Autos trade group Mobility Sweden said new vehicle registrations of Tesla models were down 80.7 percent in April amid a backlash against the political activity of CEO Elon Musk.
Tesla registrations were 203 in April, down from 1,052 a year before.
It was one of the worst-performing automakers for the month in the Nordic country, and sat in contrast to an overall 11 percent rise in new passenger vehicle registrations to 24,292.
Polestar Automotive, a Swedish electric automaker and one of Tesla's competitors, saw its sales hit 535 in April, an 11.5 percent increase.
Tesla has faced a similar slide in sales elsewhere in Europe as people protest against Musk, both peacefully and through violent attacks on Tesla property, and its aging fleet of electric vehicles comes under pressure from newer Chinese models.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
"The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order," the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement.
The AfD came second in federal elections in February, winning a record 152 seats in the 630-seat parliament with 20.8% of the vote.
Patricia Harrison, President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), issued the following statement today regarding the President’s Executive Order on public media:
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”
A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app’s data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months.
The April jobs report showed the US labor market remained resilient in the weeks after President Trump's "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariff announcements shook markets.
The US economy added 177,000 nonfarm payrolls in April, more than the 138,000 expected by economists. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%.
Average hourly earnings in April rose 0.2% over last month and 3.8% over the prior year. Economists expected wages to rise 0.3% over last month and 3.9% over the prior year.
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - appearing to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said its ship The Conscience was targeted at 00:23 local time on Friday and issued an SOS signal right after the attack.
The group said it had planned to sail to Gaza and "challenge Israel's illegal siege and blockade" there.
The Maltese government said everyone aboard the ship is "confirmed safe" and that a fire onboard the ship was "brought under control overnight".
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rebuked the phone giant, opened the app store, and made a criminal contempt referral to an Apple executive for lying under oath. Plus, a bad antitrust bill goes down.
The US and Ukraine reached a deal over access to the country’s natural resources, offering a measure of assurance to officials in Kyiv who had feared that President Donald Trump would pull back his support in peace talks with Russia.
The deal will grant the US privileged access to new investment projects to develop Ukraine’s natural resources including aluminum, graphite, oil and natural gas. It’s been seen as critical to fostering Trump’s goodwill as his administration pushes to end the war that began when Russia mounted its full-scale invasion more than three years ago.
The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025, as businesses rushed to stock up on imports ahead of the Trump administration’s tariffs and consumer spending slowed.
The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 0.3% annual rate in the first quarter. That was the first contraction since the first quarter of 2022.
- “It’s a precipitous drop in volume with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles.
- Shipments from China make up about 45% of the business for the port, though some transport companies will be looking to pick up goods at other points in Southeast Asia to try to fill up their ships, Seroka said.
- Data on shipments out of China had already started to signal slowing trade volume to the U.S., alarming some economists.
A court in India has ordered the blocking of encrypted email provider Proton Mail across the country.
On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates. The local firm alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.
After the first launch was postponed due to weather, Amazon’s Kuiper satellites are off to space.
Project Kuiper is Amazon’s plan for a constellation of thousands of internet-beaming satellites.
Once up and running, Kuiper will compete directly with SpaceX’s Starlink.
- A massive power cut has hit large parts of Spain and Portugal
The mayor of Madrid warns people to stay off the roads and only call the emergency services if it's "truly urgent"
- Shops and restaurants in the Spanish capital were plunged into darkness, writes our correspondent Guy Hedgecoe
In Portugal, police say traffic lights are also down, and the metro in Lisbon and Porto is closed
- There were long queues at cash points in the Portuguese capital as card payments were not working
- Andorra and parts of France were also hit - although the Balearic and Canary Islands seem not to have been affected
The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it. The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet. The Communist party decided 30 years ago to unify and populate vast rural areas, an experiment that has become a symbol of the Chinese ability to reshape the world.
We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information.
And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.
Ask just about anybody, and they’ll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn’t looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it’s hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.
Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.
Perplexity doesn’t just want to compete with Google, it apparently wants to be Google.
CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app. This so it can sell premium ads.
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
And work-related queries won’t help the AI company build an accurate-enough dossier.
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” he explained.
Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.
“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there,” he said.
US President Donald Trump has reiterated in an interview with The Time that he believes Ukraine's aspiration to join NATO is the main reason behind Russia's military aggression. He also stated that he considers Crimea to be lost to Ukraine.
"I think what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO," the US leader said.
He also made it clear that he considers Crimea to be lost to Ukraine. "Crimea will stay with Russia," Trump said.
- Volkswagen beat Tesla in European EV sales across the first three months of 2025, data shows.
- Registrations for VW EVs are up more than 150%, while Tesla lost huge ground.
- However, the Model Y and Model 3 remain Europe's top two most-registered EVs.
Xi Jinping has announced a plan to counter China’s continuing economic problems and the impact of the US trade war, as reports swirl that it could drop tariffs on some US products, including semiconductors.
Friday’s meeting of the politburo was convened to discuss China’s economic situation, which since the pandemic has faced difficulties fuelled by a housing sector crisis, youth unemployment, and Donald Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese exports.
A readout of the meeting published by the official state media outlet, Xinhua, said China’s economy had showed a “positive trend” with increasing social confidence in 2025, but “the impact of external shocks has increased”.
“We must strengthen bottom-line thinking, fully prepare emergency plans, and do a solid job in economic work,” it said.
Apple plans to shift the assembly of all iPhones sold in the U.S. to India as early as next year, pivoting away from China to avoid steep tariffs, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google’s Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it.
The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department’s remedies trial to rectify Google’s search monopoly. The DOJ has — among other proposals — requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its popular search engine that’s amassed too much power for anyone else to compete. Yahoo isn’t the only company interested in buying Chrome. While DuckDuckGo’s CEO said they wouldn’t be able to afford it, witnesses from Perplexity and OpenAI both expressed interest in the popular browser on the stand this week.
The director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced his resignation today, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Science.
“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.
What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) surged by as much as 8% today following the company reporting disastrous earnings results – its worst in years and way below expectations.
The stock seems to surge based on people believing Elon Musk’s lies.
Yesterday, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming its worst performance in years.
The automaker is now operating at just 2% margins and would have lost money last quarter if it weren’t for the sales of regulatory credits.
The financial performance was worse than most analysts predicted, and yet, Tesla’s stock surged by as much as 8% today.
The reason for the surge appears to be shareholders overlooking Tesla’s degrading auto business in favor of Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla.
However, the problem is that Musk has been misleading people about his vision of Tesla’s future and lied several times on the earnings call that followed the release of its financial results.
The remedy phase of Google's antitrust trial is underway, with the government angling to realign Google's business after the company was ruled a search monopolist. The Department of Justice is seeking a plethora of penalties, but perhaps none as severe as forcing Google to sell Chrome. But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.
Top diplomats of the United States, Ukraine, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have postponed a planned meeting in London, downgrading the talks on ending the war in Ukraine to discussions among their senior officials.
The UK Foreign Office indicated that ministerial-level meetings would be replaced by discussions at an official level.
The move follows US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to travel to Moscow instead, with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has also opted to not attend. In their absence, Keith Kellogg, US President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is leading the American delegation.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha arrived in London along with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov.
The European Commission issued the first fines under its Digital Markets Act on Wednesday, slapping tech giants Apple and Meta with penalties for breaching the EU’s new digital rulebook.
Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.
The Israeli government shared and then deleted a social media post offering condolences over the death of Pope Francis, without saying why, though an Israeli newspaper linked the decision to the late pontiff's criticism of the war in Gaza.
The verified @Israel account had posted on Monday a message on social media platform X that read: "Rest in Peace, Pope Francis. May his memory be a blessing", alongside an image of the pope visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Post quoted officials at the foreign ministry as saying that the pope had made "statements against Israel" and that the social media post had been published in "error".
At least two dozen people are feared to have been killed after gunmen indiscriminately fired at tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Tuesday in what local authorities called a terror attack, blaming militants fighting against Indian rule.
"This attack is much larger than anything we've seen directed at civilians in recent years," Omar Abdullah, the region's top elected official, wrote on social media. "The death toll is still being ascertained so I don't want to get into those details."
Agence France-Presse, citing Indian police, reported that at least 24 people had died in the attack, which coincided with the trip to India of U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
Russia’s ruble has surged to become the best performing global currency, posting this year’s strongest gains against the dollar to outpace even the traditional safe haven of gold.
The ruble has strengthened 38% versus the dollar on the over-the-counter market since the beginning of this year, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. While the greenback has reeled from mounting pressure caused by US President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff wars, Russia’s currency has also been buoyed by factors unique to the country, including record-high local interest rates.
China has halted all imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States for more than ten weeks
According to the Financial Times, shipping data revealed that no LNG shipments have taken place between the two nations since a 69,000-tonne tanker from Corpus Christi, Texas, arrived in China’s Fujian province on 6 February.
A second vessel destined for China was redirected to Bangladesh after it failed to arrive before Beijing imposed a 15 per cent tariff on US LNG on 10 February.
The tariff has now been raised to 49 per cent, effectively pricing US gas out of the Chinese market.
The current freeze on US LNG mirrors a similar halt during United States President Donald Trump’s first term, which lasted over a year.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.
Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found a possible 'biosignature' – the potential fingerprint of life – within its atmosphere, although they say they're remaining "cautious", and that this isn't a confirmed detection.
The chemicals detected are the same as those produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth.
U.S. President Donald Trump does not want to transfer additional Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems to Kyiv, even if he receives $50 billion from EU funds in return. He refused a corresponding lucrative deal, while making new accusations against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, UNN reports, citing BILD.
The White House said China is now facing up to a 245 percent tariff on imports to the U.S. "as a result of its retaliatory actions," another escalation in a trade war between the world's two largest economies.
The top potential tariff is higher than previously stated and was referenced in a fact sheet published by the White House late on Tuesday.
No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.
As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.
These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills.
In an unprecedented move, the Japan Fair Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order against Google for violating the country's anti-monopoly law by forcing manufacturers to preinstall the company’s apps on their Android smartphones.
This is the first time that Japan has issued such an order against any of the major U.S. technology companies referred to collectively as GAFAM — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
The Federal Trade Commission and Meta will square off in a long-awaited antitrust trial on Monday over the tech giant's past acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.
In an Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Monday, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported from the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Mr. Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bukele said returning Mr. Abrego Garcia would be akin to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president talked, Mr. Trump smiled in approval, surrounded by cabinet members who spoke in support of the president on cue.
Beijing has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the world’s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries.
Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors.
The official crackdown is part of China’s retaliation for President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs that started on April 2.
The UK government is taking control of Chinese-owned British Steel after emergency legislation was rushed through Parliament in a single day.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told MPs the government's likely next step would be to nationalise the Scunthorpe plant, which employs 2,700 people.
But he said he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.
President Donald Trump’s administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, potentially cushioning consumers from sticker shock while benefiting electronics giants including Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.
A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.
Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history.
The Yuan dipped to a 17-year low against the U.S. dollar early on Thursday after President Donald Trump excluded Beijing from his 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs and cranked up his tariff on Chinese goods imports to 125 percent.
Nvidia will be permitted to continue selling H20 graphics processing units in China following a visit to Mar-a-Lago by CEO Jensen Huang, according to NPR. Huang attended a dinner last Friday at the resort that was priced at $1 million per head, though it is unclear whether he spoke with President Trump.
James Cameron appeared on the “Boz to the Future” podcast and said the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half,” and the Oscar winner is trying to figure out how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members. Cameron announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners.
Nate said its app’s users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.
US stocks sank on Thursday, pulling back from the previous day's historic rally amid concerns that President Trump's broad trade offensive has become a direct confrontation with China.
The S&P 500 (GSPC) dropped over 2.8%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (IXIC) tumbled 3.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell nearly 1,000 points, or 2.2%. The 10-year Treasury yield, (^TNX) in high focus amid bond market whiplash, fell to around 4.35%.