World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
“If the Taiwan Strait or the surrounding area of Taiwan will be blockaded, it is almost a 100% of the blockade of the regional energy supply,” Sawyer Mars, Taiwan’s deputy interior minister, said in an interview with Bloomberg News earlier this month. “It’s not only Taiwan’s problem, it’s the whole area’s problem.”
from financialpost.com
Apple is finally stepping into the smart glasses space. For this, the company is asking an important question: Would you actually wear these outside? This is the most important thing, because this is where most smart glasses have historically fallen apart. Rather than locking itself into a single, safe design, Apple is reportedly exploring multiple frame styles for its first pair of AI glasses. And not minor tweaks either — we’re talking distinctly different silhouettes.
There’s a bold, chunky rectangular option that leans into classic sunglasses territory. Then a slimmer, more understated rectangular design that feels a bit more executive-core. On the other end, Apple is also experimenting with rounded frames, both oversized and more refined — clearly trying to cover as many style preferences as possible. In short, Apple is designing a small collection, and that’s a smart move. Because what works for one face can look wildly off on another.
Disney To Axe Nearly 1,000 Jobs Under New CEO Josh D’Amaro: Report Yahoo Finance
from news.google.com
Donald Trump hasn’t done interviews with neutral journalists who could challenge him in years. Trump’s venues of choice are either cell phone interviews that last a minute or two or conservative media like Fox News and Newsmax.
The Fox News interviews are heavily manufactured, usually pretaped, and edited before they air.
It takes a special level of incompetence to go on a network that is propagandistic and supportive and botch a softball question in such a friendly and managed environment.
The issue that is driving the special election results that Democrats have been dominating, and the Democratic Party’s midterm generic ballot lead that has been growing, is the economy. Inflation and rising prices are driving voter outrage directed at this president and his administration.
Elon Musk’s xAI faces lawsuit over Mississippi power plant tied to AI data centers The Times of India
from news.google.com
An advisory firm that counsels the largest institutional investors on how to vote at shareholder meetings is recommending investors support Warner Bros. Discovery’s $77.7 billion acquisition by Paramount Skydance but is against a golden-parachute proposal that would see executives collect a total of $1.35 billion after the deal goes through.
In a report issued on Wednesday, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) said support for the “extraordinary golden parachute” proposal, which it valued at $886.8 million in payments for Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav and $466.2 million for the other executives, wasn’t warranted. ISS took issue with an “excise tax grossup” estimate of $335 million for Zaslav and hundreds of millions he stands to collect just because the deal between the two companies is happening.
It’s unclear if Zaslav will have a future role at the combined entity or with one of its affiliates or if he will continue on in a senior role. When Warner Bros. was weighing rival offers from David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance and Netflix last year, Ellison and his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, dangled a compensation package worth “several hundred million dollars” to Zaslav, according to the deal disclosures. David Ellison also floated Zaslav becoming chairman of the combined company’s board, and then upped it to a co-CEO and co-chairman title.
Germany’s fiscal problems are no longer confined to Berlin — they are now most visible in the country’s towns and cities, where local governments have recorded their worst deficit since reunification.
According to a DeStatis press release on Tuesday, municipal finances deteriorated sharply in 2025, with the deficit climbing to €31.9 billion, up from €24.8 billion the previous year. While revenues rose to €391.4 billion, an increase of 4.1 percent, spending grew even faster to €423.3 billion, widening the gap between income and expenditure to unprecedented levels.
As the United States-Israel war on Iran — paused for two weeks on Wednesday amid fresh diplomatic talks — has roiled the global economy for more than a month, Iran and China have seized the opportunity to address a shared gripe about the global financial system.
Their common cause: ending the hegemony of the US dollar.
US President Donald Trump wants to see the Strait of Hormuz open up for oil tankers and other traffic without any limitations, including tolls, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday.
from www.news24.com
The Trump administration is eliminating Obama-era off-cycle credits that incentivized automakers to install automatic start-stop technology in vehicles, effectively killing what many drivers consider one of the most annoying features of newer models.
Modern electronics power everything from smartphones to satellites, but they all share a major limitation. Heat. Once temperatures climb above roughly 200 degrees Celsius, most devices begin to break down. For decades, this thermal barrier has been one of the toughest challenges in engineering.
Researchers at the University of Southern California now believe they have found a way past that limit.
The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:
OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.
Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.
Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)
We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart.
From the time I began work on AI in 2010 to now, the amount of training data that goes into frontier AI models has grown by a staggering 1 trillion times—from roughly 10¹⁴ flops (floating-point operations‚ the core unit of computation) for early systems to over 10²⁶ flops for today’s largest models. This is an explosion. Everything else in AI follows from this fact.
Shippers looking to revive the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz were seeking clarity on the logistics on Wednesday, while refiners inquired about new crude loadings, in response to a ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran.
Most stranded oil and gas tankers remained inside the Gulf, LSEG shipping data showed, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the two-week ceasefire and said the U.S. would help with the traffic build-up.
The Rundown: Gov. Pritzker calls for Trump’s removal from office WBEZ Chicago
from news.google.com
The 2025 Oregon assisted suicide report stated that 637 lethal poison prescriptions were written under the Oregon assisted suicide law which was up from 609 in 2024 and 566 in 2023.
Tom Jeanne, M.D., MPH, the deputy state health officer and epidemiologist at OHA’s Public Health Division stated that:
“What we’ve been seeing over the last several years is a steady overall increase in prescriptions and deaths among Death with Dignity Act participants,”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said a large swath of the country’s farmers will be unaffected this planting season, despite the rising fertilizer costs stemming from the Iran war.
“The good news is that about 80% of our farmers, actually, last fall locked in their fertilizer,” Rollins said to reporters outside the White House on Monday. “So as we’re moving into planting season, it’s only about 20% to 25% of our farmers that didn’t lock that in. We are working directly to ensure that we can get them what they need and it won’t bankrupt them.”
As the war moves into its second month, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has led not only to higher oil prices but also higher fertilizer prices, as Persian Gulf-based companies face difficulty exporting their supplies through the closed-off strait.
Who could have predicted that California’s massive minimum wage hike would have “negative consequences?” Well, RedState certainly did, along with everyone else who wasn’t a hard-left progressive.
The law, which mandated a $20 per hour minimum wage for fast food workers at franchises that have more than 60 locations in the Golden State, went into effect in April 2024. But wait, there’s more! The law created the Fast Food Council — and gave it the green light to impose further wage increases yearly until 2029, when the council’s authority runs out.
What are the effects of the law, AB 1228? UC Santa Cruz Economics Lecturer Stephen Owen decided to find out, and surprise, surprise:
“Based on what we’ve found, I think this legislation is a classic case of ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’” Owen said. “There are unintended consequences and knock-on effects, and overall, I think the results have definitely not been as positive as policymakers had been expecting.”
The U.S. federal government has just given Bill Gates’s new company the green light to begin construction of a nuclear reactor, marking a major shift in America’s energy landscape.
Gates’s new nuclear reactor project is the first to win government approval in nearly a decade.
The move is raising fresh questions about the growing alliance between Big Tech, government regulators, and the future of America’s energy grid.
We reported on Thursday about a United Nations Security Council resolution, designed to try to ensure safe shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The resolution from Bahrain:
“[A]uthorizes member States, acting nationally or through voluntary multinational naval partnerships, with advance notifications to the Security Council,” to use all necessary means “to secure transit passage and to deter attempts to close, obstruct or otherwise interfere with international navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.”
Judge Dismisses Elon Musk Antitrust Lawsuit Let’s Data Science
from news.google.com
President Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the Supreme Court and federal court judges after they ruled against his effort to freeze $10 billion in funding to blue states.
The president in December announced that his administration was freezing funding to Minnesota after widespread welfare fraud was exposed in the state. In early January, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent letters to five blue states announcing a temporary freeze on funding for child care and social service funding.
During a cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump told reporters about how people discovered the rampant waste and fraud occurring in Minnesota. “I just saw something that the nursing home business and the daycare centers in particular, they went out and inspected them in Minnesota, and they didn’t exist,” he said. “They’re knocking on door, happens to be a young man, Nick [Shirley], nice young man. He’s done a very good job. They’re knocking on doors. It’s like homes. And they’re getting hundreds of thousands…they didn’t exist.”
And in California, it’s worse. It’s even worse. And I spoke with Russell Vought. I said, ‘Russell, don’t send him any money.’ He said, ‘but we have a court order that we have.’ Can you believe it? A judge. The judges are really hurting this country. Our judges. Justice Roberts doesn’t like when I say it, but the judges are really hurting this country. And frankly, the justices, the Supreme Court has really hurt our country, too.
President Donald Trump rips into the Supreme Court after it ruled against his effort to freeze $10 billion in federal child care and social service funding to blue states.
“The justices, the Supreme Court has really hurt our country, too.” pic.twitter.com/EXy1oQECV5
— Jeff Charles, Asker of Questions🏴 (@jeffcharlesjr) March 26, 2026
GM’s China venture seeks to build vehicles in Mexico to advance global expansion Automotive News
from news.google.com
WTO talks stall as Brazil blocks e-commerce moratorium extension FreshPlaza
from news.google.com
BANGKOK — Asian nations are increasingly competing for Russian crude oil as an energy crisis mounts amid the month-old war by the U.S. and Israel against Iran, which has choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply.
Much of the oil from the mostly shut Strait of Hormuz was headed for Asia, hit hardest by recent energy shocks. Over the weekend, Iran-backed Houthi rebels entered the conflict, further threatening shipping.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both Democrats, have proposed pausing new data center construction until federal safeguards for workers, consumers, and the environment are in place. Given how far Congress is from passing comprehensive AI legislation, the proposal could stall new projects for years. It reflects deep concern about AI’s economic and social impact—but rests on an ASAP sense of urgency that outpaces the best current evidence on how quickly those effects are materializing.
What do we know right now about the job impacts of the emerging AI revolution, given the rising level of concern in Washington? Some recent analysis for consideration on Capitol Hill:
A New Mexico jury has ordered Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta to pay $375 million in civil damages after finding the tech giant violated state law by failing to protect children from predators on its platforms.
The verdict, delivered after a civil trial in Santa Fe, marks a significant legal setback for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.