Riya Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a stalwart defender of former President Donald Trump and a face of the MAGA movement, has in recent months taken a string of public positions that mark a sharp departure from the Republican mainstream and, at times, from Trump himself — signaling an emerging split inside the movement she helped popularize. … Read more
With Congress stalled and few concrete instructions coming from agency leadership, thousands of federal employees are quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario: a partial government shutdown that could begin as early as Oct. 1. The lack of clear, centralized guidance is leaving workers to make personal financial and logistical plans with scant information about who … Read more
Mountain View / Washington — Google reacted with alarm and swift internal moves after the Trump administration announced a sweeping change to the H-1B visa program this month — a new $100,000 annual fee and a tighter selection process for new hires — even as company leaders sought to reassure employees that existing staff would … Read more
San Francisco — Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI filed a lawsuit this week in a California federal court accusing OpenAI of orchestrating a campaign to poach employees and steal trade secrets — including source code for xAI’s chatbot Grok and sensitive information about data-center operations — to gain a competitive edge in the fast-moving AI … Read more
Beijing / Los Angeles — A wave of online anger has hit a Chinese distributor after viewers spotted that a same-sex couple in the new body-horror film Together was digitally altered to appear heterosexual for showings in mainland China. Audiences and critics say the change — reportedly made with AI face-replacement tools — erased an … Read more
Amarillo, Texas — A company tied to former U.S. Energy Secretary and Texas governor Rick Perry has unveiled a sweeping plan to build what it calls an “advanced energy and artificial intelligence campus” near Amarillo — a massive complex that would pair multiple large nuclear reactors with huge data-center capacity and, supporters say, answer soaring … Read more
Seattle / Washington — Amazon has agreed to a landmark $2.5 billion settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to resolve allegations that the company used deceptive signup practices to enroll millions of shoppers in its Prime membership and made cancellations difficult. The settlement, announced Sept. 25, requires Amazon to pay a $1 billion civil … Read more
Washington — The U.S. economy grew faster in the April–June quarter than previously reported, the Commerce Department said Thursday, in a revision that lifts second-quarter real gross domestic product to an annualized 3.8 percent. That is 0.5 percentage point higher than the prior estimate of 3.3 percent. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said the upward … Read more
New York — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to address the United Nations General Assembly on Friday amid rising international criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza and a wave of diplomatic moves that officials and analysts say have left Israel increasingly isolated on the world stage. The speech comes after days of intense … Read more
Washington — A bipartisan group of senior economic officials — including the three most recent former Federal Reserve chairs — filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court this week warning that President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook could damage the Fed’s independence and risk a surge in inflation. The … Read more