ASIA: The major Asian stock markets had a mixed day today: • NIKKEI 225 increased 3,320.72 points or 5.58% to 62,833.84 • Shanghai increased 19.919 points or 0.48% to 4,180.092 • Hang Seng increased 412.50 points or 1.57% to 26,626.28 • ASX 200 increased 84.50 points or 0.96% to 8,878.10 • SENSEX decreased 114.00 points or -0.15% to 77,844.52 • Nifty50 decreased 4.30 points or -0.02% to 24,326.65 The major Asian currency markets had a mixed day today: • AUDUSD decreased 0.00042 or -0.06% to 0.72328 • NZDUSD decreased 0.00001 or 0.00% to 0.59549 • USDJPY increased 0.339 or 0.22%…
Author: Staff Writer
At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we help senior women leaders mentor one another through shared insight. As founder, chair, and CEO, I speak with executives shaping how organizations evolve and perform. This month, I spoke with Jennifer Renaud, CEO of Kradle LLC and a board director with more than 30 years experience in digital innovation, commercial strategy, and customer-centered growth. She has guided companies through operating model transformation and post-integration growth. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded across organizations, Renaud believes companies must rethink how decisions are made. Traditional hierarchies, designed for stability and control, often slow organizations when speed and…
Book bans are on the rise – and they’re increasingly focused on censoring facts. In a new report on banned books in U.S. public schools, the free expression advocacy group PEN America found that the number of non-fiction books pulled from shelves doubled last year. The group describes a “surge” of book bannings targeting non-fiction science, history, and biographic titles, including books about the digestive system and ancient Egypt. PEN America conducted an analysis of 3,743 books removed from American school libraries and classrooms in the 2024-2025 academic year. Of the banned titles, 29% or 1,100 were non-fiction, up from…
Spirit Airlines abruptly ended operations in the early morning of Saturday, May 2 following a failed government bailout for Spirit Aviation Holdings, Inc. The company shutdown left customers stranded—it flew over 50,000 people the day before—and about 17,000 employees without a job, effective immediately. Now, some of those employees have turned to GoFundMe for support during this tumultuous time. Searching “Spirit Airlines” on the donation site leads to campaign after campaign from former captains, flight attendants, and ground staff. Many of the campaigns highlight that the person is looking for new employment, but until then, needs support to stay on their…
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on Elon Musk’s decision to lease the computing capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic. I also look at what a new Atlantic exposé on David Sacks says about Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump, and a benchmark that’s stumping top AI coding agents. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have…
Walk down almost any city street, beach, or park, and you’ll see them: cigarette butts scattered along the curb, tucked into sidewalk cracks, or washed up along shorelines—4.5 trillion of them. They’re now so common they’ve become nearly invisible. But that ubiquity masks a growing environmental crisis—one that has only intensified as nicotine products evolve. For decades, cigarette butts have been the most littered item in the world. The filter—often mistaken as biodegradable—is made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can persist in the environment for years. These filters don’t just sit there; they break down into microplastics,…
Judgment is scarce in the age of agentic AI. Access is not scarce, and nearly every enterprise can now reach the same frontier models. Yes, automation is the starting line, but reimagining end-to-end processes and having context–rich process intelligence are how you get ROI from artificial intelligence. And that is incredibly hard to build overnight. That is where competitive advantage now lives, in the ability to apply AI with discipline, context, and consequence, with accountability for outcomes. Agentic AI is redrawing the competitive landscape quickly. The winners will go deep instead of wide, deliberately owning the last stretch of the…
Blue Cross Blue Shield is set to begin issuing nearly $2 billion in payouts to claimants in a long-running class action lawsuit. The payments are expected to begin this month and could see individuals receiving checks worth hundreds of dollars. Here’s what you need to know about the settlement and its massive payout. What is the settlement about? The settlement payout is the culmination of a nearly 14-year legal battle between Blue Cross Blue Shield and its subscribers. Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) operates a federation of health insurance companies under its umbrella. As of 2026, there are 33 such…
A new library is opening up in New York City this Friday, but rather than books, the space will house 3,437 volumes and roughly 3.5 million pages of the Epstein Files. The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room is a project by the Institute for Primary Facts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency. Housed in an undisclosed location in Tribeca, the exhibition will allow visitors to see the records in a new way. It will be open to the public from May 8 through 21 by appointment only. “The truth is hard to deny when it’s…
I’m a big believer in the power of mindset. My journey as an entrepreneur has, frankly, demanded it. Building a business from scratch forces you into deeper work on self-inquiry and meta-cognition—that recursive question of Why do I think the way I think about this? It has pushed me to examine my assumptions, sit with discomfort, and deliberately fortify my inner life in ways I never anticipated when I started out. So when I sat down with Nir Eyal, author of the new New York Times bestselling book Beyond Belief, I expected a great conversation. What I got was an…