Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, has admitted that he was mistaken in announcing the rescue of four children whose plane had crashed in the Amazon Rainforest. On 1 May, the plane carrying seven people crashed killing three adults but the four children, aged 13, 9, 4, and 11-months-old were thought to have survived the impact. Petro tweeted that the children had been found after "arduous search efforts" by the military, however, he then deleted the tweet, saying he had received the information from the Colombian Family Welfare Institute but the rescue teams could not confirm the news. More than 100 soldiers, sniffer dogs, and helicopters were part of the search operation but so far there has been no confirmation of the children's survival or location.
Meta is developing custom chips in-house for AI work, according to spokespeople for the social media giant, including for its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) project. The company has in the past drawn criticism for its handling of data, while its plans to develop a large-scale inference chip in-house were previously abandoned, in favor of a more grandiose system that would enable training as well. MTIA is powered by RISC-V architecture and looked hopeful in early testing for low-and medium-complexity models, though its developers were said to have struggled with complex models. Data center projects, including new networking and cooling systems, have also been announced.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to invest $12.9bn in India by 2030, in response to rising demand for cloud services from the country's growing economy and population. AWS said the investment will support 131,700 full-time jobs annually on average. The Amazon.com unit has already invested $4.1bn in India between 2016 and 2022.
The head of property development company Iguatemi Shopping Malls led a successful bid to buy a Brazilian farmland estate being sold to create space for an Amazon rainforest reserve just a week before President Jair Bolsonaro rejected the reserve. Carlos Jereissati, Jr’s purchase of the farm helped open the way for the right-wing president to continue to sell off the Amazon for agriculture and mining development by trading permits to log parts of a federal reserve bordering on the Iguatemi land. The Jereissati family is part of the Cosan group, which has been accused of land grabbing and deforestation.
Workers should "actively fight back" if their employers seek to roll back remote working after the pandemic, according to Microsoft executive Lucy Cooper. Speaking at a conference, Cooper insisted that such a step would hit parents, young people and those with non-standard working environments particularly badly. Workers at main UK bank Lloyds have criticised the company at its AGM over plans to tighten rules on flexible working arrangements. Microsoft has so far committed to a hybrid model of work, requiring staff to come into the office for around 50% of their working time unless they have permission to work from home.
Collision has requested $40m to stay in Toronto. In 2018, the conference asked for CAD 3.8m ($2.8m), a free venue, free internet and travel reimbursement for press, speakers and staff. The event has since received CAD6.5m annually and has targeted Canadian rivals, according to this opinion piece in The Globe and Mail. Investors should focus on home-grown resources such as Mesh and Traction rather than chasing star-studded events with nothing to offer fledgling firms, it added.
The Ceibo Alliance Foundation, made up of four of Ecuador’s indigenous Amazonian nationalities, has installed 150 solar panel systems in remote communities, and plans to install 21 more. The installation of the solar panels changed the lives of people in these communities, who otherwise lived without any electricity. With eight light bulbs per system and the ability to charge phones, electric tools, or even a small television, the inhabitants now have more hours to play, do homework and work, and have benefited from improved health as well as better detection of illegal activities. The solar energy project started in 2016 with investment from a German organization called Love for Life, and is now funded by the Honnold Foundation.
Alianza Ceibo started the solar energy project in 2016, with investment from a German organization called Love for Life. The process to install solar panels is long, and Jairo Irumenga, representative of the Waorani nationality in Alianza Ceibo, explains that resources are limited, so they must first analyze which communities will be prioritized, and it is often difficult to enter the communities due to the size and weight of the parts of the system. The panels can last up to 20 years, however, if there is a problem that requires deep repairs, it takes 24 hours to get to the community due to the remote location. After installation, during the first year, the technician in charge of the community makes periodic maintenance visits.
Between 2001 and 2020, Ecuador lost approximately 31,000 hectares of forest per year. With a deforestation rate this high, access to electricity is critical for local communities to have access to the equipment necessary to monitor, gather evidence of, and prevent illegal activities. Ecuador has also considered oil exploitation, which can damage territories, including the indigenous lands of the Waorani nationality in Pastaza. Switching to solar energy will mitigate the number of carbon emissions, toxic emissions, and noise from the generators that affected the health and livelihoods of people who used them.
Portfolio managers at HillsideWealth | iA Private Wealth have explained how a concentrated portfolio of global high-quality stocks gives investors the best chance to outperform both broadly diversified indexes and professional money managers. The pair have been exploring their investment approach, which focuses on businesses generating predictable, high returns on capital and whose shares can be bought at reasonable prices and held for the long-term. They argue that sustainable growth is only meaningful if the incremental capital can be deployed at a high rate of return while excess capital should be returned through dividends and share repurchases. The high-quality companies which the pair prefers contrasts with high-yielding stocks because the price-multiple of the former would have to be very attractive for its yield to meet demanding total return requirements.
After a small aircraft crashed in the Colombian Amazon rainforest on 1 May, reports suggest that 4 children may have survived the ordeal. It is believed that the children escaped the crash and embarked on a journey to find help. Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Tien Noriel Ronoque Mucutuy and Cristin Neriman Ranoque Mucutuy were found to have evaded the accident, as strands of the children’s hair, children’s scissors and a baby bottle were found in the jungle. After conducting an extensive search party over the past few weeks, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that the minors had been located and were in good health on Wednesday. However, hours later, he clarified that the Air Force and indigenous communities had established contact with the children, but their whereabouts remain unknown. Efforts to locate the four children in the dense jungle of Colombia’s Caqueta province will continue.
Investors in the US are expecting a deal to be reached to lift the country's debt ceiling, leading to a sell-off of tech and growth stocks and a shift towards other market sectors. Heavyweights such as Alphabet and Amazon have been attractive to investors due to their strong balance sheets and predictable cash flows, but the fear of a budget crisis has meant the broader market has lagged behind. Negotiations in Washington had led to concerns about government defaults, but investors expect an agreement through until September to be forthcoming.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has backtracked from a social media post in which he claimed that four Indigenous children, who have been missing for more than two weeks following an aeroplane crash in the Amazon, were found alive. More than 100 soldiers have been deployed with sniffer dogs to search for the minors, including an 11-month-old baby, who were travelling in an aeroplane which crashed on 1 May, leaving three adults including the pilot, and the children’s mother, dead. Rescuers believe the children have been wandering through the jungle, with the military and Indigenous communities continuing the search.
Barclays has said that an increasing outflow of Japanese money to pay for services like video and music streaming is becoming a structural weight on the yen. The trend, known as the “digital deficit,” is related to payments to technology companies like Netflix and Amazon. The digital deficit is predicted to put pressure on the yen, although it is thought that a rise in inbound tourism to Japan may balance any weakness caused. The yen has fallen over 5% against the dollar this year. Barclays predicts it may fall to ¥123 against the dollar in Q1 2024.
Elon Musk has said that he thinks working from home is “morally wrong”. While many have suggested reasons why Musk, founder of Tesla, may have issued the comment, including the fact that he has production lines that need to be staffed, NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo argues against the sentiment. Manjoo writes that if we want people to go to work, “we have to do something about a ritual of American life that’s time-consuming, emotionally taxing, environmentally toxic, and expensive: the daily commute”. Commuting takes up a significant amount of time each day, with the average one-way commute in the US reaching almost 28 minutes in 2019. People are “making a rational calculation”, says Manjoo. If they can work from home and become more efficient, they will. Conversely, the downside to remote work is that it could cause cities to suffer. Many large urban areas depend on the daily office worker commute for businesses such as cafes and restaurants to operate optimally. As such, making the most of remote work involving better city infrastructure is the most viable solution.
The internet has given way to a culture of ratings and rankings that helped fuel the proliferation of listicles as a content format that was easy to produce and easy to attract attention to, said Alice Robb in an op-ed in The New York Times. The internet also gave people more ways to make their own rankings, rather than just objecting to or agreeing with those handed down by editors. Since then, online reviews, such as Yelp and Google reviews, have become popular sources to find practically any business or service, which puts ratings culture at the forefront of our lives.
The appeal of the best is engendered by a feeling of reassurance and having got the right thing, rather than a simple difference in the quality of the product. While rankings and ratings offer a sense of control when we are immersed in vast consumer landscapes, the experience of shopping online can feel psychedelic and overwhelming, causing people to put a strange amount of faith in rankings and chase “the best”.
Robb argues many people who are generally satisficers would have certain things that bring out their inner maximizer, defined by Swarthmore College Professor Barry Schwartz as consumers who search exhaustively for the best version. Even Dan Symons, the extreme case of a maximizer, says his “quest for the best” isn't about snobbery, or even self-optimisation, but ensuring the people he is with have the best time possible.
Canadian airlines are expected to face another chaotic season of air travel due to ongoing labor disputes and a potential shortage of staff. Despite scheduling more flights for the summer, airlines may not have enough crew to staff them. Experts predict that the situation will lead to flight cancellations and longer wait times for passengers. The issue is discussed in a report by transportation reporter Eric Atkins in The Globe and Mail.
The forthcoming Apple iPhone 15 could feature a USB-C port, as the company aims to exceed the design change brought about by 2017's iPhone X. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests that Apple could remove the mechanical volume and power buttons on its handsets, replacing them with solid-state equivalents while giving the Pro line-up a new titanium design. Similarly, rumours abound of an iPhone 15 Ultra appearing in 2024. The new phone could replace the failing Mini and Plus models. Possible camera upgrades include a periscope camera to boost long-range photography and zoom.
Walmart and Amazon are competing for online consumers in India, with each company offering a range of features and options to attract customers. Walmart, which acquired Indian e-commerce site Flipkart in 2018, offers a wide range of products and fast delivery times, while Amazon boasts a vast selection of products and has a growing Indian customer base. Both companies are investing heavily in India's e-commerce market, which is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge has been criticised for her portrayal of an "arcane dealer" in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Her character, archaeologist Helena Shaw, chooses to leave her godfather, Indiana Jones, to be preyed upon by neo-Nazi agents after acquiring an ancient computing tool known as the Antikythera and travelling to Tangier to sell it to the highest bidder. The performance, and character motivation in particular, has been criticised as basic and a waste of Waller-Bridge's "brilliant mind".
Brian Jones, the founding guitarist and public face of the Rolling Stones, had a lifelong hobby: trainspotting. According to a new documentary by filmmaker Nick Broomfield, Jones was known to watch trains race past the platform and would hunt for parts for his train set while on tour with the Stones. Broomfield learned of the music legend's secret hobby when he sat next to him on a train when he was 14 years old. The documentary, "The Rolling Stones and Brian Jones", looks into Jones's impact on the history of the iconic band.
OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman has invested roughly $180m in San Francisco biotech firm Retro Bioscience, which focuses on developing drugs that slow or reverse ageing. Despite major investments in treatments for age-related diseases, researchers have yet to bring a drug to market. One anti-ageing firm, Calico, established by Google a decade ago, has extended a funding partnership with AbbVie, but there are concerns about the slow pace of its research. Last year, US average life expectancy dipped slightly to 76.1 years. Wealthy investors have raised billions of dollars for such research, but there is no cure for life.
