China builds a rival satellite constellation as SpaceX goes public A Chinese state-backed satellite company is signing the partners and governments Starlink has pushed aside, days before SpaceX’s record listing. Rest of World/iStock By INDRANIL GHOSH + 11 JUNE 2026 TRANSLATE Chinese upstart Spacesail is trying to steal SpaceX’s thunder. State-backed Spacesail launched two satellites on a reusable rocket on June 1, just days before SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion listing on June 12, the largest public offering to date. Much of SpaceX’s valuation rests on Starlink, the satellite internet service, which has over 10 million customers across 100 countries. Spacesail appears to be deliberately targeting countries where Starlink has faced issues.”Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting Starlink’s 7,000 satellites dominate internet service in virtually every market where they are present. User growth slowed in the first quarter of this year as sign-ups tapered in established markets, and...

 Democratic socialists are done being on the fringe. But are they Democrats? MS NOW · 4 hours ago by Eugene Daniels · Elections CHICAGO — In the halls of a Hyatt, serviced by unionized employees of course, hundreds of young, mostly college educated democratic socialists are milling about. It’s a bit too corporate for what is happening in the rooms: conversations on how they can expand, grow and fight back more. The session names are the tell: “Winning Socialism in the South,” “Legislating as Socialists,” “Power Shift Opportunities.” What you won’t find are the stars of the movement. No Mamdani. No AOC. No Bernie. Instead, it’s the door knockers, the city council types, the local stewards who have gotten disillusioned with American politics and have taken their energy elsewhere. And in a lot of cases, that fight is aimed as much at the Democratic Party as at President Donald Trump. Which raises the question that hung over the entire weekend, which nobody answered the same way twice:...

  Stripe and Advent reportedly drop $50+ billion bid for PayPal. What might have been the largest fintech acquisition ever looks like it won’t be getting processed after all. Bloomberg reports that PE firm Advent and payment processor Stripe are walking away from their efforts to acquire PayPal, an OG in the payments space. They had reportedly offered more than $50 billion for PayPal. An earlier Wall Street Journal report said PayPal—which has a new CEO, and saw its stock rise amid news of the deal talk and a solid second quarter—had been seeking more money.

  Ask ChatGPT to write a short story in the voice of Ernest Hemingway, and you may not get one anymore. Just a few months ago, Grammarly started writing in the style of famous personalities, both dead and alive, without any authorization. It resulted in a furor, and the company had to kill the “expert” writing feature. ChatGPT is now taking a safer path, as well. As per user reports, it is now refusing to imitate the writing style of famous personalities such as Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. For example, when the folks over at ArsTechnica asked the chatbot to write like Hemingway, this was the response: “I can definitely write with the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread, but I can’t write in Stephen King’s exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice. Here’s an original opening that captures a similar feeling while remaining its own” It looks like OpenAI is playing it safe with all those lawsuits piling up, alleging the company...

 In an unexpected twist, India's automobile brands are outranking Tesla and BYD in EV efficiency Indian automakers Tata Motors and Mahindra have claimed the top two spots in a global electric vehicle efficiency ranking, beating out household names like Tesla and BYD. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation's 2025 report, which evaluated 22 of the world's largest EV manufacturers, Tata Motors led the field with an average energy consumption of just 106 watt-hours per kilometer, followed by Mahindra at 113 Wh/km. Tesla and BYD came in third and fourth respectively, while the overall industry average held nearly flat year on year at 131 Wh/km. The results arrive at a significant moment for India's auto industry. EVs currently account for less than 5% of new passenger vehicle sales in the country, well below the global average of 25% , but the Indian government has set an ambitious target of electrifying 30% by 2030, a goal framed around cutting...

  Jersey Mike’s gets that bread from its IPO Kevin Carter/Getty Images Jersey Mike’s debuted on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, the culmination of a relatively quick turnaround from its sale to private equity firm Blackstone last year. The purveyors of the Big Kahuna Cheese Steak priced its IPO at $23 per share to raise ~$1 billion, making it the largest IPO in the restaurant sector since Krispy Kreme raised $500 million with its 2021 IPO. The newly dubbed JMKE opened lower, at $21, and closed the day down ~6% from its IPO price. Fast food: PE companies tend to hold for years, but Blackstone fast-tracked the sandwich chain for public trading in 18 months. Blackstone moved so quickly because of Jersey Mike’s rapid growth in recent years and the public’s current voracious appetite for IPOs: Since 2019, Jersey Mike’s has tripled sales while smoking rival Subway. Per the Wall Street Journal, the average Jersey Mike’s location made $1.36 million in sales last year while Subway...

  Life came at this AI whiz kid fast Situational Awareness It’s times like these when it’s very important to have a company name that doesn’t dunk on itself if something goes wrong. AI hedge fund Situational Awareness put out an emergency call to unload more than $10 billion from its public portfolio this week after absorbing massive losses. Billionaire Ken Griffin’s fund Citadel promised to buy a majority of the stock at a heavy discount yesterday. Situational Awareness was founded two years ago by 25-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI staffer who wrote the popular essay “Situational Awareness” in 2024 about how he expected AI to change everything. The fund invested huge amounts of leveraged cash in the software and hardware companies that it believed the AI revolution would depend on: The hedge fund grew its portfolio to $45 billion in early July. But recent investor jitters about the sustainability of the industry have cratered many of the fund’s biggest holdings,...

  Apple wants to be the company you rent your gadgets from, not just buy them from. Apple has officially launched Apple Upgrade , a leasing program that lets customers pay monthly for an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch rather than purchasing the device outright. Built in partnership with Klarna , the program replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program that Apple has offered since 2015 and expands the concept across nearly the full current hardware lineup. Lease terms run 12 or 24 months for phones and watches, and 24 or 36 months for iPads and Macs. Pricing starts at $31.99 a month for a 256GB iPhone 17 Pro on a 24-month term, $24.99 a month for a 256GB iPad Pro over 36 months, and $38.99 a month for a 16GB MacBook Pro over the same stretch. Notably, the iPhone 16, base iPad, and MacBook Neo are not eligible, and iPhone lessees must be on a postpaid plan with AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. The structure of the program carries some meaningful fine print. Apple requires no security depos...

 TCL built a 22-speaker soundbar for turning living rooms into movie theaters, but it’s skipping the US Here's everything inside TCL's new flagship Q95K soundbar, from its Bang & Olufsen tuning to its 360-degree sound tech. By Shikhar Mehrotra Published July 27, 2026 11:45 AM TCL I’ve used enough soundbars to know most “360-degree audio” claims are marketing fluff dressed up as innovation. TCL’s new flagship might actually have the hardware to back that claim up for once. The Q95K is TCL’s new flagship soundbar . It’s built around an 11.1.4 channel Hi-Fi architecture and tuned in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen . To me, it sounds like a serious attempt to compete with premium home theater setups. TCL So what’s actually inside this thing? The system spreads 1420W of peak power across 22 independent speaker units. The exceptional output is split between a main bar handling seven horizontal channels, two overhead channels, and a subwoofer channel, along with wireless s...

Musk Leaves Room For a Potential SpaceX-Tesla Merger First came xAI-SpaceX. Now brace yourselves for SpaceXAI-Tesla. BY ECE YILDIRIM PUBLISHED JULY 22, 2026, 11:39 PM ET READING TIME 2 MINUTES Elon Musk © FotoField / Shutterstock READ LATER COMMENTS (31) Elon Musk has a lot of companies, and lately his hobby has been mergers. Earlier this year, the billionaire’s space company SpaceX acquired his artificial intelligence company xAI (now SpaceXAI) in a $1.25 trillion deal. The joint entity, known just as SpaceX, went public in a record $75 billion IPO earlier this summer (though its stock has been trending down since ). On the heels of that financial success, people are largely expecting Musk to further capitalize on that hype and merge his electric vehicle company Tesla with SpaceX. The two companies already work together on a lot, including the integration of SpaceXAI’s Grok chatbot into Tesla’s vehicles and a giant join-venture chip factory in Texas called the Terafab . When asked ...

  Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement pays Harry Potter publisher $19M Anthropic has reached a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to train its Claude AI chatbots, with Bloomsbury Publishing set to receive roughly $19 million of that total. The London-based publisher, home to J.K. Rowling , Sarah J. Maas, and Susanna Clarke, had 14,087 titles listed in the settlement at a proposed compensation of about $3,000 per title. After attorney fees and other expenses are deducted, that sum will be split between Bloomsbury and the affected authors, with payments expected to begin arriving in instalments as early as the second half of this fiscal year. The case, which began when novelist Andrea Bartz and two other authors filed suit in 2024, has been described by the authors' lead lawyer as the largest known copyright recovery in history. A US district judge approved the deal on Monday, calling it meaningful relief for thos...

Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) Updated 11:01 AM GMT-7, July 21, 2026 Leer en español 27 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers. About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to maki...

 Lake Mead expected to drop nearly 33 feet by June 2028, and that’s not even the worst-case scenario by Greg Haas - 07/18/26 10:47 AM ET LAS VEGAS ( KLAS ) – A critical year is ahead for the nation’s two largest reservoirs, with no relief after a record-low snowpack and a continuing drought. A comment posted on the Colorado River Basin’s Facebook page Wednesday morning might have said it best: “Not enough water in the Monsoons to help. There’s only 2 things that can save Mead and Powell right now: 150 percent Colorado Rockies snow pack for 5 consecutive years, or God himself.” Projections released earlier this week show Lake Mead dropping to the lowest levels seen since Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s, falling to 1,035.86 feet in November. That’s about 6.5 feet lower than Lake Mead’s level Friday at noon — 1,042.52 feet. Lake Mead is the nation’s largest reservoir, but it’s currently at 27 percent capacity. The latest projections The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-month study...

How big is the federal deficit? Last month, we covered the federal debt. Now it’s time to cover what adds to it each year: the deficit . That's the gap between the money the government brings in and what it spends in a given period. If the country is running a deficit at the end of the fiscal year, that amount gets added to the national debt. Here’s how the current deficit compares with historical data. The deficit for fiscal year 2026 (which will run from October 2025 to the end of September 2026) reached $1.37 trillion by June. That’s $29.1 billion higher, or up 2.2%, from the same point last fiscal year. The government has run a budget surplus in 12 nonconsecutive fiscal years since 1933. The most recent surplus year was FY 2001. The deficit more than tripled from $983.6 billion in FY 2019 to $3.1 trillion in FY 2020, largely due to pandemic-related spending on unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and small business support. The deficit reached 5.8% of GDP in FY 2025. ...

The nation’s neighbors are also its biggest trading partners. In 2025, imports and exports with Mexico totaled $971 billion. These primarily included capital goods, such as machinery, equipment, and other production process tools. Imports and exports with Canada , primarily industrial supplies and materials such as oil, chemicals, and plastics used in production processes, totaled $879.9 billion. While the nation’s trade deficit with Canada shrank last year (down $12.1 billion from the year prior), it grew with Mexico (up $22.3 billion).

 Google Ordered to Give A.I. Rivals More Access on Android Smartphones The decision by European Union regulators is a response to fears that Google will use its vast Android user base to gain an edge in A.I. Listen · 3:43 min Share full article Google’s Android operating system powers about 60 percent of all smartphones in the European Union.Credit...Poppy Lynch for The New York Times By Adam Satariano Reporting from London July 16, 2026 See more of our coverage in your search results.Add The New York Times on Google Google was ordered by European Union regulators on Thursday to lift restrictions that limit how rival A.I. companies can reach users of Android smartphones, a sign of increased government scrutiny of the booming business of artificial intelligence. The decision is a response to fears that Google will leverage the enormous user base of Android, which powers about 60 percent of all smartphones in the European Union, to gain an edge in the growing A.I. market and undercu...

US Companies Are Realizing That Chinese AI Models Are Way Cheaper, Ditch American Ones "'Hey, we don't need the best model, we can use the faster, cheaper models.'" By Frank Landymore Published Jul 13, 2026 4:01 PM EDT Add Futurism(opens in a new tab) More information Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up As corporate AI bills spiral out of control , many companies are beginning to ask themselves a simple question: why pay a pretty penny for the US’s leading AI models when Chinese ones are far cheaper? Major companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Siemens are adopting Chinese AI tools, the Financial Times reports , attracted not only by their lower costs but their “open-weight” approach that allows them to be molded to each company’s particular needs. According to data from OpenRouter, a platform that provides all-in-...

  Exclusive news, data and analytics for financial market professionals World Business Markets Sustainability Legal Commentary Technology Investigations More My News Indian students cool on 'American Dream' as EU opens its doors By Praveen Paramasivam , Sai Ishwarbharath B and Charlotte Van Campenhout July 19, 20267:40 PM PDTUpdated 8 hours ago Item 1 of 5 A student reads a brochure next to a study abroad sign at the office of KC Overseas Education, an education consultancy, in Bengaluru, India, February 18, 2026. REUTERS/Priyanshu Singh [1/5]A student reads a brochure next to a study abroad sign at the office of KC Overseas Education, an education consultancy, in Bengaluru, India, February 18, 2026. REUTERS/Priyanshu Singh Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Summary Trade pact sets clearer post-study pathways for Indian students EU tuition fees are about 50% to 80% less than the U.S. EU gains appeal as U.S., Canada, UK tighten visa rules CHENNAI/BENGALURU/AMSTERDAM, July...