Category: World

Retail sales soared in August, defying predictions that slumping consumer sentiment and rising gasoline prices would trigger a pullback in spending. Sales at retail shops and online rose 1.2 percent, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Excluding gas stations, sales rose by a strong 1.1 percent.…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for outside monitors to police the AI industry has run into questions about how independent those monitors really are. The watchdog Amodei mentions, METR, is deeply connected to both Amodei’s Anthropic and the Effective Altruism movement. Breitbart News reported that…

The first-of-its-kind midterm Republican National Convention (RNC) was a viewer magnet, garnering over 100 million live stream and cable news views last week, Breitbart News learned. The more than 100 million views were tallied across social media live streams, including Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, as…

Mark Zuckerberg has staked out his position in the industry’s growing argument over how fast AI should advance, aligning himself with President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang against Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. CNBC reports that Meta CEO Mark…

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday with a one-quarter percentage point increase. The unanimous decision brings the federal funds rate to a range between 3.75 percent and 4.0 percent. “Our decision comes at a time when the economy appears to be…

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has directed the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that fail to report their water usage, after state records showed most facilities have ignored the mandatory survey for years. The Texas Tribune reports that the directive follows a rough…

Don’t Create a Captured Regulator for AI The artificial intelligence industry has managed to produce a regulatory debate in which nearly everyone’s preferred solution happens to suit his business model. Apparently, some tasks still require human intelligence. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wants outside evaluators and government-assisted…

President Donald Trump said interest rates should be one percent or less after the Federal Reserve unanimously hiked rates by a quarter of a percent on Wednesday. Trump took to Truth Social to call for rates to be lowered “fast.” “The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing…

The House of Representatives has unanimously voted to pass the Common Cents Act, which would send the United States penny into extinction. Democrats and Republicans voted together on Monday to block the U.S. Treasury from minting any more one-cent coins, and to require any person…

The U.S. poverty rate fell to the lowest level on record in 2025 while median household income climbed to a record high, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The official poverty rate dropped 0.5 percentage points to 10.2% last year, leaving 34.5 million people in poverty,…