se mantiene apenas por debajo de los niveles vistos en junio de 2022, cuando la inflación alcanzó un máximo de cuatro décadas.

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GOLETA, Calif. (KEYT) - It was a full house at Sovine Gymnasium as Dos Pueblos High School recognized 15 student-athletes that have committed to play their chosen sport at four-year colleges.

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Hernán Quintas

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