For the first time in the 25-year history of the World Press Freedom Index, more than half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. The share is 52.2 per cent, up from 13.7 per cent when Reporters Without Borders first published the index in 2002. The […]

Netflix can afford to lose this case. The company reported $12.25 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, a 16 per cent increase from the prior year, with net income of $5.28 billion. It has 325 million paying subscribers worldwide. In March, it raised prices again, pushing the Premium plan in the United […]

SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion developing its Starship megarocket and is pushing for a launch cadence that would make space access resemble an airline schedule rather than a government programme, Reuters reported on Friday, drawing on the company’s confidential pre-IPO prospectus. The figure quantifies, for the first time, the cumulative cost of the […]

In January 2026, a new AI-generated micro-drama went live on a Chinese streaming platform every 90 seconds. By March, approximately 50,000 AI-native titles had been added to Douyin in a single month. The production cost was roughly one-tenth of a live-action shoot. The usable rate of AI-generated footage had climbed above 90 per cent. And […]

Uber has acquired the main remaining alternative taxi-hailing app in the city. Acquired five months before Hong Kong’s new ride-hailing licences are expected to come into force, the move locks in Uber’s consolidated position before competitors Didi, Tada and Amap can use the licensing transition as an opening. Uber is acquiring Hong Kong’s Fly Taxi, […]

The firm’s new ‘AI productivity gains and the performance paradox’ report concludes that most current AI applications ‘accelerate existing work’ without redesigning workflows, a finding McKinsey is publishing while targeting 1:1 parity between its 40,000 human consultants and 40,000 AI agents by year-end. McKinsey’s strategy practice has published a new analysis arguing that the corporate […]

Most of the umbilical cord blood collected at birth is discarded. The tissue is clamped, cut, and disposed of as medical waste, along with the stem cells it contains, cells that are immunologically naive, genetically diverse, and capable of being reprogrammed into virtually any cell type in the human body. The New York Blood Center […]

The social platform beat Wall Street estimates across every line, raised Q2 guidance above consensus, and reported $1m in capital expenditure, a striking contrast to the hyperscaler capex arms race. Reddit reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $663 million, up 69% year on year and 8.5% above the $611 million Wall Street consensus, in earnings released […]

The United States government now owes more than the country produces. Data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis on 30 April showed that debt held by the public stood at $31.27 trillion at the end of March, while nominal GDP over the preceding 12 months was $31.22 trillion, pushing the ratio to 100.2 per […]

At a Thursday town hall, the Meta CEO made the explicit trade-off he had previously left implicit: ‘We basically have two major cost centres in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things.’ The chief people officer also declined to rule out additional layoffs Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the company’s upcoming layoffs to its rising […]