Author: GT

Ukraine’s top financial regulator is floating the idea of taxing cryptocurrency as personal income, with possible carveouts for certain foreign asset-backed stablecoins, under a newly proposed taxation matrix published on Tuesday. In a translated letter introducing the potential new approach, Ruslan Magomedov, head of Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission, said that effective tax policy is a necessary step in preventing financial abuse and facilitating the “legal and responsible use of digital assets.” “Establishing fair and understandable taxation rules is also a prerequisite for attracting investment and integrating the Ukrainian virtual asset market into the global financial market,” Magomedov…

New York’s A-list venture capital seed fund, Lerer Hippeau, announced on Wednesday that it closed a ninth $200 million fund. That’s a step up from its eighth fund, which closed at $140 million, it said. With the new fund, Lerer Hippeau has $1.4 billion of assets under management. Since its inception in 2010, Lerer Hippeau has backed a string of well-known startups that went public or were acquired, many of them from New York. The list includes Allbirds, Axios, Birchbox, Brit + Co, Casper, Namely, Zipline, and Warby Parker, it says. The firm has also become a family affair, with…

U.S. President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for most countries, excluding China, whose tariff rate was raised from 104% to 125%. The move marked a shift from his earlier stance on high tariffs, which had caused significant market turbulence. Trump stated in a Truth Social post that the pause would apply only to countries that do not retaliate. A 10% tariff will remain in effect across the board during this period. Trump’s decision followed days of market speculation and came just hours after China imposed 84% tariffs on U.S. goods, up from the previously announced 34%.…

A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. Picture taken through glass. Callaghan O’hare | ReutersConservative news outlet Newsmax Media defamed Dominion Voting Systems with its false reporting accusing the voting machine company of rigging the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a Delaware judge ruled Wednesday.Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages to be determined by a Delaware jury in a trial scheduled to begin on April 28 in Wilmington, said Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis.A Dominion representative said in a statement that the company…

NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document.  The document was published on Friday as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a vulnerability in the chat app to target hundreds of users, including more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, and “other members of civil society.” At the time, WhatsApp said around 1,400 users had been targeted. Now, an exhibit published in the court document shows exactly…

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesGoogle has reversed a policy forbidding employees from discussing its antitrust woes following a settlement with workers. The company sent a notice to U.S. employees last week saying it rescinded “the rule requesting that workers refrain from commenting internally or externally about the on-going antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice,” according to correspondence viewed by CNBC.Google settled with the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents company employees and contractors, according to the U.S. National…

The sale of bankrupt EV startup Canoo’s assets to its CEO has been okayed by the judge overseeing the case. After evaluating a number of limited objections to the sale, Judge Brendan Shannon said in a hearing Wednesday he believes the process was fair and that no one else but Canoo CEO Anthony Aquila made a bid. Shannon’s decision, once formalized, paves the way for Aquila to buy most of the assets of the EV startup for around $4 million in cash. Aquila plans to offer services to customers such as NASA and the Department of Defense, which purchased a…

Crypto: April 9: The Mercury network upgrade gets applied to the Neutron (NTRN) mainnet, migrating it from Cosmos Hub’s Interchain Security to a fully sovereign proof-of-stake network. April 9, 10 a.m.: U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing on updating U.S. securities laws to take into account digital assets. Livestream link. April 10, 10:30 a.m.: Status conference for former Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. April 11, 1 p.m.: U.S. SEC Crypto Task Force Roundtable on “Tailoring Regulation for Crypto Trading” in Washington. Macro April 9, 8:00 a.m.: Mexico’s Instituto…

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is using Google Cloud’s TPU chips to power its AI research, part of a new partnership the companies announced on Wednesday in a press release. Google Cloud says SSI is using TPUs to “accelerate its research and development efforts toward building a safe, superintelligent AI.” Cloud providers are chasing a handful of unicorn AI startups that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computing power every year to train AI foundation models. SSI’s deal with Google Cloud suggests the former will spend a large chunk of…

Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, accusing the social media company of undermining national security and briefing China on U.S. artificial intelligence efforts in order to grow its business there. “We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams said in her prepared testimony.Her book “Careless People,” an explosive insider account of her time at the social media giant, sold 60,000 copies in its…