"The Pulse With Francine Lacqua" is all about conversations with high profile guests in the beating heart of global business, economics, finance and politics. Based in London, we go wherever the story is, bringing you exclusive interviews and market-moving scoops. Today's guests: Ludovic Subran, Allianz, CIO & Chief Economist; Anu Talus, European Data Protection Board, Chair; Michele Della Vigna, ...
"The Pulse With Francine Lacqua" is all about conversations with high profile guests in the beating heart of global business, economics, finance and politics. Based in London, we go wherever the story is, bringing you exclusive interviews and market-moving scoops. Today's guests: Ludovic Subran, Allianz, CIO & Chief Economist; Anu Talus, European Data Protection Board, Chair; Michele Della Vigna, Goldman Sachs, Head of EMEA Natural Resources Research; Craig Nicol, Sona Asset Management, Head of Credit Strategy. (Source: Bloomberg)
Divisions between Washington and European capitals fuels concern over US commitment to peace deal As a ceasefire was declared in the Middle East, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to draw attention to the war in his own country, posting on social media that Ukraine had consistently pushed for a ceasefire in the war “being waged by Russia here, in Europe”. Efforts to end the war in Ukraine have largely st...
Divisions between Washington and European capitals fuels concern over US commitment to peace deal As a ceasefire was declared in the Middle East, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to draw attention to the war in his own country, posting on social media that Ukraine had consistently pushed for a ceasefire in the war “being waged by Russia here, in Europe”. Efforts to end the war in Ukraine have largely stalled since the Iran war began, with trilateral talks between Kyiv, Moscow and Washington, which had already yielded little, frozen since February 2026. The war, meanwhile, has continued with air attacks on Ukrainian cities and heavy fighting on the battlefields as Russia launches a new spring offensive. Continue reading...
Iryna Zarutska's Accused Killer Found Incompetent To Stand Trial In Charlotte Stabbing In a development that has reignited outrage over North Carolina’s handling of violent repeat offenders and the mentally ill, the man accused of savagely murdering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train - saying " I got that white girl " - has been declared “incapable to proceed” with hi...
Iryna Zarutska's Accused Killer Found Incompetent To Stand Trial In Charlotte Stabbing In a development that has reignited outrage over North Carolina’s handling of violent repeat offenders and the mentally ill, the man accused of savagely murdering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train - saying " I got that white girl " - has been declared “incapable to proceed” with his state murder trial. Decarlos Brown Jr., a 35-year-old homeless man with a long criminal history and diagnosed schizophrenia, was evaluated at Central Regional Hospital on December 29, 2025. Court filings made public this week reveal that mental-health experts determined he lacks the capacity to understand the proceedings or assist in his own defense. A motion filed April 7 by his state public defender in Mecklenburg Superior Court formally disclosed the findings and requested a 180-day delay of an upcoming competency hearing originally set for April 30. The ruling throws the state first-degree murder case into limbo . Under North Carolina law, if Brown is formally ruled incompetent, the charges could eventually be dismissed without prejudice - meaning they could be refiled only if and when he is restored to competency. But restoring competency in cases like this often takes a year or more because of severe shortages at state psychiatric facilities. Brown remains in federal custody, where he faces separate charges that could still carry the death penalty. A random horror caught on camera The killing occurred on the evening of August 22, 2025. Twenty-three-year-old Iryna Zarutska, still wearing her black baseball cap from her shift at Zepeddie’s Pizza, boarded the Lynx Blue Line light-rail train heading home. She took a seat. Seconds later, Brown—already seated directly behind her—pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed her three times in the neck and upper body in a sudden, unprovoked attack. Surveillance video, which quickly circulated online, captured the grueso...
Regulators clean up AI-modified videos China’s National Radio and Television Administration said Wednesday it had cracked down on unauthorized artificial intelligence-modified videos. Following a one-month campaign launched in January, platforms removed more than 23,000 non-compliant videos and penalized over 100 accounts. The broader, ongoing effort — targeting altered content involving classic T...
Regulators clean up AI-modified videos China’s National Radio and Television Administration said Wednesday it had cracked down on unauthorized artificial intelligence-modified videos. Following a one-month campaign launched in January, platforms removed more than 23,000 non-compliant videos and penalized over 100 accounts. The broader, ongoing effort — targeting altered content involving classic TV dramas, historical and revolutionary themes, and heroic figures — had removed nearly 29,000 videos as of March 31.
YouTube Shorts is rolling out a new AI-powered feature giving creators an easy way to realistically clone themselves on camera. The launch, hinted at earlier this year , reflects the platform's fraught relationship with AI-generated content, adding more generative features while struggling to contain AI slop , deepfake scams, and impersonations. YouTube says the new tool will let users create a di...
YouTube Shorts is rolling out a new AI-powered feature giving creators an easy way to realistically clone themselves on camera. The launch, hinted at earlier this year , reflects the platform's fraught relationship with AI-generated content, adding more generative features while struggling to contain AI slop , deepfake scams, and impersonations. YouTube says the new tool will let users create a digital version of themselves, called an avatar, that can be inserted into existing Shorts videos or used to generate entirely new ones. The company said avatars will "look and sound like you," framing them as a safer and more secure way to use AI to … Read the full story at The Verge.
(RTTNews) - The UK stock market's benchmark FTSE 100 drifted lower on Thursday with investors reluctant to pick up stocks amid uncertainty about U.S.-Iran truce.
(RTTNews) - The UK stock market's benchmark FTSE 100 drifted lower on Thursday with investors reluctant to pick up stocks amid uncertainty about U.S.-Iran truce.
Nuclear power is renewable, carbon-neutral, and cheap to produce. However, the high up-front costs of building a new nuclear power plant have impeded nuclear deployment in the U.S. But a new crop of nuclear start-ups hopes to change that by building small modular reactors (SMRs), which would have a much smaller footprint and lower construction costs than a traditional power plant. One of the first...
Nuclear power is renewable, carbon-neutral, and cheap to produce. However, the high up-front costs of building a new nuclear power plant have impeded nuclear deployment in the U.S. But a new crop of nuclear start-ups hopes to change that by building small modular reactors (SMRs), which would have a much smaller footprint and lower construction costs than a traditional power plant. One of the first movers in this potentially revolutionary industry is NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR) , the first SMR company with designs approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The company is speculative and its stock is volatile, but it could be the ticket to millionaire status for risk-tolerant investors. Here's why. Continue reading
In this article CRWV MSFT GOOGL Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Arda Kucukkaya | Anadolu | Getty Images Meta has committed to spending an additional $21 billion on AI cloud infrastructure from CoreWeave , which comes on top of a prior arrangement of $14.2 billion, as the social media company continues to ramp up its investments in artificial intelligence. The new agreement, announc...
In this article CRWV MSFT GOOGL Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Arda Kucukkaya | Anadolu | Getty Images Meta has committed to spending an additional $21 billion on AI cloud infrastructure from CoreWeave , which comes on top of a prior arrangement of $14.2 billion, as the social media company continues to ramp up its investments in artificial intelligence. The new agreement, announced on Thursday, runs from 2027 to 2032. The previous deal , disclosed in September, goes through 2031. CoreWeave's data centers are filled with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units that can accommodate AI models, offering a key piece of infrastructure that hyperscalers need for rapidly expanding to meet what they describe as insatiable demand. While Meta and its peers are building out their own facilities, they need capacity from companies like CoreWeave, which also serves Google , Microsof t, OpenAI and others. In March, Meta said it would spend $10 billion on a Texas data center . "Sure, they can buy compute," CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC in an interview. "Yet, for some reason, all these people who can buy compute also feel the need to buy it from us, because of the quality of the product that we deliver." In Meta's last earnings report, the company said it plans to shell out between $115 billion and $135 billion this year in capital expenditures, above Wall Street's estimates and nearly twice the amount it spent on capex in 2025. While Meta's core advertising business has benefited from the focus on AI, the company has struggled to get traction in the world of AI models currently dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Meta has spent lavishly to form a Superintelligence Labs group that develops advanced AI models, and on Wednesday announced its new model called Muse Spark . Meta has had partnered with CoreWeave since 2023, and Intrator said his company's infrastructure allows Meta to make better use of all the AI talent it's acquired. "Th...
Vacancy rates for office properties in Stockholm continued to worsen at the start of this year, in a worrying sign for Sweden’s landlords who just escaped a funding crunch but now face more operational challenges. The vacancy rate for office properties increased to 15.5% at the start of the year across the Swedish capital, the highest since the financial crisis in the early 1990s, Tor Borg , chief...
Vacancy rates for office properties in Stockholm continued to worsen at the start of this year, in a worrying sign for Sweden’s landlords who just escaped a funding crunch but now face more operational challenges. The vacancy rate for office properties increased to 15.5% at the start of the year across the Swedish capital, the highest since the financial crisis in the early 1990s, Tor Borg , chief analyst at real estate data provider CityMark, told Bloomberg. The office market in Sweden and elsewhere has faced challenges in the wake of the pandemic with a mix of oversupply, rising costs and tenants re-evaluating their space needs due to more remote work. That has led to higher vacancies and slower leasing activity. Furthermore, heightened geopolitical insecurity made companies more cautious about hiring at the end of the year, Sven-Olof Johansson , chief executive officer of FastPartner AB , said in the landlord’s report for 2025. “Stockholm is also a market where there was a lot of construction throughout the 2010s, which has resulted in an oversupply of office premises,” he said, adding that the same goes for all of Sweden’s four largest cities. Read More: Iran Shock Upends Real Estate’s Long-Anticipated Recovery The demand for workspace in central Stockholm versus outside it was substantial. While the vacancy rate for central offices stood at 11.1% at the start of 2026, almost every fourth office in northern Stockholm stood empty at the beginning of the year, at a 23.1% vacancy rate, according to data from CityMark.