Author: GT

USA Rare Earth has announced plans to buy Brazilian rare earths miner Serra Verde in a deal worth $2.8 billion in cash and shares, as it seeks to challenge China’s dominance of the supply chain.The Oklahoma-headquartered company said it will pay $300 million in cash and $126.9 million in its own newly issued stock for the transaction, which it expects to complete in the third quarter of 2026, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals.Rare earths have come to the fore as a key bargaining chip in the ongoing geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China, which produces nearly 70% of…

Everyone said AI would kill apps. Instead, new app launches are soaring. According to a new analysis from market intelligence provider Appfigures, worldwide app releases in the first quarter of 2026 were up 60% year-over-year across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play. That percentage was an even higher 80% when looking at the iOS App Store alone. In April 2026 so far, the total number of app releases is up 104% across both stores compared to the same time last year, and up 89% on iOS. As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiak, quipped In…

BEIJING (AP) — A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps. The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race kicked off.That was faster than the human world record holder, Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race. The performance…

Commercial ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz briefly jumped over the weekend before slowing to a trickle again after several attacks on vessels. At least 20 ships transited the strait on Saturday ranging from oil tankers to dry bulk and container ships, according to data from LSEG. The big oil tanker FPMC C Lord crossed the strait loaded with 2 million barrels of Saudi crude on its way to Taiwan, the data showed. But traffic came to a standstill Sunday, after attacks on commercial ships demonstrated that the security situation remains dangerous. Oil prices rose about 6% Monday as…

Despite recently being designated a supply-chain risk by the Pentagon, Anthropic is still talking to high-level members of the Trump administration. There were earlier signs of a thawing relationship — or a sense that not every part of the administration wanted to cut off Anthropic — with reports saying that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell were encouraging the heads of major banks to test out Anthropic’s new Mythos model. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark seemed to confirm this, claiming that the ongoing fight over the supply-chain risk designation is a “narrow contracting dispute” that would not…

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Google’s investment in Indonesia’s ride-hailing company GoTo wasn’t in anyway connected to the country’s Education Ministry’s decision to procure Chromebooks for schools during COVID-19 pandemic, former Google executives testified in court on Monday.The testimony undercut a central allegation by prosecutors in the closely watched corruption trial of Nadiem Anwar Makarim, the co-founder of Gojek and the education minister at the time of the procurement. It took place during the transition to remote learning in schools when classrooms were forced to shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Makarim, 41, was arrested in September following an investigation into…

CNBC’s Jim Cramer said the stock market’s muted reaction to escalating tensions in the Middle East shows investors are focused on forces far bigger than geopolitics.”When you saw the news…you had to believe we were just going to get clobbered today,” the “Mad Money” host said, referring to headlines over the weekend that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again. Despite the U.S. oil benchmark, West Texas Intermediate crude, jumping more than 5% Monday, stocks “barely blinked.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average remained relatively unchanged, only down 4.87 points, the S&P 500 fell 0.2.4%, and the Nasdaq dropped 0.26%.The resilience…

Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty ImagesAmazon pressured major brands like Levi Strauss & Co. and Hanes to inflate prices of listings on rival online marketplaces as part of wide-ranging price-fixing scheme, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.The newly unsealed documents released on Monday are part of a 2022 antitrust lawsuit alleging Amazon stifled competition and increased the prices that consumers pay across the internet. The complaint zeroes in on Amazon’s agreements with its…

Cerebras Systems, a startup building what CEO Andrew Feldman describes as “the fastest AI hardware for training and inference,” has filed to go public. The company previously filed for an initial public offering in 2024, but that was delayed due to a federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based G42 and was ultimately withdrawn. Cerebras raised a $1.1 billion Series G last year, followed by a $1 billion Series H in February at a $23 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. In recent months, the company announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services to use Cerebras chips…

PARIS (AP) — Elon Musk has been summoned to Paris on Monday, where investigators are looking into allegations of misconduct related to the social media platform X, including the spread of child sexual abuse material and deepfake content.The world’s richest man and Linda Yaccarino — the former CEO of X — have been summoned for “voluntary interviews,” while other employees of the platform are scheduled to be heard as witnesses throughout this week, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.It remains unclear whether Musk and Yaccarino will travel to Paris. A spokesperson for X did not respond to questions from The Associated…