Pope Leo XIV calls Herzog and Zelensky on Good Friday to urge peace
Pope Leo XIV held separate telephone conversations with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Good Friday, April 3, 2026, pressing both leaders to pursue diplomatic paths to end the wars ravaging the Middle East and Ukraine. The calls, confirmed by the Vatican in a statement, mark the pontiff's most......
Analysts warn Iran could become a North Korea-style garrison state
More than a month into the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, a growing number of analysts and business leaders are warning that the conflict may not end in regime change or capitulation, but in the transformation of the Islamic Republic into a closed, militarized garrison state modeled on North Korea. Nikkei Asia published an analysis......
Tether gives investors two weeks to commit to $500 billion valuation round
Tether, the issuer of the world's largest stablecoin USDT, is pressing investors to commit to a funding round at a $500 billion valuation within the next two weeks, according to a report from The Information published on Wednesday. The move marks a last-ditch effort to close a deal that has been scaled back repeatedly since it was first......
Coinbase commits $150 million to protect Bitcoin from quantum computing threats
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced this week that he will personally oversee a new industry initiative to protect Bitcoin against quantum computing threats, committing $150 million to a "Quantum Defense Fund" that will award grants to developers working on integrating post-quantum cryptography into the Bitcoin protocol. The......
Erste Group cuts Toyota to "hold" on tariff drag and slowing US sales
Erste Group Bank downgraded Toyota Motor from "buy" to "hold" on Thursday, citing near-term growth headwinds as the Japanese automaker contends with weakening U.S. sales and the sustained impact of tariffs on its profitability. Analyst Hans Engel pointed to a slowdown in revenue projections for the new fiscal year, which......
Arm shares slide as investors lock in gains after AI-driven rally
Shares in Arm Holdings fell sharply on Thursday, dropping approximately 5.5 percent from the previous session's close, even as the chip designer was riding a wave of high-profile announcements that had fueled a strong run in recent weeks. The pullback, which brought the stock to around $146 during the April 2 trading session, came as investors......
Nexon calls Arc Raiders a "Trojan horse" for AI-assisted game development
Patrick Söderlund, Nexon's new executive chairman and CEO of Embark Studios, told an investor meeting in Tokyo on March 31 that artificial intelligence would "rebuild the game development process," presenting the technology as the key to producing triple-A games with smaller teams and reduced budgets. Nexon CEO Junghun......
Iranian drones strike Kuwait's Mina al-Ahmadi refinery again, sparking fires
Iranian drones struck the Mina al-Ahmadi oil refinery in Kuwait on Friday morning, igniting fires across multiple operational units in the latest attack on Gulf energy infrastructure since the U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran began in late February. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation told the official KUNA news agency that the 346,000-barrel-per-day......
Morocco launches sovereign AI platform to boost industrial transformation
Aba Technology unveiled a new artificial intelligence platform designed to support Morocco’s push for technological sovereignty and industrial growth, according to a company statement issued in Rabat on April 2 . The launch event took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Rabat under the supervision of the Ministry of Industry and Trade......
Tesla posts record sales in South Korea and Australia as oil crisis accelerates EV shift
Tesla recorded record sales in South Korea and strong growth in Australia during March, closing out a first quarter driven by the refreshed Model Y and a global oil crisis that is pushing consumers toward electric vehicles at an accelerating pace. Tesla delivered 11,130 vehicles to South Korean customers in March, a result described as a......
European Q1 earnings set to rise 4% as energy sector surges
Corporate earnings for companies in the STOXX 600 index are forecast to grow 4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, marking a rebound after a decline in the final quarter of last year, according to LSEG I/B/E/S data cited by Reuters on Thursday. The turnaround is driven primarily by a surge in the energy sector, where crude oil prices inflated......
Anthropic maps 171 emotion-like patterns inside Claude that shape its behavior
Anthropic's interpretability team published research on Wednesday revealing that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model contains 171 distinct internal representations that function analogously to human emotions — and that these patterns do not merely correlate with model outputs but causally influence its decisions, including triggering unethical......
Container ship Safeen Prestige sinks in Strait of Hormuz after weeks ablaze
The Maltese-flagged container ship Safeen Prestige has sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, nearly a month after being struck by a projectile and abandoned by its crew, according to a maritime traffic advisory issued by regional operators on April 1. The vessel went down approximately 6.5 nautical miles northeast of Ras Mahrouk, with an oil slick......
Airlines face bankruptcy risk as fuel costs soar amid Middle East conflict
A billionaire aviation executive based in Dubai has warned that airlines around the world could begin filing for bankruptcy within weeks if the war in Iran continues to drive jet fuel prices higher, even as the shipping industry posts record profits fueled by the same geopolitical upheaval. Gediminas Ziemelis, chairman of Avia Solutions Group,......
Fossils in China push back origins of complex animal life by millions of years
A cache of more than 700 fossils unearthed in southwestern China has shown that complex animal life was already diversifying millions of years before the celebrated Cambrian explosion, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The discovery, from a site known as the Jiangchuan biota in Yunnan province, includes specimens......