The Apple Car is Dead, But the Innovation Behind It Lives on
Business

The Apple Car is Dead, But the Innovation Behind It Lives on

Linked media - Associated media Innovation on wheels Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company. Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes. Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has never publicly acknowledged its existence. That said, it told staff on Tuesday that many of them would be redeployed. There had been an wider internal debate ...
Companies Were Big on CBD. Not Anymore.
Sports

Companies Were Big on CBD. Not Anymore.

Connected media - Associated media “My account on Meta is forever banned from making any advertising after I posted once under our company’s page about our CBD products and it was flagged,” said Clarice Coppolino, head of branding and product development for Vital Leaf, which makes CBD chocolate, skin care and tinctures. The Covid-19 pandemic also took a toll on the industry. While sales in the early weeks and months of the pandemic soared as nervous consumers sought relief through CBD-infused products, the interest among large companies and investors fell off. “Covid clearly shifted consumer packaged goods companies away from the CBD space and what was possible there to focusing on simply meeting food demand,” said Carmen Brace, a consultant who worked with companies that sell consu...
Max Verstappen’s father: Red Bull could be ‘torn apart’ if Horner stays amid controversy
Sports

Max Verstappen’s father: Red Bull could be ‘torn apart’ if Horner stays amid controversy

Stay informed on all the biggest stories in Formula One. Sign up here to receive the Prime Tire newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday and Friday.Fractures within Red Bull Racing appear to have grown after Max Verstappen’s father, Jos, warned the team was “in danger of being torn apart” if Christian Horner remained in charge amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the team principal.Horner remains in the spotlight after a turbulent few days in Bahrain to start the new Formula One season. Although Verstappen scored his eighth consecutive grand prix victory with a dominant display, beating teammate Sergio Pérez by over 20 seconds, his father spoke publicly about divisions within the team as the situation remains the biggest story in the sport.The situation became public in early February wh...
Shafiqah Hudson, Who Fought Trolls on Social Media, Dies at 46
Technology

Shafiqah Hudson, Who Fought Trolls on Social Media, Dies at 46

Shafiqah Hudson was looking for a job in early June of 2014, toggling between Twitter and email, when she noticed an odd hashtag that was surging on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay.The posters claimed to be Black feminists, but they had laughable handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts; they declared they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression, among other inanities.They didn’t seem like real people, Ms. Hudson thought, but parodies of Black women, spouting ridiculous propositions. As Ms. Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018, “Anybody with half the sense God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these weren’t feminist sentiments.”But the hashtag kept trending, roiling the Twitter community, and the conservative...
Brighter Economic Mood Isn’t Translating Into Support for Biden
Business

Brighter Economic Mood Isn’t Translating Into Support for Biden

Economic vibes don’t necessarily predict electoral outcomes, though, and this campaign is different in many ways from those in the past. “We’re kind of in an unprecedented situation where we’re weighing two incumbents,” said Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey.Anthony Rice, a 54-year-old Democrat in eastern Indiana, and pretty much everyone he knows, he said, are doing well right now. Gas prices are down, jobs are plentiful, and Mr. Rice, a unionized dump-truck driver, is benefiting directly from the infrastructure law that Mr. Biden signed in 2021. Yet few people in the deep-red part of the country where he lives will acknowledge that, Mr. Rice said.“There are more people now that are working, have better jobs, have more chances to get better jobs now than at any other time,” he said...
Juli Lynne Charlot, Creator of the Poodle Skirt, Dies at 101
World

Juli Lynne Charlot, Creator of the Poodle Skirt, Dies at 101

What’s a nice Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, a party invitation but no clothes and a pair of scissors but no sewing skills?Invent the poodle skirt, of course.That, quite by accident, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, in the process creating a totem of midcentury material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.Ms. Charlot, a New York native who died at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at 101, had been a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a viscount, or British nobleman. Fashion conscious but hopeless with a needle, she stumbled by necessity onto a pattern for a striking skirt that involved no sewing: Take a large swath of solid-colored felt, cut it into an expansive circl...
Apparently Healthy, but Diagnosed With Alzheimer’s?
Health

Apparently Healthy, but Diagnosed With Alzheimer’s?

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease usually requires an extended diagnostic process. A doctor takes a patient’s medical history, discusses symptoms, administers verbal and visual cognitive tests.The patient may undergo a PET scan, an M.R.I. or a spinal tap — tests that detect the presence of two proteins in the brain, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, both associated with Alzheimer’s.All of that could change dramatically if new criteria proposed by an Alzheimer’s Association working group are widely adopted.Its final recommendations, expected later this year, will accelerate a shift that is already underway: from defining the disease by symptoms and behavior to defining it purely biologically — with biomarkers, substances in the body that indicate disease.The draft guideline...
How should broadcasts handle court-storming? On the line between documenting and glamorizing
Sports

How should broadcasts handle court-storming? On the line between documenting and glamorizing

Throughout a three-decade career as a prominent ESPN play-by-play broadcaster, Dave Pasch says he has been on the mic for two college basketball games that ended in a court-storming. One occurred earlier this month as unranked LSU upset Kentucky as time expired at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, La. Pasch recalled this week a conversation he and analyst Jay Williams had with an LSU athletics department staffer prior to the game.“We asked, if they beat Kentucky, will they storm the court?” Pasch said. “He was like, ‘Nope, we don’t storm the court here. We’ve beaten Kentucky before.’ Well, they won on this crazy, last-second shot and, of course, they stormed the floor.”In the game’s final sequence, you can clearly hear Williams say, “Didn’t we talk today about if LSU has th...
How Regulations Fractured Apple’s App Store
Technology

How Regulations Fractured Apple’s App Store

Since introducing the App Store in 2008, Apple has run it largely the same way across 175 countries, right down to the 30 percent commission it has collected on every app sold.The company calls the result an economic miracle. The store has generated more than $1 trillion in sales, helped create more than seven million jobs and delivered Apple billions of dollars in annual profits.But as the App Store approaches its 16th anniversary, a patchwork of local rules are upending Apple’s authority over it.On Thursday, European Union regulators will begin enforcing the Digital Markets Act, a 2022 law that requires Apple to open iPhones in the bloc to competing app marketplaces and alternative payment systems for in-app sales.The changes follow similar demands in South Korea and the United States, w...
Forced to Change: Tech Giants Bow to Global Onslaught of Rules
Business

Forced to Change: Tech Giants Bow to Global Onslaught of Rules

For decades, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta barreled forward with few rules and limits. As their power, riches and reach grew, a groundswell of regulatory activity, lawmaking and legal cases sprang up against them in Europe, the United States, China, India, Canada, South Korea and Australia. Now that global tipping point for reining in the largest tech companies has finally tipped.The companies have been forced to alter the everyday technology they offer, including devices and features of their social media services, which have been especially noticeable to users in Europe. The firms are also making consequential shifts that are less visible, to their business models, deal making and data-sharing practices, for example.The degree of change is evident at Apple. While the Silicon ...