Town Hall News

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Biden administration said on Thursday it is offering $1.2 billion in aid to extend the life of distressed nuclear power plants which, for the first time, could offer funding to a plant that has recently closed. President Joe Biden’s climate team believes nuclear power is a crucial source of virtually carbon-free electricity needed to be maintained and expanded to reach his pledge of […]

By Akash Sriram (Reuters) – Apple Inc has blocked an update to email app BlueMail, which uses a customized version of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, the co-founder of the app developer told Reuters on Thursday. “Apple has blocked the BlueMail update and continues to treat BlueMail unfairly and to discriminate against us,” Blix’s Ben Volach said. “Other GPT-powered apps seem not to be restricted,” he added. Apple, which rejected the […]

By Suzanne Smalley (Reuters) – The White House on Thursday announced a new cybersecurity strategy in the latest effort by the U.S. government to bolster its cyber defenses amid a steady increase in hacking and digital crimes targeting the country. The strategy, which is intended to guide future policy, urges tighter regulation of existing cybersecurity practices across industries and improved collaboration between the government and private sector. It comes after […]

By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The metaverse, shared virtual worlds accessible via the Internet, is the next digital market to attract regulatory scrutiny, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Thursday. The metaverse has come into sharper focus since Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms two years ago to reflect its bet on the new sector as the successor to the mobile internet. That move has in […]

By Kanishka Singh WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s lone Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson, will step down from her role at the end of March, she said in a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday, in which she criticized FTC Chair Lina Khan. In addition, Holly Vedova, head of the agency’s bureau of competition, said she would retire after decades at the agency but did not give a […]

By Angus Berwick and Tom Wilson (Reuters) – Three U.S. Senators have asked giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its U.S. partner Binance.US for information about their regulatory compliance and finances, citing a series of investigations by Reuters and some other media reports, according to a letter released on Wednesday. In the letter, Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen along with Republican Roger Marshall, called on Binance “to provide transparency […]

By Shreyashi Sanyal and Johann M Cherian (Reuters) -European shares rose on Friday, as hopes that the U.S. Federal Reserve could adopt a measured approach for rate hikes ahead lifted technology stocks, while miners jumped on growing bets of demand recovery in China. The continent-wide STOXX 600 rose 0.7% in early trading, with rate-sensitive tech stocks up 1.4%. Overnight, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic favoured a “slow and steady” rate […]

By Mariko Katsumura, Makiko Yamazaki and Ritsuko Shimizu TOKYO (Reuters) – The investment firm managing nearly $1.5 billion of assets for members of Nintendo’s founding family is willing to play a long game when it comes to portfolio companies and can wait more than a decade to see a turnaround, a top executive said. That timeline helps explain why Yamauchi-No.10 Family Office shows no sign of relenting nearly a year […]

By Ilona Wissenbach and Joanna Plucinska (Reuters) -Germany’s Lufthansa on Friday said it delivered a “clearly positive result” for 2022 and expects a significant improvement in earnings this year as air travel recovers from COVID restrictions. Passenger numbers doubled and net revenue almost doubled from that achieved in 2021, although the figures remain short of pre-pandemic levels. “Lufthansa is back,” CEO Carsten Spohr said in a statement. “In just one […]