Avengers Endgame Source: Marvel Studios. “Avengers: Endgame” is expected to become the highest-grossing film of all time in a matter of days, Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios announced Saturday to a crowd of thousands in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con. In just thirteen weeks in theaters, the Disney superhero flick will finally surpass
Month: July 2019
Farmer walks through his soy fields in Harvard, Illinois. Nova Safo | AFP | Getty Images In the past year, torrential rains have dumped water on U.S. farmlands, destroying acreage and delaying crops from getting planted on time. Now, farmers face another hurdle: a stifling heat wave that’s spreading across the United States and is
On the second evening of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, Anne Marie Bressler received an email from Amazon that had nothing to do with the latest deals. The message, sent from an automated email address Tuesday, informed her that the Align nutritional supplements she ordered two weeks earlier were probably counterfeit. “If you still
Signage is displayed outside a JC Penney Co. store in Chicago, Illinois. Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg | Getty Images J.C. Penney on Friday afternoon said it hasn’t hired any advisors to prepare for an “in-court restructuring or bankruptcy.” The statement followed a report Thursday evening that the embattled department store chain had hired advisers to explore
A new app knows what your Instagram-loving friends did last summer. Called Who’s in Town, the iOS and Android app is ostensibly designed to show you, well … who’s in town. But it does much more than that. Users who download the app and grant it access to their Instagram account are presented with an
Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are furious over reports that the Federal Trade Commission is prepared to settle with Facebook over widespread privacy violations for just $5 billion. But that doesn’t mean there’s currently an acceptable bipartisan solution floating around the marble halls of the Capitol. “The terrible message sent by this tap on the
2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Source: General Motors General Motors is gunning for Ferrari with its newest redesign of the Chevrolet Corvette — the 2020 Stingray unveiled Thursday night. First introduced in 1954, the Chevy Corvette quickly stood out in a market dominated by the heavy metal that was rolling out of most Detroit factories in
It’s been a strange, conflicted week for antitrust in Washington, DC. In one set of congressional hearings, tech leaders, facing possible far-reaching regulation, fended off accusations that they are strangling competition. In another, Facebook’s David Marcus explained why the social media giant should be given a green light to expand ambitiously into global finance with
Today’s AI systems make weighty decisions regarding loans, medical diagnoses, parole, and more. They’re also opaque systems, which makes them susceptible to bias. In the absence of transparency, we will never know why a 41-year-old white male and an 18-year-old black woman who commit similar crimes are assessed as “low risk” versus “high risk” by
Everyone from President Trump to Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) says Libra, Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, should be heavily regulated. But nobody seems to know how—including Facebook. That much was clear in the often muddled questions of legislators who hauled in Facebook executive David Marcus to testify this week, as well as in Marcus’ frequent deflections. The
CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Wednesday that a number of bank stocks are worth buying, despite signs that the economy is weakening and the Federal Reserve won’t be raising interest rates this year. The banking cohort that have reported earnings thus far — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — combined made $29.5 billion, which the
Eva-Katalin | E+ | Getty Images Dutch technology conglomerate Philips has acquired a small Boston-based health-tech start-up called Medumo for its health care business. Medumo uses a combination of email and SMS to deliver instructions to patients, on behalf of its hospital customers. The company, which has fewer than 30 employees, fits into the so-called
Today’s younger, more tech-savvy breed of House Democrats may spend a lot of their time online, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy with the tech companies they rely on. In fact, it seems the more testimony they hear from top Silicon Valley executives, the louder their calls to regulate these behemoth technology firms become. This
The market could be due for a correction now that the S&P 500 is trading above the 3,000 level, according to the charts. Because of this, there is good reason for investors to be more cautious about their portfolio, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday citing technician Carley Garner. The S&P has added more than 650
Four of the seven Google employees who organized a 20,000-person walkout in November have resigned from the company, including two women who claimed Google retaliated against them for their internal activism. The latest to leave is Meredith Whittaker, who ran Google Open Research and has emerged in the past couple of years as a prominent
At a recent postmortem for the so-called Twitter tax break, the divisive San Francisco policy that drew tech companies to a beleaguered stretch of downtown, the tone at City Hall was chilly. Tech offices—the likes of Twitter, Zendesk, and Uber—had indeed arrived as promised, but residents of the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood told officials that little
Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, July 10, 2019. Gerry Miller | CNBC Microsoft might be the primary competitor for Slack, but the widespread adoption of Microsoft’s software is not a major problem for Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of
Jeff Bezos announces Blue Moon, a lunar landing vehicle for the Moon, during a Blue Origin event in Washington, DC, May 9, 2019. Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images Amazon is looking to expand its empire and Morgan Stanley believes Jeff Bezos‘ ambitious satellite internet plan may become one of its most lucrative businesses.
Hemp plants are grown for medical research purposes in Chiang Mai province, Thailand. Taylor Weidman | Bloomberg | Getty Images With Thailand’s legalization of medical cannabis in February, some experts predict that other Southeast Asian countries may move to decriminalize the plant. If that happens, it could prove a significant opportunity for investors interested in
Istvan Kadar Photography | Moment | Getty Images Nearly 40,000 Con Edison customers were left without power Saturday after massive outages hit New York City. The utility company said it was responding to “extensive outages” on the westside of Manhattan and would share more information as it becomes available. The power outage was apparently caused
Cricket has been around for centuries, and with 104 nations as official members of the International Cricket Council, it’s now one of the world’s most popular sports. The Indian Premier League, or IPL, is a relatively new league, but it is already one of the richest cricket tournaments on the planet. In 2018, the IPL
From 2010 to 2011, I worked on YouTube’s artificial intelligence recommendation engine—the algorithm that directs what you see next based on your previous viewing habits and searches. One of my main tasks was to increase the amount of time people spent on YouTube. At the time, this pursuit seemed harmless. But nearly a decade later,
Nick Gregory, a 26-year-old manager, vapes on a JUUL at Botany Bay in Lexington, Ky. Charles Bertram | Tribune News Service | Getty Images A U.S. federal judge on Friday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to impose a 10-month deadline for the submission of e-cigarette applications, turning the screws on companies like Juul Labs
After months of negotiations, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record-setting $5 billion on Friday for privacy violations, according to multiple reports. The penalty comes after an investigation that lasted over a year, and marks the largest in the agency’s history by an order of magnitude. If approved by the Justice Department’s civil division,
Search for “best headphones” on YouTube, and a video by Marques Brownlee, a popular tech YouTuber with nearly 9 million subscribers, will likely be one of the first to appear. Published last November, his video “My Favorite Wireless Headphones | 2018!” has over 2.7 million views. In it, Brownlee describes his favorite pairs of Bluetooth
A docker works in front of a container ship at Qingdao Port in Qingdao, Shandong Province of China. ChinaFotoPress | Getty Images China’s dollar-denominated exports fell 1.3% in June from a year ago while imports fell 7.3% in the same period, the country’s customs department reported on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had expected China’s June exports
Over the past two days, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has told members of both chambers of Congress that he has “many serious concerns” about Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency. Those include issues related to privacy and money laundering, as well as the platform’s potential to destabilize monetary policy around the world, should it catch on with
Amazon makes an expensive pledge to its workers, a hacker group hits 17,000 domains, and butt plugs are being used for scientific research. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s Headlines Amazon pledged $700 million
Darren Elias knows poker. The 32-year-old is the only person to have won four World Poker Tour titles and has earned more than $7 million at tournaments. Despite his expertise, he learned something new this spring from an artificial intelligence bot. Elias was helping test new software from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook.
A Domino’s Pizza delivery driver Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images Delivery apps like UberEats, Doordash and GrubHub are cutting into Domino’s Pizza‘s business, so much so that it’s reducing sales growth for the world’s largest pizza chain, according to Morgan Stanley. Domino’s built its business around a fleet of drivers who deliver hot pizzas