Associated Press

News Agency

EXPLAINER: What's a SPAC, the latest craze on Wall Street?

WeWork will finally go public this year, allowing investors to buy and sell its shares. But not through a traditional IPO. In the two years since the office-sharing company’s failed IPO, a new way to launch a stock on Wall Street has become fashionable: SPACs. Special purpose acquisition companies have been embraced by big institutions […]

Global banks warn of possible losses from hedge fund default

Swiss bank Credit Suisse said Monday it may have suffered a “highly significant” loss from a default by a U.S.-based hedge fund on margin calls that it and other banks made last week, while Japan’s Nomura said it could face a loss of $2 billion due to an event with a U.S. client. Credit Suisse […]

SolarWinds hack got emails of top DHS officials

Suspected Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to the Trump administration’s head of the Department of Homeland Security and members of the department’s cybersecurity staff whose jobs included hunting threats from foreign countries, The Associated Press has learned. The intelligence value of the hacking of then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is […]

Big Tech's outsized influence draws state-level pushback

New York state Sen. Michael Gianaris was ecstatic when Amazon named Long Island City in 2018 as a front-runner for its new headquarters, a project that would bring 25,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in construction spending to his district in Queens. But his support faded quickly when he learned that state and city leaders had […]

China cuts taxes to spur semiconductor development

China announced tax breaks Monday to spur growth of its semiconductor industry following U.S. sanctions that alarmed the ruling Communist Party by cutting off access to American processor chips for tech giant Huawei and some other companies. Leaders declared accelerating efforts to transform China into a self-reliant “technology power” to be this year’s top economic […]

UK variant hunters lead global race to stay ahead of COVID

On March 4, 2020, when there were just 84 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.K., professor Sharon Peacock recognized that the country needed to expand its capacity to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus. The Cambridge University microbiologist understood that genomic sequencing would be crucial in tracking the disease, controlling outbreaks and developing […]

WeWork stock offer comes amid doubtful need for office space

Uncertainty about demand for office space in a global pandemic is a big risk that investors will have to weigh as WeWork makes a second run at a public stock offering. A year after the novel coronavirus turned office towers into ghost towns worldwide, the embattled communal work space company said Friday it would merge […]

Former Google CEO gives $150M for research in biology, AI

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, have given $150 million to a research institute to establish a “new era of biology” aimed at battling diseases with a mix of data and life science studies. The Massachusetts-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will use the funds to build a new center that […]

How two friends made art history buying a $70M digital work

It took a few minutes for Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran to realize that they’d parted with $69.3 million for a digital artwork stored in a JPEG file, coincidentally securing their place in art history. “We weren’t sure we won,” said Venkateswaran, describing the nerve-racking final moments of the online auction for a collage of […]

Italy: Teen in hijab aims to be 'Afro-influencer' on TikTok

In Milan’s chic Victor Emmanuel II Gallery, a spacious mall that would be jammed with shoppers were it not for the pandemic, a young Black woman wearing a violet hijab and matching lipstick propped up her phone and moved her hips to a tinny-sounding beat coming from the device. Aida Diouf Mbengue, 19, was recording […]