Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT) is committing a US$10b investment in AI and cloud infrastructure in Japan. The plan includes new AI data center capacity and partnerships with Japanese firms such as SoftBank and Sakura Internet. Microsoft aims to support training for 1 million Japan based engineers by 2029 and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with local authorities. For investors tracking Microsoft, this...
Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT) is committing a US$10b investment in AI and cloud infrastructure in Japan. The plan includes new AI data center capacity and partnerships with Japanese firms such as SoftBank and Sakura Internet. Microsoft aims to support training for 1 million Japan based engineers by 2029 and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with local authorities. For investors tracking Microsoft, this move extends the company’s cloud and AI footprint in one of the world’s largest technology...
Many of Tokyo’s popular and iconic Somei Yoshino cherry blossom trees were planted during Japan’s post-war advancement in the 1960s, and are now getting old and frail. Some have fallen and many others require support, triggering safety concern as the Japanese celebrate the season of their favourite flower. Two cherry blossom trees collapsed on Thursday, one at Kinuta Park in downtown Tokyo and the...
Many of Tokyo’s popular and iconic Somei Yoshino cherry blossom trees were planted during Japan’s post-war advancement in the 1960s, and are now getting old and frail. Some have fallen and many others require support, triggering safety concern as the Japanese celebrate the season of their favourite flower. Two cherry blossom trees collapsed on Thursday, one at Kinuta Park in downtown Tokyo and the other at the Chidorigafuchi greenway. The one in Kinuta Park damaged a fence while the other tree...
PeopleImages/iStock via Getty Images Weak demand for labor and job destruction at federal & state governments should push up unemployment. But the supply of labor has plunged. The federal government shed another 18,000 jobs from its payrolls in March, including employees who’d departed earlier but whose severance packages ended in February. Since January 2025, the federal government has shed 352,0...
PeopleImages/iStock via Getty Images Weak demand for labor and job destruction at federal & state governments should push up unemployment. But the supply of labor has plunged. The federal government shed another 18,000 jobs from its payrolls in March, including employees who’d departed earlier but whose severance packages ended in February. Since January 2025, the federal government has shed 352,000 civilian employees, or nearly 12% of its staff. Federal government employment is now down to 2.66 million, the lowest since 1966, when LBJ was President. State governments shed another 4,000 jobs in March, and since January 2025 have shed 49,000 jobs or about 1% of their payrolls, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. Local governments added 14,000 jobs in March. Local government employment is largely composed of educators, first responders, and healthcare workers. Since January 2025, local governments have added 161,000 workers to their payrolls. The private sector added 186,000 jobs in March. But the data has been yo-yoing, made worse by big revisions in both directions. Today, January was revised up further, February was revised down further. And earlier this year, the BLS adjusted everything to its annual massive benchmark revisions. So the six-month average, which irons out the silly month-to-month ups and downs – a labor market doesn’t turn on a dime every single month – shows the trend better: The private sector added 53,000 jobs on average per month over the past six months. Total payrolls, including government, rose by 178,000 in March. But the six-month average inched up by only 15,000 after having been in the negative in four of the past five months, dragged down by job cuts at federal and state governments. These kinds of dynamics – negative to low positive growth in nonfarm payrolls – would normally cause the unemployment rate to spike because normally, the US labor force would grow substantially through immigration, legal and illegal,...
This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Hong Kong is bracing for a series of thunderstorms on the weekend, with the weather forecaster issuing an amber rainstorm warning on Saturday morning. The Hong Kong Observatory announced the amber warning, the lowest of the three-tiered rainstorm warning system...
This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Hong Kong is bracing for a series of thunderstorms on the weekend, with the weather forecaster issuing an amber rainstorm warning on Saturday morning. The Hong Kong Observatory announced the amber warning, the lowest of the three-tiered rainstorm warning system, at 11am. It also said rain was particularly heavy in Tai Po district and might cause serious...
Would you pay for (or even bother to use) a calculator if you knew it was only going to be right 98% of the time? You might if you knew enough about what you were calculating to tell if an answer was wrong. But otherwise? Probably not. Keep that thought in mind—we’ll come back to it. This week’s newsletter is about artificial intelligence, or more particularly about the large language models (LLM)...
Would you pay for (or even bother to use) a calculator if you knew it was only going to be right 98% of the time? You might if you knew enough about what you were calculating to tell if an answer was wrong. But otherwise? Probably not. Keep that thought in mind—we’ll come back to it. This week’s newsletter is about artificial intelligence, or more particularly about the large language models (LLM) we currently refer to as AI. It’s about what they need from us and what we think we need from them. There are two parts to the first bit: computing power and data. Compute isn’t 100% straightforward: The electricity needed for giant data centers is in short supply everywhere (no one has invested enough in their grids for decades). There’s also a growing helium problem: a third of helium is produced in Qatar. Without it (as a coolant) chip production is impossible. No chips, no AI. Still, this is not an existential problem. With good policy choices and supply chains sorting themselves out, energy and material shortages can be (eventually) surmounted everywhere. The inputs may be increasingly expensive, but compute is always buyable. The second part, the data on which all LLMs are trained, is not. Its supply is limited. Up to ChatGPT4, the internet provided enough data for each new iteration to be better. But that version was completed a few years ago, trained on the lot. There is little more for new models to train on. The data on the internet might have expanded over the last few years, but not in a particularly helpful way. Much of it has been produced by other LLMs: train your new model on that and you might end up degrading it. Why? Because LLMs are horribly prone to errors (confabulations or hallucinations), which means they can’t give us what we most need from them: accuracy. An LLM is not a continuous learning machine. Its knowledge stops with its training. It also isn’t deterministic (like, say, a calculator), says AI expert Janusz Marecki (who I interviewed for a p...
Roommates overall are skewing older, as young people stay with their parents for longer. The share of older adults looking to rent with a roommate has tripled from a decade ago.
Roommates overall are skewing older, as young people stay with their parents for longer. The share of older adults looking to rent with a roommate has tripled from a decade ago.
The Hong Kong government has demanded that the city’s largest franchised bus operator investigate the malfunctioning of its fare rebate machines, which provided free trips to passengers on the day a revised HK$2 (26 US cents) transport subsidy scheme was implemented. The government told the South China Morning Post on Saturday that KMB would be responsible for paying the additional rebates that it...
The Hong Kong government has demanded that the city’s largest franchised bus operator investigate the malfunctioning of its fare rebate machines, which provided free trips to passengers on the day a revised HK$2 (26 US cents) transport subsidy scheme was implemented. The government told the South China Morning Post on Saturday that KMB would be responsible for paying the additional rebates that it accidentally provided to eligible passengers and other residents during the system malfunction on...
From glimmering floral-patterned glassware to the vivid colours of intricately designed Persian carpets, artefacts from Iran have captivated visitors to a museum in northern China, where they have avoided the risks of damage in the war waged by the US and Israel. The relics, on display at the Inner Mongolia Museum in the regional capital Hohhot since December, have drawn growing attention since th...
From glimmering floral-patterned glassware to the vivid colours of intricately designed Persian carpets, artefacts from Iran have captivated visitors to a museum in northern China, where they have avoided the risks of damage in the war waged by the US and Israel. The relics, on display at the Inner Mongolia Museum in the regional capital Hohhot since December, have drawn growing attention since the start of the conflict in the Middle East and highlighted a cultural exchange that has been quietly...
Group exercise had been associated with older people, but the playlist of K-pop and US hip-hop is a hit with gen Z It’s evening rush hour in central Bangkok, the roads are clogged with traffic and the air is heavy from the heat. But in a corner of the capital’s biggest park, the crowds are already gathering to dance. As the music starts, an aerobics leader glides across a small stage. A sea of arm...
Group exercise had been associated with older people, but the playlist of K-pop and US hip-hop is a hit with gen Z It’s evening rush hour in central Bangkok, the roads are clogged with traffic and the air is heavy from the heat. But in a corner of the capital’s biggest park, the crowds are already gathering to dance. As the music starts, an aerobics leader glides across a small stage. A sea of arms move from side to side, then touch the sky. Knees pop up and down. Ankles tap. The sessions have become so popular that projector screens and extra speakers have been added Continue reading...
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JTKPHOTOz/iStock via Getty Images As the stock market continues to waver around Iran war headlines, investors continue to take a risk-off approach to investing even as the broader market shows signs of a rebound. Small- and mid-cap stocks have been particularly hard hit, with investors less willing to bet that a tough economy can enable an upward multiples re-rating. DoubleVerify ( DV ) has been h...
JTKPHOTOz/iStock via Getty Images As the stock market continues to waver around Iran war headlines, investors continue to take a risk-off approach to investing even as the broader market shows signs of a rebound. Small- and mid-cap stocks have been particularly hard hit, with investors less willing to bet that a tough economy can enable an upward multiples re-rating. DoubleVerify ( DV ) has been hit hard on two fronts: first, as a software platform, it has suffered from “SaaSpocalypse” fears, and as an advertising platform, the company is also under scrutiny for weaker ad budgets and a fallout across the industry, as peers like The Trade Desk ( TTD ) and Criteo ( CRTO ) suffer huge declines. The question for investors now is, with DoubleVerify down ~10% since the start of the year and ~20% over the past twelve months, has the selloff gone too far? Data by YCharts I find an incredibly attractive value-buying opportunity in this stock. Certainly there are risks we need to be aware of, but I also think DoubleVerify is being overly penalized for its positioning as an ad-tech software platform - even though its underlying fundamentals are quite healthy. I’m initiating this stock at a buy rating. A holistic platform for ad spend measurement Let’s first kick off the discussion with an overview of what exactly DoubleVerify does. The company is most aptly described as a software platform that helps brands measure the efficacy and reach of their ad spending. It works with brands, agencies, and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to execute efficient campaigns and report results. The snapshot below, taken from DoubleVerify’s 2025 product showcase, demonstrates the three core pillars of its product. The main use case here is verification, which is in the company’s brand name itself. This product helps to verify the stated reach and results of online campaigns. It also helps to make sure that ads are sufficiently targeted and that brands using automated DSPs to purchase ad inventory do...
Are you a subscriber to Anthropic's Claude Pro ($20 monthly) or Max ($100-$200 monthly) plans and use its Claude AI models and products to power third-party AI agents like OpenClaw ? If so, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. Anthropic announced a few hours ago that starting tomorrow, Saturday, April 4, 2026, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET, it will no longer be possible for those Claude subscribers to use ...
Are you a subscriber to Anthropic's Claude Pro ($20 monthly) or Max ($100-$200 monthly) plans and use its Claude AI models and products to power third-party AI agents like OpenClaw ? If so, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. Anthropic announced a few hours ago that starting tomorrow, Saturday, April 4, 2026, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET, it will no longer be possible for those Claude subscribers to use their subscriptions to hook Anthropic's Claude models up to third-party agentic tools, citing the strain such usage was placing on Anthropic's compute and engineering resources, and desire to serve a wide number of users reliably. "We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools," wrote Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, in a post on X . "Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API." The company also reportedly sent out an email to this effect to some subscribers. However, it's not certain if subscribers to Claude Team and Enterprise will be impacted similarly. We've reached out to Anthropic for further clarification and will update when we hear back. To be clear, it will still be possible to use Claude models like Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku to power OpenClaw and similar external agents, but users will now need to opt into a pay-as-you-go "extra usage" billing system or utilize Anthropic's application programming interface (API), which charges for every token of usage rather than allowing for open-ended usage up to certain limits, as the Pro and Max plans have allowed so far. The reason for the change: 'third party services are not optimized' The technical reality, according to Anthropic, is that its first-party tools like Claude Code, its AI vibe coding harness, and Claude Cowork, its business app interfacing and control tool, are built to maximize "prompt cache hit rates"—reusing previously pr...