Ask just about anybody, and they’ll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn’t looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it’s hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.
Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.
Perplexity doesn’t just want to compete with Google, it apparently wants to be Google.
CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app. This so it can sell premium ads.
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
And work-related queries won’t help the AI company build an accurate-enough dossier.
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” he explained.
Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.
“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there,” he said.
US President Donald Trump has reiterated in an interview with The Time that he believes Ukraine's aspiration to join NATO is the main reason behind Russia's military aggression. He also stated that he considers Crimea to be lost to Ukraine.
"I think what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO," the US leader said.
He also made it clear that he considers Crimea to be lost to Ukraine. "Crimea will stay with Russia," Trump said.
- Volkswagen beat Tesla in European EV sales across the first three months of 2025, data shows.
- Registrations for VW EVs are up more than 150%, while Tesla lost huge ground.
- However, the Model Y and Model 3 remain Europe's top two most-registered EVs.
Xi Jinping has announced a plan to counter China’s continuing economic problems and the impact of the US trade war, as reports swirl that it could drop tariffs on some US products, including semiconductors.
Friday’s meeting of the politburo was convened to discuss China’s economic situation, which since the pandemic has faced difficulties fuelled by a housing sector crisis, youth unemployment, and Donald Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese exports.
A readout of the meeting published by the official state media outlet, Xinhua, said China’s economy had showed a “positive trend” with increasing social confidence in 2025, but “the impact of external shocks has increased”.
“We must strengthen bottom-line thinking, fully prepare emergency plans, and do a solid job in economic work,” it said.
Apple plans to shift the assembly of all iPhones sold in the U.S. to India as early as next year, pivoting away from China to avoid steep tariffs, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google’s Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it.
The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department’s remedies trial to rectify Google’s search monopoly. The DOJ has — among other proposals — requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its popular search engine that’s amassed too much power for anyone else to compete. Yahoo isn’t the only company interested in buying Chrome. While DuckDuckGo’s CEO said they wouldn’t be able to afford it, witnesses from Perplexity and OpenAI both expressed interest in the popular browser on the stand this week.
The director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced his resignation today, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Science.
“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.
What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) surged by as much as 8% today following the company reporting disastrous earnings results – its worst in years and way below expectations.
The stock seems to surge based on people believing Elon Musk’s lies.
Yesterday, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming its worst performance in years.
The automaker is now operating at just 2% margins and would have lost money last quarter if it weren’t for the sales of regulatory credits.
The financial performance was worse than most analysts predicted, and yet, Tesla’s stock surged by as much as 8% today.
The reason for the surge appears to be shareholders overlooking Tesla’s degrading auto business in favor of Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla.
However, the problem is that Musk has been misleading people about his vision of Tesla’s future and lied several times on the earnings call that followed the release of its financial results.
The remedy phase of Google's antitrust trial is underway, with the government angling to realign Google's business after the company was ruled a search monopolist. The Department of Justice is seeking a plethora of penalties, but perhaps none as severe as forcing Google to sell Chrome. But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.
Top diplomats of the United States, Ukraine, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have postponed a planned meeting in London, downgrading the talks on ending the war in Ukraine to discussions among their senior officials.
The UK Foreign Office indicated that ministerial-level meetings would be replaced by discussions at an official level.
The move follows US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to travel to Moscow instead, with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has also opted to not attend. In their absence, Keith Kellogg, US President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is leading the American delegation.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha arrived in London along with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov.
The European Commission issued the first fines under its Digital Markets Act on Wednesday, slapping tech giants Apple and Meta with penalties for breaching the EU’s new digital rulebook.
Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.
The Israeli government shared and then deleted a social media post offering condolences over the death of Pope Francis, without saying why, though an Israeli newspaper linked the decision to the late pontiff's criticism of the war in Gaza.
The verified @Israel account had posted on Monday a message on social media platform X that read: "Rest in Peace, Pope Francis. May his memory be a blessing", alongside an image of the pope visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Post quoted officials at the foreign ministry as saying that the pope had made "statements against Israel" and that the social media post had been published in "error".
At least two dozen people are feared to have been killed after gunmen indiscriminately fired at tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Tuesday in what local authorities called a terror attack, blaming militants fighting against Indian rule.
"This attack is much larger than anything we've seen directed at civilians in recent years," Omar Abdullah, the region's top elected official, wrote on social media. "The death toll is still being ascertained so I don't want to get into those details."
Agence France-Presse, citing Indian police, reported that at least 24 people had died in the attack, which coincided with the trip to India of U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
Russia’s ruble has surged to become the best performing global currency, posting this year’s strongest gains against the dollar to outpace even the traditional safe haven of gold.
The ruble has strengthened 38% versus the dollar on the over-the-counter market since the beginning of this year, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. While the greenback has reeled from mounting pressure caused by US President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff wars, Russia’s currency has also been buoyed by factors unique to the country, including record-high local interest rates.
China has halted all imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States for more than ten weeks
According to the Financial Times, shipping data revealed that no LNG shipments have taken place between the two nations since a 69,000-tonne tanker from Corpus Christi, Texas, arrived in China’s Fujian province on 6 February.
A second vessel destined for China was redirected to Bangladesh after it failed to arrive before Beijing imposed a 15 per cent tariff on US LNG on 10 February.
The tariff has now been raised to 49 per cent, effectively pricing US gas out of the Chinese market.
The current freeze on US LNG mirrors a similar halt during United States President Donald Trump’s first term, which lasted over a year.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.
Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found a possible 'biosignature' – the potential fingerprint of life – within its atmosphere, although they say they're remaining "cautious", and that this isn't a confirmed detection.
The chemicals detected are the same as those produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth.
U.S. President Donald Trump does not want to transfer additional Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems to Kyiv, even if he receives $50 billion from EU funds in return. He refused a corresponding lucrative deal, while making new accusations against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, UNN reports, citing BILD.
The White House said China is now facing up to a 245 percent tariff on imports to the U.S. "as a result of its retaliatory actions," another escalation in a trade war between the world's two largest economies.
The top potential tariff is higher than previously stated and was referenced in a fact sheet published by the White House late on Tuesday.
No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.
As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.
These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills.
In an unprecedented move, the Japan Fair Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order against Google for violating the country's anti-monopoly law by forcing manufacturers to preinstall the company’s apps on their Android smartphones.
This is the first time that Japan has issued such an order against any of the major U.S. technology companies referred to collectively as GAFAM — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
The Federal Trade Commission and Meta will square off in a long-awaited antitrust trial on Monday over the tech giant's past acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.
In an Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Monday, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported from the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Mr. Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bukele said returning Mr. Abrego Garcia would be akin to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president talked, Mr. Trump smiled in approval, surrounded by cabinet members who spoke in support of the president on cue.
Beijing has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the world’s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries.
Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors.
The official crackdown is part of China’s retaliation for President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs that started on April 2.
The UK government is taking control of Chinese-owned British Steel after emergency legislation was rushed through Parliament in a single day.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told MPs the government's likely next step would be to nationalise the Scunthorpe plant, which employs 2,700 people.
But he said he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.
President Donald Trump’s administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, potentially cushioning consumers from sticker shock while benefiting electronics giants including Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.
A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.
Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history.
The Yuan dipped to a 17-year low against the U.S. dollar early on Thursday after President Donald Trump excluded Beijing from his 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs and cranked up his tariff on Chinese goods imports to 125 percent.
Nvidia will be permitted to continue selling H20 graphics processing units in China following a visit to Mar-a-Lago by CEO Jensen Huang, according to NPR. Huang attended a dinner last Friday at the resort that was priced at $1 million per head, though it is unclear whether he spoke with President Trump.
James Cameron appeared on the “Boz to the Future” podcast and said the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half,” and the Oscar winner is trying to figure out how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members. Cameron announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners.
Nate said its app’s users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.
US stocks sank on Thursday, pulling back from the previous day's historic rally amid concerns that President Trump's broad trade offensive has become a direct confrontation with China.
The S&P 500 (GSPC) dropped over 2.8%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (IXIC) tumbled 3.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell nearly 1,000 points, or 2.2%. The 10-year Treasury yield, (^TNX) in high focus amid bond market whiplash, fell to around 4.35%.
This was the news we and everyone on the Street was waiting for as the pressure on Trump took on a life of its own and the eye-popping rise of the 10-year yield was ultimately too much to hold his line on the self-inflicted Armageddon tariff unleashed at midnight.
Now we would expect massive negotiations across the board over the coming months including China being front and center as the biggest wild card.
China's finance ministry has announced an 84% tariff on goods imported from the US as it retaliates against new levies imposed by the White House.
The hike in tariffs, from 34%, came as US President Donald Trump's 104% tariff on Chinese goods came into force.
Beijing says the new charges will take effect from Thursday.
U.S. Treasuries extended heavy losses on Wednesday in a sign investors are dumping even their safest assets as a global market rout unleashed by U.S. tariffs takes an unnerving turn towards forced selling and a dash for the safety of cash.
"This is beyond fundamentals right now. This is about liquidity," said Jack Chambers, senior rates strategist at ANZ in Sydney.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the U.S. will soon announce a "major" tariff on pharmaceutical imports.
Speaking to an event at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump said the tariff will incentivize drug companies to move their operations to the U.S.
US stocks lost steam in afternoon trading on Tuesday after the White House said it plans to move forward on a threat to add a 50% tariff on Chinese goods in a move that would bring the overall tariff rate on Chinese goods to 104%. That tariff rate will go into effect at 12:01am ET.
In the small town of Kawara in Fukuoka Prefecture, something unexpected is happening at the Saidosho Community Center. While kids in most parts of Japan are obsessed with Pokémon cards — or perhaps the franchise’s latest smartphone game, Pokémon TCG Pocket — the children of Kawara are clutching to something a little closer to home.
They are playing a trading card game (TCG) where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho.
Senior Defense Department officials are considering a proposal to withdraw as many as 10,000 troops from Eastern Europe, sparking concern on both continents that it would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to six U.S. and European officials who have been briefed on the matter.
The units under consideration are part of the 20,000 personnel the Biden administration deployed in 2022 to strengthen the defenses of countries bordering Ukraine after the Russian invasion. The numbers are still being discussed, but the proposal could involve removing up to half of the forces sent by Biden.
Microsoft terminated the employment of two software engineers who protested at company events on Friday over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s artificial intelligence products, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
Ibtihal Aboussad, a software engineer in the company’s AI division who is based in Canada, was fired on Monday over “just cause, wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty,” according to one of the documents.
Another Microsoft software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, had said she would resign from the company on Friday, April 11. But Microsoft terminated her role on Monday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. The company wrote that it “has decided to make your resignation immediately effective today.”
Two of President Donald Trump's richest supporters have broken with him over his tariff hikes.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump last summer, warned of an "economic nuclear winter" if Trump doesn't immediately pause his sweeping tariffs.
And Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla who is an adviser to Trump and leading the Trump administration's efforts to downsize the government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has also spoken out against the tariff policies.
At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory, leaving experts aghast and fearful about what lies ahead.
The STD lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leading player in global efforts to monitor for drug resistance in the bacteria that cause these diseases — was among the targets of major staff slashing at the CDC this past week. All 28 full-time employees of the lab were fired.
Asian stock markets plunged across the region on Monday, kicking off the trading week on the weakest footing in more than a decade, as the world braced for shock waves from the tit-for-tat tariff war between China and the US.
Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index plunged as much as 13 per cent to 19,868 at 2:25pm, marking its biggest intraday decline in more than a decade.
All 14 major equity gauges in the Asia-Pacific markets fell, with 11 of them hitting their lowest in at least 52 weeks. Japan’s Nikkei 225 slid 6.2 per cent, South Korea’s Kospi Index retreated 4.7 per cent, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 4 per cent and Singapore’s Straits Times Index crashed 8.1 per cent.
U.S. stock futures opened sharply lower late on Sunday, suggesting a continuation of the two-day selloff that wiped trillions from equity values after the Trump administration's tariffs announcement last week.
Investors had been anticipating another week of turbulence as global trading partners react to the harsher-than-expected tariffs. U.S. S&P 500 E-minis stock futures were last down 4%. Dow E-minis were down 3.8%, while Nasdaq 100 E-minis were down 4.6% at the open on Sunday.
Ron Vara has appeared as a cryptic voice of economic wisdom more than a dozen times in five of Mr. Navarro’s 13 books, dispensing musings like “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”
But Ron Vara, it turns out, does not exist. At least not in corporeal form. He is apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination — an anagram of Mr. Navarro’s surname that the trade adviser created as a Hitchcockian writing device and stuck with as something of an inside joke with himself.
Japan could lose $17 billion in car export potential in the U.S. following President Donald Trump's decision to introduce 25% tariffs on the automotive sector, the International Trade Centre said on Friday.
"Japan's automotive sector comprises 20% of the country's total exports and the majority of exports are headed to the U.S. market. Now the flat 25% tariff on the sector that came into force yesterday means that Japan could lose 17 billion dollars in export potentials in the U.S., according to our calculations," Julia Spies, ITC chief of trade and market intelligence, told reporters in Geneva.
President Trump put up a wall between the U.S. economy and the rest of the world, and the market tanked. And then the market tanked again.
The message from Wall Street’s epic two-day rout, which destroyed $6.6 trillion in market value: There is nowhere to hide from Trump’s steep tariffs on goods imported from nearly every corner of the planet.
The global tariff rout deepened Friday, with the Nasdaq dropping more than 5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling about 1,900 points after China's decision to match U.S. duties escalated the worst trade war in decades.
China's decision to apply 34% levies on all imported goods from the U.S. next Thursday, after President Trump's tariffs go into effect, rattled markets in part because it further deflated hopes on Wall Street that a global settlement could be reached soon.