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The abrupt departure of Intel’s Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger offers a fresh opportunity for the troubled company to consider potential deal options, including scenarios that he rejected during his time running the chipmaker. The board has discussed a range of possibilities in recent months, such as private equity transactions and even a split of Intel’s factory and product-design businesses. But Gelsinger was opposed to breaking up the company, focusing instead on his plan to restore Intel’s technological edge and become a made-to-order manufacturer for outside clients. Gelsinger left this week following pressure from the board and is set to receive as much as $10 million in severance pay. With his departure, there’s a chance to reset the conversation. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been helping the company ponder its options and may find a more receptive audience in new management. Source link

In the middle of 2020, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s investigative unit sent the agency’s top officials a report containing a stark warning based on an interview it had conducted with a doctor who had worked in China’s sports ministry. The doctor claimed that China had been running a state-backed doping program for decades, a potential nightmare scenario for the Olympic movement, which was still recovering from a Russian doping scandal that had rocked the Games. And while the doctor’s information was years old — she had defected in 2017 — it was specific. Among the ways Chinese athletes were cheating, she said, was by taking undetectable amounts of a little-known prescription heart medication, trimetazidine, or TMZ, which can help increase stamina, endurance and recovery. Source link

Meta is seeking as much as 4 gigawatts of new nuclear energy as the company looks for a reliable electricity source for its data centers. The Facebook parent is asking developers to submit proposals to deliver 1 to 4 GW of reactor capacity, starting in the early 2030s, according to a statement Tuesday. Commercial nuclear reactors generate about 1 GW of electricity, enough for 750,000 typical homes. Meta is racing to line up clean energy to meet the massive electricity needs of its artificial intelligence ambitions. Like fellow tech giants Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, it’s now pursuing a tantalizing but hard-to-develop energy source — nuclear power. Source link

China’s move to ban exports of rare metals to the U.S. underscores the need for trade cooperation between mineral-rich Canada and its southern neighbor. That’s the message from the Mining Association of Canada, which argued that China’s decision to curb shipments of gallium, germanium and other key metals to the U.S. is “a stark reminder of the challenges posed by geopolitical tensions, particularly on the reliable supply of critical minerals.” The statement from the mining association follows the escalation of trade tensions with the U.S., after President-elect Donald Trump threatened to slap 25% tariffs on all goods coming from Canada and Mexico unless the countries each do more to stem migration and fentanyl. Source link

China ratcheted up trade tensions with the United States with an export ban on several materials with high-tech and military applications, in a tit-for-tat move after U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration escalated technology curbs on Beijing. Gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials are no longer allowed to be shipped to America, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Tuesday. Beijing will also place tighter controls on sales of graphite, it added. The move came after the White House on Monday slapped fresh curbs on the sale of high-bandwidth memory chips made by U.S. and foreign companies to China. The Biden administration’s goal is to slow China’s development of advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence systems that may help its military. Source link

Rakuten Group began marketing its third dollar bond of the year, seeking to take advantage of strong investor appetite for junk rated debt that drove U.S. spreads to their lowest since 2007. The e-commerce giant is targeting the sale of as much as $550 million of subordinated notes that can be called after five years, with price talk for the deal given at 8.375% area, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Rakuten is offering debt with a rating of single B from S&P Global Ratings, three levels below its issuer score. Rakuten is a rare Japanese issuer in the U.S. high-yield market, upon which it has become increasingly reliant for funding after its mobile network business saddled it with a string of losses and lower credit ratings. The company, which priced $3.8 billion of dollar bonds between January and April, said it plans to use the funds from the current offering to redeem yen notes that have call options late next year. Source link

Akita – Mir, a 12-year-old male Siberian cat that Russian President Vladimir Putin gifted to Akita Prefecture, died from an illness Tuesday, the prefectural government said the same day. Akita Gov. Norihisa Satake had cared for the cat. The prefecture presented female Akita dog Yume to Putin in 2012 as a token of its gratitude for Russia’s assistance offered to areas affected by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that mainly hit the Tohoku region, which includes Akita. Putin gave the male cat to the prefecture in return in 2013, and Satake named it Mir, which means peace in Russian. Satake has been in the governor’s post since 2009. Every February, Satake uploaded a video of Mir on the prefecture’s official YouTube channel to coincide with the cat’s birthday, Feb. 12, and on other occasions. Even after Russia started to invade Ukraine in February 2022, the governor continued to release information about Mir, saying that the cat is innocent. Source link

THE HAGUE – Russian presidential aircraft and funds were used in a program that took children from occupied Ukrainian territories, stripped them of Ukrainian identity and placed them with Russian families, according to a report by Yale’s School of Public Health. The U.S. State Department-backed research, published on Tuesday, identified 314 Ukrainian children taken to Russia in the early months of the war in Ukraine as part of what it says was a systematic, Kremlin-funded program to “Russify” them. Reuters was unable to confirm the report’s findings independently. Source link

BRUSSELS – Ukraine declared it would not settle for anything less than NATO membership to guarantee its future security, as the alliance sidestepped Kyiv’s call for an immediate invitation at a foreign ministers’ meeting on Tuesday. In a letter to his NATO counterparts ahead of the meeting, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said an invitation would remove one of Russia’s main arguments for waging its war: preventing Ukraine from joining the alliance. Although NATO has stated that Ukraine’s path to membership is “irreversible,” the alliance has not set a date or issued an invitation. Diplomats said there was currently no consensus among its 32 members to do so. Source link

The U.S. military’s Space Force has launched its first-ever unit in Japan, part of an effort to boost coordination and interoperability with its ally, including the Air Self-Defense Force’s own Space Operations Group. Activated on Wednesday, U.S. Space Forces Japan — a component similar to the one established at South Korea’s Osan Air Base in 2022 — will operate out of Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo with a staff of about 10 and be subordinate to U.S. Forces Japan, which is set to be reconstituted into a joint force headquarters next year. Part of a larger U.S. push to increase collaboration with allies in the space domain, the unit is expected to help boost deterrence and improve coordination in responding to challenges amid shared concerns about the increasingly advanced space technologies of rivals such as China, Russia and North Korea. Source link