OpenAI will acquire the AI device startup co-founded by Apple Inc. veteran Jony Ive in a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal, joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware.
The purchase — the largest in OpenAI’s history — will provide the company with a dedicated unit for developing AI-powered devices. Acquiring the secretive startup, named io, also will secure the services of Ive and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone.
In February, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. As a result, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has no access to the emails on his Microsoft account. The incident once again demonstrates the risks of dependence on US IT services.
To make matters worse, Khan’s bank accounts have also been frozen, according to the Associated Press. If he takes a flight to the US, he will likely be arrested upon arrival. According to the Associated Press, the ICC has been paralyzed by the forced Microsoft blockade.
The conflict between the ICC and the US arose in November, when the former issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This incident tells bystanders more than just how applicable it is to this specific situation. Anyone who does not want to follow the geopolitical stance of the US exactly must have a plan B when it comes to software.
“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams said on Monday morning that he expects to die soon from prostate cancer, the same disease former President Joe Biden announced he is battling.
Adams made the jarring revelation during the latest episode of “Coffee With Scott Adams,” the Rumble show he hosts during weekday mornings.
“I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said. “So my life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”
Having shut down its last remaining nuclear plant Saturday, Taiwan is working to secure new imports of natural gas.
The Maanshan nuclear plant closed following the expiration of its 40-year operating license, fulfilling a promise by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of a “nuclear-free” Taiwan. Analysts say the move will make the country more reliant on imported fossil fuels and more exposed to spikes in the price of gas.
Already Taiwan is struggling to generate enough electricity, leading to recurrent blackouts and brownouts in recent years. To service its booming semiconductor industry, Taiwan will add 5 gigawatts of gas power to the grid this year, the equivalent of five nuclear reactors.
Acting President of Romania Ilie Bolojan has signed a law expanding its armed forces’ powers, allowing troops to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are unlawfully in the country’s airspace.
The law on use of national airspace was initiated after several incidents in which Russian attack drones targeting southern Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast entered Romanian airspace.
The legislation was finally approved by Parliament in February 2025.
Romania’s far-right parties challenged the law in the Constitutional Court but lost the case.
In March, Romania confirmed another case of a Russian drone crashing on its territory, in the border area near the Ukrainian settlement of Reni.
Stakes have never been this high in Romania's post-communist history, as Romanians voted in a crucial and polarised presidential election runoff on Sunday, in which centrist Nicușor Dan faced nationalist George Simion.
Pro-Western independent candidate Nicusor Dan staged a dramatic comeback on Sunday to win the Romanian presidential elections with a firm 54% of the votes.
His contender, hard-right candidate George Simion, with 46% of votes, at first refused to concede in an unprecedented political thriller which transfixed and polarised the country on NATO’s eastern flank, but then relented, congratulating Dan on his victory late on Sunday night.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it actually comes from a lab in Maryland.
In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab.
“All these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, “He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. I don’t know quite what to do about it.”
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.
Now, the startup’s first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer.
U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.
The N-of-1 accomplishment provides a template for swift, personalized genetic therapies.
News broke yesterday that researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a 6-month-old baby boy, called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJ—and he would have a 50 percent chance of dying in infancy.
Moody’s has stripped the US of its top-notch triple-A credit rating as it warned about rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit in the world’s biggest economy.
The agency on Friday afternoon cut its credit rating on the US by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa, while its outlook was changed to stable from negative. Fitch and S&P, the other main agencies, had previously removed the US’s pristine rating.
The move by Moody’s comes as investors are growing increasingly concerned about the US’s fiscal trajectory. President Donald Trump’s Republican party is pursuing a budget bill that is widely expected to increase debt significantly over the next decade.
Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.
The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?
They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.
“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.
Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.
Denmark is reconsidering its 40-year ban on nuclear power in a major policy shift for the renewables-heavy country.
The Danish government will analyse the potential benefits of a new generation of nuclear power technologies after banning traditional nuclear reactors in 1985, its energy minister said.
Companies with higher levels of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic saw more of their employees launch startups, economists have found. They argue this entrepreneurial spillover is a factor policymakers and firms should weigh when shaping remote work policies.
In a research paper titled, "Entrepreneurial Spawning From Remote Work," authors Alan Kwan (Hong Kong University), Ben Matthies (University of Notre Dame), Richard R. Townsend (University of California, San Diego), and Ting Xu (University of Toronto) describe how they analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses.
The United States and China have mutually agreed to a 90 day reduction on tariffs implemented in April, marking a significant attempt to de-escalate the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
The deal was hashed out by US and Chinese officials in Geneva over the weekend, and will see the US reducing duties on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, and China lowering tariffs on US goods to 10 percent, down from 125 percent. This new agreement doesn’t change the removal of the de minimis exception on May 2nd, which closed the tariff loophole that allowed businesses like Temu and Shein to send goods under $800 into the US without any added duties at all.
Russian secret services were behind a massive fire that nearly completely destroyed a Warsaw shopping centre in May 2024, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Sunday after a year of investigation into the case.
"We already know for sure that the large fire on Marywilska was the result of arson ordered by Russian services. The actions were coordinated by a person staying in Russia. Some of the perpetrators are already in custody, the rest have been identified and are being sought," Tusk said on X.
Storing renewable energy sustainably and efficiently is one of the major challenges of our time. A team of German researchers is proposing a revolutionary solution: concrete spheres immersed in the ocean floor. Their potential is such that California is preparing to test a large-scale prototype.
A Simple, Ingenious Concept
The project, called StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea), was developed by the Fraunhofer IEE (Institute for Energy Economics and Energy Systems Technology). The idea is relatively simple: hollow concrete spheres are installed at a depth of several hundred metres. Each sphere is fitted with a pump-turbine and a valve system.
Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer—one that pays $68,000 a year.
Rios, 17 years old, is a junior taking welding classes at Father Judge, a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that works closely with companies looking for workers in the skilled trades. Employers are dealing with a shortage of such workers as baby boomers retire. They have increasingly begun courting high-school students like Rios—a hiring strategy they say is likely to become even more crucial in the coming years.
Another shipping port official voiced concern about the drastic decline in imports as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs.
"I can see it right over my shoulder here, I'm looking out at the Port of Seattle right now, and we currently have no container ships at berth," Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN on Wednesday.
"That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare," he added. "And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications."
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. The current directors and deputy directors will lose their titles and might be reassigned to other positions at the agency or elsewhere in the federal government.
The consolidation appears to be driven in part by President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the agency’s $4 billion budget by 55% for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions could also be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that involves adding a new layer of review. NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.
Pakistan's armed forces launched "multiple attacks" using drones and other munitions along India's entire western border on Thursday night and early Friday, the Indian army said, as conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbours intensified.
The old enemies have been clashing since India struck multiple locations in Pakistan on Wednesday that it said were "terrorist camps", in retaliation for a deadly attack on Hindu tourists in Indian Kashmir last month.
Cardinal Robert Prevost has been elected as the first US-born pontiff and will be known as Pope Leo XIV. Leo made his first remarks as pope from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in front of tens of thousands of onlookers, calling for peace and paying tribute to the late Pope Francis.
A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users.
The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who have long criticized the practices of NSO and other exploit sellers. The jury also awarded WhatsApp $444 million in compensatory damages.
Clickless exploit
WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019 for an attack that targeted roughly 1,400 mobile phones belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. NSO, which works on behalf of governments and law enforcement authorities in various countries, exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed it to install NSO’s proprietary spyware Pegasus on iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit worked by placing a call to a target's app. A target did not have to answer the call to be infected.
India attacked Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir on Wednesday and Pakistan said it had shot down five Indian fighter jets in the worst fighting in more than two decades between the nuclear-armed enemies.
India said it struck nine Pakistani "terrorist infrastructure" sites, some of them linked to an attack by Islamist militants on Hindu tourists that killed 26 people in Indian Kashmir last month. Islamabad said six Pakistani locations were targeted, with eight people killed.
Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday.
After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.
An Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”, raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory.
The declaration on Tuesday by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came a day after Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan for Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which an Israeli official said would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”.
The Israeli threats to seize control of the territory permanently has stirred global outrage.
OpenAI has agreed to buy Windsurf, an artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool formerly known as Codeium, for about $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the ChatGPT maker’s largest acquisition to date.
The deal has not yet closed, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. OpenAI and Windsurf declined to comment.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday ordered a 20% reduction in the number of four-star officers, deepening cuts at the Pentagon that have shaken the Department of Defense at the start of President Donald Trump's second term in office.
Hegseth has long been vocal about how he views the senior-most ranks of the military as too big.
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.
In his post, he claimed to have authorised the commerce department and the US trade representative to immediately begin instituting such a tariff.
The best candidate yet for the elusive Planet Nine has been spotted in two deep infrared surveys taken 23 years apart. If this mystery object really is Planet Nine, it would have a mass greater than Neptune, and currently be about 700 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS.
A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene editing. Not only did they succeed, but its pigs are now poised to enter the food chain following approval of the animals this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Romanians are voting in a presidential election rerun that could propel to power an ultranationalist who opposes military aid to Ukraine, has fiercely criticised the EU’s leadership and describes himself as a “natural ally” of Donald Trump.
George Simion, 38, is comfortably ahead in the opinion polls before the first-round vote in the EU and Nato member state, nearly six months after the original ballot was cancelled amid evidence of an alleged “massive” Russian influence campaign.
Warren Buffett, who built Berkshire Hathaway Inc. into a business valued at more than $1.16 trillion and himself into a celebrity billionaire renowned for his investing acumen and witticisms, will step down at year-end after six decades atop the conglomerate.
Greg Abel, the vice chairman for non-insurance operations, will take charge of the conglomerate upon board approval, Buffett, 94, said Saturday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. He said the board plans to meet on Sunday.
Autos trade group Mobility Sweden said new vehicle registrations of Tesla models were down 80.7 percent in April amid a backlash against the political activity of CEO Elon Musk.
Tesla registrations were 203 in April, down from 1,052 a year before.
It was one of the worst-performing automakers for the month in the Nordic country, and sat in contrast to an overall 11 percent rise in new passenger vehicle registrations to 24,292.
Polestar Automotive, a Swedish electric automaker and one of Tesla's competitors, saw its sales hit 535 in April, an 11.5 percent increase.
Tesla has faced a similar slide in sales elsewhere in Europe as people protest against Musk, both peacefully and through violent attacks on Tesla property, and its aging fleet of electric vehicles comes under pressure from newer Chinese models.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
"The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order," the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement.
The AfD came second in federal elections in February, winning a record 152 seats in the 630-seat parliament with 20.8% of the vote.
Patricia Harrison, President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), issued the following statement today regarding the President’s Executive Order on public media:
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”
A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app’s data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months.
The April jobs report showed the US labor market remained resilient in the weeks after President Trump's "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariff announcements shook markets.
The US economy added 177,000 nonfarm payrolls in April, more than the 138,000 expected by economists. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%.
Average hourly earnings in April rose 0.2% over last month and 3.8% over the prior year. Economists expected wages to rise 0.3% over last month and 3.9% over the prior year.
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - appearing to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said its ship The Conscience was targeted at 00:23 local time on Friday and issued an SOS signal right after the attack.
The group said it had planned to sail to Gaza and "challenge Israel's illegal siege and blockade" there.
The Maltese government said everyone aboard the ship is "confirmed safe" and that a fire onboard the ship was "brought under control overnight".
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rebuked the phone giant, opened the app store, and made a criminal contempt referral to an Apple executive for lying under oath. Plus, a bad antitrust bill goes down.
The US and Ukraine reached a deal over access to the country’s natural resources, offering a measure of assurance to officials in Kyiv who had feared that President Donald Trump would pull back his support in peace talks with Russia.
The deal will grant the US privileged access to new investment projects to develop Ukraine’s natural resources including aluminum, graphite, oil and natural gas. It’s been seen as critical to fostering Trump’s goodwill as his administration pushes to end the war that began when Russia mounted its full-scale invasion more than three years ago.
The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025, as businesses rushed to stock up on imports ahead of the Trump administration’s tariffs and consumer spending slowed.
The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 0.3% annual rate in the first quarter. That was the first contraction since the first quarter of 2022.
- “It’s a precipitous drop in volume with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles.
- Shipments from China make up about 45% of the business for the port, though some transport companies will be looking to pick up goods at other points in Southeast Asia to try to fill up their ships, Seroka said.
- Data on shipments out of China had already started to signal slowing trade volume to the U.S., alarming some economists.
A court in India has ordered the blocking of encrypted email provider Proton Mail across the country.
On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates. The local firm alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.
After the first launch was postponed due to weather, Amazon’s Kuiper satellites are off to space.
Project Kuiper is Amazon’s plan for a constellation of thousands of internet-beaming satellites.
Once up and running, Kuiper will compete directly with SpaceX’s Starlink.
- A massive power cut has hit large parts of Spain and Portugal
The mayor of Madrid warns people to stay off the roads and only call the emergency services if it's "truly urgent"
- Shops and restaurants in the Spanish capital were plunged into darkness, writes our correspondent Guy Hedgecoe
In Portugal, police say traffic lights are also down, and the metro in Lisbon and Porto is closed
- There were long queues at cash points in the Portuguese capital as card payments were not working
- Andorra and parts of France were also hit - although the Balearic and Canary Islands seem not to have been affected
The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it. The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet. The Communist party decided 30 years ago to unify and populate vast rural areas, an experiment that has become a symbol of the Chinese ability to reshape the world.
We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information.
And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.
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.