After years of bipartisan attacks on TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, which for a time included an effort to potentially ban the social media app in the U.S., a new U.S. TikTok spinoff has been announced, set to be owned and overseen by a tight-knit consortium of tech and financial megabillionaires, many of whom have had direct business relationships with Trump and members of his…
Source
The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues.
Source
The first year of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president has been a most profitable one for the Trump family and its inner circle. By now, much has been reported about the web of conflicts — the unapologetic ethical morass — that defines the second Trump administration and the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, foreign business deals, military contracts, and more.
Source
When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry. Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the…
Source
We speak with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book and ongoing reporting about the Los Angeles fires one year ago, when destructive infernos razed entire neighborhoods, killing 30 people and displacing over 100,000 more. The book Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster provides a detailed look at how the fires unfolded, the emergency efforts and the…
Source
A new analysis finds that the richest 15 billionaires in the U.S. saw their wealth skyrocket by nearly $1 trillion in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, which also contained one of the single largest cuts to welfare benefits in U.S. history. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) report, citing data from Forbes, has found that U.S. billionaires’ assets surged by a…
Source