WALTERBORO, S.C. (NewsNation) — South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial will continue Tuesday after an emotional day in the courtroom on Monday.

Defense attorneys questioned the way state agents collected and analyzed evidence in the shooting deaths of Murdaugh’s wife and son.

Murdaugh, 54, is standing trial on two counts of murder in the shootings of his wife and son at their Colleton County home and hunting lodge on June 7, 2021. His wife, Maggie, 52, was shot several times with a rifle; their son Paul, 22, was shot twice with a shotgun near kennels on the property. Murdaugh faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted.

Over the first four days of testimony, prosecutors have mostly called officers and crime scene technicians to present evidence to the jury that investigators will likely later explain in more detail. They described their case as a puzzle in last week’s opening statement.

NewsNation will stream the trial. You can watch it on this page when it begins at 9:30 a.m. ET.

Jurors watched video of investigators searching the hunting lodge where they believe Murdaugh killed his wife and son.

The video — dated June 8, 2021, a day after Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were killed — showed a large gun rack with several long guns stored inside, as investigators searched the home.

In an interview played Monday, Murdaugh spoke to the state agent at his brother’s house for about an hour three days after the killings. Murdaugh’s lawyer was close by.

Prosecutors paused the video several times to give State Law Enforcement Division Senior Special Agent Jeff Croft a chance to emphasize some of Murdaugh’s comments. At one point, Murdaugh said his wife was home hours before the killings when he and his son returned from riding around the property. Later in the interview, Murdaugh could be heard saying “It’s just so bad,” before the unclear comment that Croft said sounded like Murdaugh was implying he had killed his son.

In court, Murdaugh appeared to shake his head no when Croft said what he heard.

Murdaugh also broke into sobs on the 2021 recording after mentioning a small disagreement he had with his wife over visiting her family.

“She was a wonderful girl and a wonderful wife. And she was a great mother,” Murdaugh said.

Murdaugh continued to rock and dab his eyes during more graphic testimony, including when Harpootlian showed a photo of his wife’s body to ask Worley if there could have been a shoeprint on his wife’s calf that was not formally documented as the scene was examined.

However, Murdaugh’s displays of emotion at his double murder trial have drawn scrutiny.

“If you think Alex Murdaugh did it, then everything he does is all part of the massive game that he’s playing,” Matt Harris, co-host of the “Influence: The Murdaugh Family Murders” podcast, said Monday night during an appearance on NewsNation’s “Rush Hour.” “If you think he’s innocent, then you think these are legitimate, regular tears.”

Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to the murders and, if convicted, faces life in prison. The trial is expected to last another two weeks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

But – Getting sacked from a job exempting a person from conscription automatically makes the former worker a potential draftee.

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On Feb. 1, Visa chief executive Al Kelly will hand over the reins at the credit card giant to Ryan McInerney, Visa’s current president and move to a position as executive chairman of its board. Under Kelly, who has been CEO for six years, Visa has increased its revenue by 90%, more than doubled the average daily number of transactions and grew its employee base by 85%, according to the company’s figures. But the company is facing an increasing number of challenges, including new regulatory pressures, compliance issues and legal battles. In 2022, as the country emerged from the shutdowns brought on by the pandemic, Visa had a particularly eventful year, with proposed legislation seeking to provide more competition in the industry, new gun store purchase protocols that raised the ire of Second Amendment activists, and a ruling from a judge about its role in facilitating questionable practices in the online porn industry.

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“We’re not moral arbiters. We’re not lawmakers,” Kelly tells TIME. “My view is that I speak out when it directly impacts the company. When it doesn’t, it’s not my position to speak out.” However, there have been cases, like the killing of George Floyd, that have prompted Kelly to be more vocal.

Kelly spoke with TIME about how he has navigated these issues over the past year, and reflected on his tenure leading the credit card giant.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

(For coverage of the future of work, visit TIME.com/charter and sign up for the free Charter newsletter.)

In March, both MasterCard and Visa suspended operations in Russia. Has that made any difference to your bottom line or the situation in Russia?

It was a big decision for us. Russia was our third largest market in the world—Russia plus Ukraine was 4% of our revenue. We don’t have any more revenue in Russia. Our hope is we’ll make it up in different places over time, and our business in Ukraine has actually held up quite well. We offered our Russian employees a job outside of Russia with the company and about three quarters of them took us up on that, which is great. They’re doing other jobs, mostly out of Dubai. We also offered all of our Ukrainian employees passage out of Ukraine, and about half left. It was not a very hard decision, but a decision that even till today has a lot of implications for us as a company. I think it’s had some effect on Russia. I think it’s definitely hurt them in terms of their citizens getting a good option for spending outside of Russia.

In July, a new bill was introduced into the U.S. Senate and House, which suggests that some people in D.C. believe that the big credit card companies are stifling competition by limiting where transactions can be processed. Is there enough competition in the credit business?

Absolutely. I’ve been in and around credit card businesses since 1997 and there’s more competition than there’s ever been; there’s more ways to pay than there’s ever been. The underlying thesis that there’s not enough competition is flawed.

Except that Visa’s net profit margin is 51%. And the U.S. does have the highest swipe fees in the world—

Well, every market in the world is unique. This happens to be a market where reward points, for example, are extremely valued. And the amount of credit extended in this market is about as large as you’ll see anywhere else. It’s the market with the most co-branded cards, and with the most benefits available to consumers on credit cards. One of the ways those things are funded is through swipe fees. If there’s more incentives for people to use cards, that’s good for the entire ecosystem, including for merchants, who will almost always earn higher sales on a credit card than they ever would from the somebody buying using cash.

And the profit margin?

We’re in a technology business, where we get incredible economies of scale so that’s why our margins will tend to be higher; I don’t have a lot of extra technology cost until I reach a threshold where we have to buy a new server. The reality is that we get a very small yield on every transaction. Our profit margin is tied to the dynamics of not just our revenue, which comes from that yield, but the fact that our expense base is such that we get economies of scale from our technology. There’s enough things the government can work on without getting in the middle of price controls of the private sector.

If Visa eliminated swipe fees, others wouldn’t be able to have their rewards. But doesn’t that mean people who struggle financially are paying for those with fancy cards?

Absolutely not. Back in 2010, when two networks were required on debit cards, that was the end of free checking. Debit cards that had rewards: gone. And every study that we’ve done suggests that merchants haven’t passed a single penny of savings on to consumers. That’s exactly what will happen if this happens with credit cards as well.

Also in July, a judge declined to dismiss a case against Visa for servicing payments that could have facilitated sex trafficking on Pornhub. What’s your position on this ruling?

We think the judge’s judgment was wrong. We were not a party to that [case] at all. That said, if what’s alleged in the complaint is correct, it’s abhorrent. Obviously, no children should be involved in anything has anything to do with sexual exploitation. But we have no idea what happened in this particular case back eight or nine years ago, and we had nothing to do with it. That was our case to the court; the judge disagreed. So we move forward from here.

At the beginning of last year, after Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about Pornhub and its owner MindGeek, Visa did withdraw the ability for customers to use its cards on that site—

That’s correct. We withdrew it for user posted content, but not the professional aspect of the site.

What about TrafficJunky [the subsidiary of MindGeek that sells advertising]?

One of the judgments that came out of the judge’s ruling that mentioned TrafficJunky as being associated with his decision, and we decided, in the spirit of being as careful as we can, to suspend TrafficJunky from acceptance on our networks. By the way, most of the advertising that appears on the sites are things like products for men to grow hair. I haven’t read the Nick Kristof article so I can’t make a judgment. We would never support something that was illegal.

So you haven’t looked into these claims at all, that people have against Pornhub?

First of all, we don’t have a relationship with Pornhub, or Mindgeek, just to be clear, it’s through acquirers [the institutions that connect merchants to credit card companies], and they have looked into it and have attested to us that they have not identified any cases where there is an issue.

You appear to be quite a devoted Catholic. Is this not a problem for you personally, that you might inadvertently be funding this kind of practice?

I run a company. So I leave my personal feelings to myself. We’re not moral arbiters. We’re not lawmakers, we follow the law of the countries in which we do business.

But you are sort of moral arbiters—you withdrew from Russia. That was a moral decision.

It also was driven by the fact that it was getting extremely difficult to operate there.

Is it so bad to be a moral arbiter? You wrote a blog post in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd about how we as a country can’t allow this kind of thing to continue and you made some commitments about what you would do at Visa to do your part; doesn’t it feel like that’s a little bit of moral arbiting?

My view is that I speak out when it directly impacts the company. When it doesn’t, it’s not my position to speak out.

How did the death of George Floyd directly impact the company?

The death of George Floyd was yet another unfortunate clear sign of Black people being treated poorly. We’re a company that believes deeply in diversity; we have a great deal of diversity in our company. And I felt strongly in that particular case it warranted me speaking out.

At the time, you committed to increase the number of underrepresented people at the level of vice president or above and within Visa overall, focusing first on Black employees. How did that go?

I made the judgment that I didn’t want to write a check. So the very first thing we did was announce this Visa Black Scholars and Jobs Program. We’ve got two classes of young people who are studying at 45 different universities in the U.S., they each have a mentor and we partially pay their tuition. And upon graduation, if they’re willing and have done their part, they’ll have a job.

And I decided we’re going to make a real statement about the need to increase underrepresented minorities, both Black as well as Latinx. On both of those metrics we are running ahead of our targets of 50%. I look at these metrics each month, we have a quarterly business review. It’s something we take extraordinarily seriously as a company.

How have you dealt with what people call the pipeline problem?

There are pipeline issues for sure. For instance, California is a state that is 10% Black. We made a commitment about six or eight months ago to put 1000 jobs in Atlanta, Georgia, which is a state that’s about 43% Black. We made a commitment to increase office size in Washington D.C., which I think it’s closer to 50% Black. Sometimes you have to move outside your comfort zone and look to different types of solutions.

In September a new merchant licensing code was introduced that would require credit card companies to give a particular code for gun purchases. Do you support or oppose that idea?

I don’t think the code was necessary. But it doesn’t matter; the code is in place. It’s now an international standard and we adopt international standards.

Some two dozen Republican Attorneys General sent you a letter—

I’ve heard from everybody. I don’t think there’s a senator or member of the House or attorney general in the United States I haven’t heard from. I’m telling them that we will follow the law. Guns are allowed in the United States and we would fully expect that anybody who wants to buy a gun should be able to buy that that gun provided all the other checks are done. On top of that, we’re telling them that we don’t collect [that level of data] for consumers. So if [Visa’s Chief Communications Officer] K.C. Kavanagh goes into a gun store and buys three thermoses and a tent, and you go in and buy a rifle and five rounds of ammunition, all I know is you both went to the same gun store. I know what gun store, I know when you went, and I know how much money you spent. But I don’t know what you bought.

In the second quarter of 2022, the number of credit cards in the U.S. topped 500 million for the first time, up from approximately 465 million according to TransUnion. A lot of the big jumps were in applications among Gen Z and subprime borrowers. What do you think is behind this increase?

I think what’s happening is that during the pandemic, people got very, very shy about using cash. And some merchants stopped accepting cash. Many more people certainly went to look for credit and debit cards as an alternative. Additionally, millions of people around the world during the pandemic went to shop on e-commerce for the first time and many who shopped on e-commerce went to different categories that they had never shopped on for the first time. I haven’t done the research, but it does not surprise me that you would have seen an uptick because of the acceleration of cash digitization that happened during the pandemic.

Is it safe to say that, in general, the pandemic was good for the credit card business?

The pandemic had one relatively significant positive and one relatively significant negative for the credit card business and they probably cancel each other out. The relatively significant positive was this cash digitization and people shopping at home and saying, Oh, my gosh, I need a credit or debit card. On the other hand, travel around the world shut down—air travel, hotel travel, day to day travel, sales conferences, weddings, charity galas —none of those things happened, all of which also generate a hell of a lot of payment volume for us.

Do you think that cash is coming to an end?

Cash will be around for quite a long time. There’s still $15 billion of cash spent annually by consumers around the world. But I think it will continue to go down—and cash by the way, is extraordinarily expensive. It’s a very expensive option for merchants. It costs a lot of money to count cash, transport cash, track it, safeguard it.

What do you regard is your signature achievement?

The job of a CEO probably comes down to a few things. One is putting a fantastic team and culture in place, putting a clear and winning strategy in place, and figuring out how to continue to grow the pie, as opposed to necessarily just market share within a fixed pie. I think that we’ve got a very, very strong group of people; for the first time in Visa’s history, we have an internal person succeeding the CEO, and that’s certainly a great source of pride for me. Below that, we have, I think, a very clear strategy, which is to drive consumer payments around the world, drive new flows, and then sell value added services to our clients.

As you look back on your tenure here, is there anything that you have any regrets about?

I don’t have regrets. I certainly have made mistakes. I expect people to take risks and therefore we’re not going to always get it right. There’s certainly things where I wish I moved faster on something. Probably many CEOs feel that way looking back. I’m also aware that success in business is a team sport.

When looking for recommendations on what to buy, popular social media influencers and celebrities are always around to peddle the hottest item of the moment. But some may reconsider their spending habits after looking through TikTok’s “de-influencing” campaign, which shares what viral products are not actually worth buying.

The app’s “deinfluencing” tag with over 50 million views, is a hub to thousands of videos of TikTokers debunking the influencer allure of cult-like internet products, particularly in the beauty realm. From highly coveted Dior makeup products to Olaplex’s shampoos and conditioners, these videos focus on popular products that “de-influencers believe” are simply overhyped. This follows the similar “anti-haul” niche of YouTube that calls out the products creators refuse to buy.

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The growing trend is a direct response to the endless deluge of products that beauty and lifestyle influencers insist you simply must have. According to the internet, at the moment, you should own a Stanley Cup drink tumbler, an ice roller for your face, shapewear from Kim Kardahian’s SKIMS line, and some tinned fish in your kitchen cupboard. These are subject to change next month, or next week—depending on trends.

Oftentimes influencer recommendation videos are sponsored by the company behind the products. Influencers can also get paid from affiliate links or codes if viewers buy via the links they share. The arrangement is so successful that the influencer marketing industry reached over $16 billion last year, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.

Celebrities have caught onto their fans willingness to purchase their products, which has fueled a multibillion dollar beauty business where users are willing to spend money on brands like JLO Beauty for Jennifer Lopez’s glow or on SKIMS for Kardashian’s hourglass figure. New products from these lines release fast and often. The Kardashians alone have launched at least 15 products ranging from candles to pajamas to skincare from their personal brands in the last two months alone. That doesn’t include the other non-Kardashian products that are promoted on their pages.

Although it’s clear that followers are willing to spend their money on these recommendations, there’s been a growing conversation about the integrity of the reviews influencers give—and whether they would actually use many of the products themselves. Most recently rising TikTok star Mikayla Nogueira caught backlash from online viewers who accused her of wearing false lashes during a mascara review in a sponsored video.

“We only need so many bronzers and lipsticks,” says Elle Grey, a 25-year-old content creator who is participating in the “de-influencing” trend on her ‘Basic Of Course’ TikTok page, which has 10,000 followers. “A lot of these items specifically within the beauty and fashion industry follow these really quick micro-trends where you likely already have an existing perfectly good substitute for that product.” Grey believes that’s particularly true for of-the-moment products like Charlotte Tilbury makeup, Target throw pillows, and most things on influencers’ Amazon storefronts, where they make commission every time someone buys.

@basicofcourse

you do need plants tho #deinfluencing #trendcycle #amazonstorefront #sustainablefashion

♬ Right Back Where We Started From – Maxine Nightingale

Other influencers often prioritize monetization over authenticity and selectivity in their reviews, says Grey. Grey has gotten offered free products from brands in exchange for an online review in the past, but says she only agrees to share products from brands she’s already used and enjoys—or has tried and genuinely likes. Even then, it’s not the priority of her content. “I love my audience, but I don’t personally know them, so I may not know what’s best for their lifestyle,” she says. “I think you should go to your close network first like friends and ask them for recommendations, rather than random girls on the internet.” Grey recommends going to influencers for other reasons. “I enjoy watching influencers for their life interests and the hobbies that they have, rather than viewing them as a source for shopping inspiration.”

The sheer volume of content many people consume on TikTok exacerbates the trend of influencers pushing more and more new products. The average user is spending over an hour-and-a-half on TikTok daily. Unlike other platforms like YouTube that skew towards longer-form videos, TikTok’s 60-second style ForYouPage gives users substantially more opportunities to encounter sponsored content.

But as much as Gen-Z loves TikTok, many members of the generation also care about sustainability and desire to reduce their consumption and spending patterns. A study conducted by First Insight found that the majority of the generation prefers to buy from sustainable brands and are likely to make purchases based on personal, social, and environmental principles.

Many on the internet are embracing the trend, calling out its helpfulness with overconsumption.

Others are pointing out the irony of the trend still using “influencing” methods to “de-influence,” especially when suggesting alternative dupe products as replacement. For some, the “de-influence” videos aren’t enough to sway away from their purchasing habits.

Online creator Grey says she’s gotten responses from viewers questioning whether her “de-influencing” posts will impact her opportunities as an influencer in the future. “I would say quite the opposite,” she says. “I think it makes the value of a true recommendation that comes from the heart so much more powerful, rather than me just pedaling out a salad spinner or the latest lipstick.”

You already know that you should be talking about sex in your relationship. When you’re up late at night, Googling your most intimate and embarrassing challenges, it’s the piece of advice you always see at the end of every article. Your sex drives are wildly mismatched? Talk about it. You’ve been in a dry spell for so long you can’t remember the last time you were intimate? Talk about it. You want your partner to stop doing that thing in the bedroom you secretly hate? You guessed it: talk about it. The idea that we need to talk about the myriad and complex dynamics that crop up in our relationships is nothing new. But the typical “just talk about it” advice often ends there, leaving us with a bigger problem – how do we actually have these kinds of conversations?

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I speak from personal experience. As I was training to become a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex therapy, my husband Xander and I faced orgasm issues, mismatched sex drives, and performance anxiety. Despite my chosen career path, we struggled to talk about our own sex life. The few conversations I did muster up the courage to initiate went terribly, which only served to make the topic of sex feel even more fraught. Through years of trial and error, we finally started to figure it out in our own relationship, and I tested and honed these techniques with my clients. I discovered that it was not only possible to effectively resolve sexual issues through communication, but surprisingly fun to talk about sex.

Xander and I wrote Sex Talks to create a practical and playful, step-by-step guide to talking about sex, all in the service of creating deeper intimacy. Because sex is such a huge topic, we believe there are five crucial Sex Talks every couple needs to have: 1. Acknowledgement (“Sex is a thing, and we have it.”) 2. Connection (“What do we need to feel connected to each other?”) 3. Desire (“What do we each need to get turned on?”) 4. Pleasure (“What do we each need to feel good?”) and 5. Exploration (“What should we try next?”).

Most of us struggle with communication in many areas of our relationship, so of course talking about a particularly vulnerable topic like sex is going to feel even harder. To help these discussions be more productive and less awkward, we came up with the Golden Rules of Sex Talks.

1. Name Your Intentions

People get pretty nervous about communication, especially when it involves sex. Those nerves lead us to rehearse conversations in our head, imagining dozens of horrible scenarios of how they can go wrong. But here’s what you need to remind yourself: you have good intentions and positive goals driving your desire to communicate. Remind yourself of these intentions often, especially before approaching your partner. Take a deep breath and tell yourself, “I’m initiating this conversation because I love my partner and I know we’re capable of a smoking-hot sex life.” Giving yourself this pep talk can soothe your anxiety and help you go into the conversation feeling stronger.

Read More: Love Languages Actually Do Improve Your Relationship

It can also be helpful to set intentions with your partner before starting a conversation. Xander and I start any serious chat by asking each other, “What’s your intention in having this conversation?” That way, even if things wind up feeling weird or uncomfortable, there’s an understanding that you’re working together toward a more intimate relationship. Keep in mind that your intentions don’t need to be complicated. They can be as simple as “We want to have a calm and loving conversation.”

2. See Yourselves as a Team

One of the best things you can do for your relationship is think of you and your partner as teammates, working together against whatever is getting in the way of having the sex life of your wildest dreams. No one partner is the problem. You are two individuals who brought history, complications, and ever-evolving needs to your relationship, and your task is to spread all of it out in front of you and say, “OK, how do we make sense of this together?”

Give your teammate the benefit of the doubt during your Sex Talks. If things start to get heated, it can be easy to feel like your partner is purposefully trying to hurt or upset you. And they’re probably going to be thinking the same thing about you. Challenge yourself to think about the good intentions that your partner has in every situation. (That’s why reminding each other of your intentions right before a conversation can be so powerful.) Ask yourself, “What positive feeling does my partner want from their words or actions—even if they’re going about things in an unskillful manner?”

3. Start Softly

Research has found that the way you start a conversation predicts how it will end. In fact, relationship expert John Gottman is famous for being able to predict the likelihood of a couple’s divorce by observing just the first three minutes of a conflict discussion. The way that you start conversations is that important.

When it comes to having your Sex Talks, make sure the conditions are right. Don’t try to talk to your partner when they’re cooking dinner, when they need to leave in 10 minutes to get to a doctor’s appointment, or when they’re obviously stressed about a looming work deadline. Check in with yourself, too. There’s a helpful acronym that you can use here: HALT. If you feel Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, take a moment to address those feelings before talking to your partner. Only initiate conversations when you both have the space and energy to properly have them. For instance, I have a bad habit of ambushing Xander with complaints when we’re already swamped, harping on him for leaving all his beard trimmings in the sink as we’re running out the door to take the pugs to the vet. It’s essentially setting him up for failure, since there’s no way he can address or even fully listen to a request, and it leaves both of us feeling combative.

Read More: The Way Couples Split Chores Can Improve Relationships, According to a New Study

Another way to start softly is to initiate any big conversations by labeling your baggage. Acknowledge the challenges you or your partner have faced or are currently facing when it comes to having a healthy relationship with intimacy. For example, “I know we were both raised Catholic and are still carrying a lot of shame about sex.” This reminds you both that your difficulties aren’t your fault, that there are understandable reasons why you’re struggling, and that you’re a team.

Here’s a trick you can use to soften your delivery. Imagine that you’re talking to a friend instead of your partner. Most of us listen to our friends more closely, and we have lower expectations and more patience for them. We tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and we don’t get as triggered by what they say or do. Imagine one of your best friends in front of you when you’re talking to your partner, and watch your communication transform.

Here are a few other ways to start softly:

• Keep your tone calm and even.
• Be aware of your facial expressions and body language, and try to convey relaxation.
• If you’re open to it, hold hands or touch while you talk. A little bit of physical contact reminds you of your love for each other.
• Make sure your first few sentences are particularly kind and open.

4. Use “I” Language

You’ve probably heard this one before; it’s an oldie but a goodie. Instead of saying “You did this” or “You did that,” talk about your personal reactions and experiences using “I,” “me,” and “my.” So instead of, “You never want to spend time with me,” you say, “I’ve been feeling lonely lately, and I’ve been wanting to feel more connected to you.” If you’re feeling stuck, here’s an easy framework to use: “I feel X, and I need Y.” Notice how that worked in the prior example—I’m feeling lonely and I need more connection.

Using “I” language cuts defensiveness off at the pass. If you tell your partner, “You did this,” it’s going to feel like an attack, and it’s likely to trigger an argumentative response like “No, I didn’t!” But if you talk about your own experience, it’s less likely to inflame that defensiveness.

This also helps you identify the feelings that are coming up for you. Your feelings are what need tending to when you’re upset, not the actual details of what happened. Here’s a great example: If you say, “You haven’t initiated sex in months,” your partner is going to respond with something like, “Yes, I have! I did three weeks ago.” Then the conversation turns into a debate about exactly how many weeks it’s been since they initiated. “No, it’s been months.” “No, the last time was before Rudy’s birthday party and that was this month.” But what about your feelings about initiation? Are you feeling sad? Lonely? Resentful? All those emotions get lost. And the worst part of it all? You’re never, ever going to agree about the logistics. You’re going to be convinced about your timeline, your partner is going to be convinced about their timeline, and those two things are never going to match up. It’s the feelings that matter, and so using “I” language will help you access that deeper layer.

5. Go Slow

This golden rule has two meanings: go at a slow speed, and tackle things one at a time.

Most of us tend to speed up when we’re nervous or upset. Your partner senses you starting to get more intense, and they get more intense in response. Before you know it, you’re having a conversation at breakneck pace. But going fast creates a lot of problems:

• You’re much more likely to interpret your partner’s words as negative, even if they’re not.
• You’re much less likely to listen fully.
• You’re much less likely to express yourself properly. When you’re going too fast, you end up stumbling over your own thoughts and words.

So, slow down! Sometimes I even tell my clients, “Have a conversation at 50% of your usual speed.” Another practical trick is to make yourself take a deep breath before every sentence you speak. This naturally slows you down and helps you relax.

6. What to Always Do to Never Fight

Just kidding! “Always” and “never” are two of the least helpful words for couples. Let’s just get one thing out of the way first: it’s extremely rare in life for something to always happen or never happen. It’s just not accurate language. Plus, these two little words will immediately put your partner on the defensive and make them feel trapped. If they “always” or “never” do something, then you’re essentially saying they’re incapable of doing anything different.

Read More: Why I Stayed in a Marriage That Was Making Me Miserable

These words also set the bar pathetically low for improvement. Let’s say you tell your partner, “You never give me compliments.” All your partner needs to do is give you one compliment to prove you wrong. And it will put the two of you right back into that argument about logistics. So, do yourselves a favor and eliminate those two words from your vocabulary.

7. Make Space for New Behaviors

You want your partner to change? Then you need to make the space for them to actually change. Rashida dragged her husband, Anthony, into a couples session because she wanted him to be more aggressive and dominant in the bedroom. “But he’ll never do it,” she said. “He’s too shy.” Anthony was seated right beside her on the sofa, staring intently at his feet. Want to hear the shocker of the century? He didn’t change a thing. Rashida sabotaged any possibility of getting her own wish.

8. Close Your Mouth and Open Your Ears

You know you have to let your partner speak, too, right? Your tasks as a listener are to try your best to understand your partner and to help them feel seen. Kick off your own shoes for a minute, and try to put on your partner’s. Give them your full and undivided attention (no multitasking!). Make eye contact. Turn your body toward theirs.

There’s a little trick that you’ll learn in any Psychology 101 class: active listening. After your partner has finished talking, try to summarize what they just said, in your own words. Start with, “So, what I’m hearing is . . .” or “What that sounded like to me is . . .” Ask them if you’ve correctly captured it. If your partner says, “Not exactly,” ask them to clarify what they meant. This makes it clear to your partner that it’s important to you to truly understand what they’re trying to say, and it will cut off misunderstandings before they snowball into huge fights. This technique will feel super clunky at first, but it’s so worth it.

9. Be Compassionate

We all have our baggage when it comes to sex. If your partner is struggling, try to be empathetic and recognize that they’re dealing with their own internal wounds about sex. The best way to get a derailed conversation back on the tracks is to remind yourselves that you’re both doing the best you can. It will get easier with practice, I promise.

Copyright © 2023 by Vanessa Marin. From the book SEX TALKS: Five Conversations That Will Transform Your Love Life by Vanessa Marin, LMFT and Xander Marin to be published by Simon Element, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

There was no Palomar Observatory when the object now known as comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) made its last close approach to Earth 50,000 years ago. There were mastodons and woolly mammoths, and great swaths of glaciers covering portions of North America and northern Europe, as the planet went through its last ice age. But there were no trained skygazers. Now, the ghostly green comet, spotted last year by two modern-day astronomers working at Palomar, in southern California, is swinging back our way. This week, the comet is heading for a close approach to Earth on Feb. 1 and 2, when it will be just 43 million km (27 million mi.) from our planet and be visible to the naked eye as a bright green smudge in the northern hemisphere’s skies.

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The researchers credited with discovering C/2022 E3 (ZTF) on March 2, 2022 are Bryce Bolin, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Frank Masci, a senior scientist at Caltech, in Pasadena, Calif., the first humans or human-like beings (after the homo sapiens and Neanderthals of 50,000 years ago) to have seen the object—and initially they weren’t looking for comets at all.

The ZTF in the comet’s name stands for Zwicky Transit Facility—essentially a very sophisticated camera and computer attached to one of the telescopes at Palomar. The system is programmed to look for exotic objects outside the solar system and even the galaxy—like supernovas, emerging black holes, and pulsating stars, all of which appear as discrete points of light.

Comets, however, have a different optical profile: by the time they’re close enough to see by telescope, they appear as a larger, fuzzier blob, not the tiny dot the ZTF is trained to identify, so the facility was just discarding those images. To Bolin, who has discovered 50 comets during his time observing the skies, that would not do.

“This was a problem, where photons were falling to the ground,” he says. “We were wasting precious potential comet photons from reaching us through our data system.”

Palomar astronomers thus trained the ZTF’s deep learning network to recognize comet profiles too and not simply throw them away. Not long afterwards, the greenish face of C/2022 E3 (ZTF) showed itself—and straightaway, Bolin knew the team had bagged something noteworthy.

For one thing there was its direction: The comet was approaching the solar system from above, at a 90-degree angle, as if it were falling down from the sky. This indicated it was not coming from the Kuiper Belt—a band of icy, rocky, comet-like bodies that circles the solar system outside the orbit of Neptune—which sends us comets that fly flat in the plane of the solar system. Rather, it was coming from the Oort cloud, a sphere of similar objects that surrounds the solar system much more distantly, with its outer fringes reaching up to two light years away. (It was the trajectory of the comet that also allowed Bolin and Masci to determine its 50,000-year orbital period.)

“Okay,” Bolin recalls saying when he first saw the object, “this is something special.”

Then too there is the comet’s striking brightness and color. Comets flare green when they carry diatomic carbon—two-atom carbon molecules—which reacts with the sun’s outgassing particles, the solar wind. Many comets possess diatomic carbon, but few also approach the sun as closely as C/2022 E3 (ZTF), meaning they show their color less vividly. “I would estimate that the combination of the green color and brightness is maybe a once every few decades or so event,” says Bolin.

What’s more, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), has two tails, rather than the single tail characteristic of most comets. The more common tail is made of dust and ice interacting with the solar wind. The less common second tail is called the ion tail and is made of ionized carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen molecules that some comet bodies carry. “The ion tail interacts with charged particles in the solar wind and is pushed in the opposite direction from the sun, along the flow of the wind,” says Bolin.

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is special, but it’s not alone in taking such a long time to return to us. Its 50,000-year orbit places it in the category of so-called long-period comets, which typically come from the Oort cloud and take anywhere from 200 years to 1 million years to complete a single transit of the solar system. The sheer number of bodies in the Oort Cloud means that long-period comets are relatively common—even if the sheer number of years it takes for them to pass our way means that we don’t get a second look at any particular one of them for a very long time, making their appearance an occasion.

Just finding the comet, however, did not mean that it would be officially recognized. Bolin and Masci had to submit their discovery to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) headquartered in Paris, so that other astronomers could examine the object too and confirm that it was indeed a comet. The hive mind did agree, and C/2022 E3 (ZTF) got its listing. Alas, for Bolin and Masci, the comet will never bear their names. The collective nature of comet-spotting and confirmation—plus the group effort required to take whole-sky surveys like those the ZTF conducts—has made the process too much of a collaborative exercise for that.

“There’s a lot of moving parts that have to come together to make it all happen,” Bolin says. “Not only do you have the data system we worked on, you also have the people who set the telescope, the people who designed the telescope and built it, and so on. It’s like 100 people are involved.”

The precise spot to look in the northern sky as the comet approaches is very much a moving target, visible only at night. On Jan. 23, as Space.com reports, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was near the constellation Draco below the Little Dipper; on January 26, it was just beside the Little Dipper itself. On Jan 30, through its closest approach to Earth on Feb. 1 and 2, it will be visible near the constellation Camelopardalis, just past the point of the Little Dipper’s handle. (See TheSkyLive.com for the exact visibility from your location.) Then, the comet will begin making its outward-bound journey, resuming its long, looping transit back through the solar system, not to return to us for another 50 millennia.

Officials from the United States and Oman met in Muscat this week to discuss efforts to curb money laundering and terrorist financing and increase investment opportunities, the Treasury Department said in a statement on Tuesday.

Brian Nelson, the U.S. Treasury Department’s top sanctions official, participated in the meeting while on a trip to Turkey and the Middle East to warn countries and businesses that they could lose access to G7 markets if they do business with entities subject to U.S. curbs, as Washington cracks down on Russian attempts to evade sanctions imposed over its war in Ukraine.

Spotify Technology SA (SPOT.N) on Tuesday forecast that the number of listeners would reach 500 million in the current quarter as it reported fourth-quarter results that beat expectations for both active users and subscribers.

Shares in the company rose 9% in trading before the bell.

After investing heavily in 2022 to build up its podcast and audiobooks business, the company is trying to rein in operating expenses that grew at twice the speed of its revenue last year by laying off 600 employees and reducing other costs.

“We always knew that 2022 would be an investment year and 2023 will be a year where we would slow down the investments and thereby operating expenditure while revenue keeps on climbing,” Chief Financial Officer Paul Vogel said in an interview.

The number of monthly active users rose to 489 million in the quarter, beating Spotify’s guidance and analysts’ forecasts of 477.9 million, helped by marketing campaigns and growth in India and Indonesia.

Premium subscribers, who account for most of the company’s revenue, increased 14% to 205 million, topping estimates of 202.3 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Apart from the forecast of half a billion users, Spotify also expects premium subscribers to reach 207 million in the current quarter and revenue of 3.1 billion euros ($3.35 billion). Analysts were expecting 202 million subscribers and revenue of 3.05 billion euros.

“Q1 is always the smallest quarter with respect to user growth. We don’t have the same level of marketing campaign, as we do in Q2 to Q4,” Chief Executive Daniel Ek said.

Spotify last year laid out plans to get 1 billion users by 2030 and to reach $100 billion revenue annually. It also promised high-margin returns from its costly expansion into podcasts and audiobooks.

The company has invested more than $1 billion in building out its podcast business which currently has more than 4 million titles. But those investments have hit gross margins.

In autumn, Spotify canceled 11 original podcasts from Parcast and Gimlet, two studios the company acquired in 2019, shifting focus to original and exclusive shows that attract listeners, such as Warner Bros’ “Batman Unburied,” or the thriller “Caso 63.”

Dawn Ostroff, the head of content and advertising who helped shape Spotify’s podcast business, was also leaving the company after four years.

Ek said there was no plan to reshape podcasting business after her exit.

“Spotify will double down on things that worked well and stop doing the things that don’t work,” he said. “We are a lot more focused on efficiency.”

In 2023, the company expects revenue to begin to grow faster than operating expenses, which have jumped due to headcount growth and higher advertising costs.

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