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Stocks rose in morning trading on Wall Street Monday to kick off the first full week of the new year, led by energy and technology companies. The S&P 500 rose 0.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 639 points, or 1.3%, as of 10:55 a.m. Eastern. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.8%. Markets in Asia and Europe were mostly higher. Energy companies and the oil market were a key focus after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a weekend raid. The price of U.S. crude jumped 1.4% to $58.13 per barrel. The price of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 1.2% to $61.50 per barrel. President Donald Trump has floated a plan for U.S. oil companies to help rebuild Venezuelas oil industry. Chevron surged 5% and Exxon Mobil rose 2% for some of the strongest gains in the market. After years of neglect and international sanctions, Venezuelas oil industry is in disrepair. It could take years and major investments before production can increase dramatically. But some analysts expect its current output of about 1.1 million barrels a day could double or triple fairly quickly. Big banks also made solid gains. JPMorgan Chase rose 3.4% and Bank of America jumped 2.6%. Wall Street is also watching the technology sector as the industry kicks off its annual CES trade show in Las Vegas. Nvidia rose 0.3% and Intel jumped 2%. Investors are particularly focused on advancements in artificial intelligence, or AI. The sector led the broader market to a series of records in 2025 on expectations that AI will continue to drive advancements and profits for a wide range of technology companies. The latest updates on AI from influential technology companies could help shed more light on whether the big investments are worth the potential financial risks. Companies like Nvidia have been heavily investing in the technology, while investors on Wall Street have made those companies among the most valuable in the world. Their outsized valuations now drive much of the movement for major indexes. Gold gained 2.8% and the price of silver soared 8%. Such assets are often considered safe havens in times of geopolitical turmoil. The metals have notched record prices over the last year amid lingering economic concerns brought on by conflicts and trade wars. Treasury yields held relatively steady in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.18% from 4.19% late Friday. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which moves more closely with expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do, fell to 3.46% from 3.48% late Friday. Wall Street will get several economic updates this week that will also be watched by the Fed as it determines interest rate policy. On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management released its manufacturing index for December showing the sector continued shrinking. More importantly, the business group will release its December report on the services sector on Wednesday. The services sector makes up the bulk of the U.S. economy and it grew, even if only slightly, throughout most of 2025. Reports on the job market later this week, which include updates for job openings and overall employment, will be a bigger focus for the Fed. The central bank has been weighing a slowing job market against risks for rising inflation as it decides whether to cut interest rates. It cut its benchmark rate three times late in 2025, but inflation has remained above its 2% target and that has made the Fed more cautious. Wall Street still expects the Fed to hold rates steady at its upcoming meeting later in January. Damian J. Troise, AP business writer AP business writer Elaine Kurtenbach and AP video journalist Mayuko Ono contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
While most EVs tip the scales at several tons, a new featherweight electric sports car weighs half as muchor lessthan others on the road. Longbow, the U.K.-based startup behind the sleek EV, plans to bring its first vehicle to market later this year with a limited run of 150 cars, starting at 84,995, or roughly $110,000. A high-performance version of the design is on display at CES this week. The companys aim is to reverse the car industrys weight problemsomething that’s especially an issue for EVs that have large batteries inside. Heavier vehicles have bigger carbon footprints, use more energy, and are more dangerous in a crash for pedestrians. They also wear out roads faster (as well as tires, which spew more microplastic pollution the more weight they carry). [Photo: Longbow Motors] Everything gets better when you remove weight, says Mark Tapscott, cofounder and CTO at Longbow. Still, most of the industry has been moving in the opposite direction. We really see automotive in generaland EVs specificallyare getting increasingly heavier,” says Longbow CEO Daniel Davey. “When they become heavier, that requires more resources, requires bigger batteries, bigger motors. It’s kind of the opposite of marginal gains.” The Chevy Silverado, for example, can weigh as much as 8,900 pounds. Even the smaller Nissan Leaf can weigh 4,200 pounds. Longbows Speedster weighs around 1,973 pounds. [Photo: Longbow Motors] A lighter car, by design The car uses lightweight materials, prioritizing options with the lowest environmental impact. A lot of manufacturers will move towards carbon fiber, but it is the single worst material you can use for the environment, says Tapscott. It breaks easily. It’s difficult to maintain. You wear out the car quickly. Instead, the car uses a custom aluminum chassis designed to maximum stiffness while minimizing weight. It also includes natural fiber composites and thermoplastics. Each design decision was made with lightness in mind. The handbrake is manual, for example, which makes it weigh less, but also makes it more effective and cheaper and quicker to develop. The design team kept the car intentionally simple. Instead of chasing unnecessary specslike a 600-mile battery range when a typical commute might be 30 miles, or a four-second sprint from zero to 60the design is pared down to the essentials. [Photo: Longbow Motors] It’s similar to the approach that the startup Slate has taken as it works on a low-cost electric truck. “What they’ve done in the truck space I think is kind of revolutionary,” says Davey. “Because they’re saying, ‘You know all those things you pay loads of money that you don’t need? Well, you could not have them and not pay all the money if you’d like.’ And I think people like that idea.” [Photo: Longbow Motors] The world doesn’t need faster numbers,” says Tapscott. “It needs better experiences. And so that’s why we talk about what the car is, what it does, how it feels, rather than what battery chemistry we have. They took time to find the right off-the-shelf components for the vehicle. The car on display at CES has innovative motors built into each wheel. The company hasn’t yet announced whether that feature will be available in the first cars that come out this year, but it’s another way that it can cut weight even further. [Image: Donut Labs] A typical drivetrain, with a central motor that connects to each wheel, might have around 100 parts that can weigh a couple of hundred pounds and take up valuable space. By placing motors in the wheels, it eliminates those components and works more efficiently. Donut Labs, the Finnish startup that designed the new motors, says that they can also reduce the cost of making a vehicle by $1,000 to $2,000. Having motors in the wheels also makes cars more responsive. “It makes the car drive in a way that you cannot experience otherwise,” says Marko Lehtimäki, CEO of Donut Labs. [Photo: Longbow Motors] A more sustainable car that’s longer-lasting Because of Longbow’s careful approach to sustainability, manufacturing the car has a lower carbon footprint than a typical gas car. When it’s driven, it also uses less electricity per mile than other EVs because it weighs less. (The lower weight also means that it can have a range of up to 280 miles on a charge, even though it uses a smaller battery than a typical EV.) The company also designed the car to last as long as possiblewith an unprecedented pledge to help keep each car on the road for 100 years. The first step: trying to design a classic car that people will want to keep for life rather than replace. [Photo: Longbow Motors] “It has to start with design,” says Tapscott. “No one wants to drive the Fiat Multipla anymore because it was the ugliest car ever built. So a core tenet of being available for a hundred years is that people want the car. Desirability. We looked at design that is timeless, not radically modern. We are drawing more inspiration from cars of the past.” The materials are also made to last. The aluminum chassis, for example, won’t rust or corrode. The parts are designed for repair. When possible, the engineers chose 3D printing for certain parts, like clips or brackets, so that they can easily be remade later on demand decades from now. [Photo: Longbow Motors] The car is also designed to be fun to driveanother way, obviously, to convince drivers to keep the same car in use longer. The light weight is an important part of the experience. “I think most people today haven’t actually experienced what a lightweight car is like to drive,” says Tapscott. “Even a lightweight hatchback or economy [sedan] are all well over 3,000 pounds or so. So when you start driving something that’s under 2,000 pounds, everything changes. The way it handles corners, under acceleration, under braking, everything gets better when you get lighter. I think any racing driver will explain that the weight is the most important thing you have.” [Photo: Longbow Motors] Their aim is to design the best sports car in the world, not just the best electric version. “You need to meet people where they are,” says Tapscott. “And you need to meet petrol on an even playing field, and do that with a really aspirational car that’s better. It just happens that it has one full green credential as well.” That mandate will extend beyond sports cars, though that’s where the company is beginning. “Our mission is to quickly make all cars better and lighter for people and the planet,” says Davey. “That’s really by showing a way to an industry that has lost itself by just adding all this excess weight to everything that they do.”
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E-Commerce
When I was Chief of Staff at CoinDesk, I was in charge of the publication’s approach to AI. One of the earliest debates our internal AI committee had was about whether we should allow AI to index our articles or not. Most of the people on the committee thought we should block AI crawlers. While the fury of media copyright lawsuits had yet to begin, the issue had gotten some traction, and it was easy to make the case that we shouldn’t give our content away to AI companies to summarize unless we were compensated in some way. But one person boldly made the case for the other side: He argued that, if AI becomes the new way people find information, shutting ourselves out of AI services would mean our storiesand more broadly, the ongoing narratives around themwould be cut out of the amalgamated answers that the people using AI would read. We would be conceding that ground to competitors to not just get referrals (which, we knew even then, would be few), but to establish consensus. We would no longer be the authority on the things we write about, at least for those who find information through AI portals. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} The cost of silence Little did I know that largely academic debate at the time would become the centerpiece of the AI conversation nearly three years later. Today, information presence in AI summariesfor brands, for public relations, and for the mediais of great interest, and poorly understood. For publishers, the issues of copyright and compensation are ongoing. But regardless of how those conflicts are resolved, AI has become the primary interpreter of their content for a large and growing audience. The committee didn’t have a name for it back then, but the idea of taking the opposite course of blocking, and actually encouraging AI to index your content, is now called generative engine optimization or GEO (sometimes the first word is substituted for “answer,” or AEO). When I’ve previously written about GEO, it was mostly in the context of why publishers would even want to do it. After all, if AI is taking your content and summarizing it without sending users to your site, what’s the benefit? There are reasons, but I think it’s more informative to flip the question around: What’s the cost if you don’t? And that is relinquishing your influence on the consensus around the topics in your domain. The risk isn’t the loss in trafficthat’s lost anyway. Audiences are turning to AI as their information guides no matter what publishers do. What a publisher risks losing is their role as the chief interpreter of events. By reporting facts and validating claims, journalists have historically set the baseline for others to react to. Without those inputs, AI will paint a poor picture of reality. The thing is, even if a publisher opts out of AI summarization, there will always be someone else who republishes the information who doesn’t (an important foundational concept of copyright law is that, although works are copyrightable, the underlying facts and ideas aren’t). Except now that set of facts is put through their lens, and that will define the first draft that machines reuse. Will the answer be inadequate and incomplete? Probably. But as use of AI increases, it’ll be what most interpret as the truth. That’s why I think framing AI blocking as an existential dilemma kind of misses the point. Blocking AI from indexing your content means blocking yourself from having a say in what a rapidly expanding portion of the world counts as truth. A publisher prioritizing GEO means finding the value in what can’t be captured by traditional metrics like traffic and time on site. Victory in the new battleground of the AI summary will be measured by a different set of criteria: citations in AI answers, influence on narratives, and long-tail impact on trust and authority. Shaping truth at scale None of this is to say publishers should just let the AI companies crawl as much as they want and settle for no compensation. If anything, measuring and showing that your content is the source of consensus is hard proof of how valuable the content is. Lawsuits naturally focus on consent, copyright, and compensation, but the rise of GEO reveals what’s really being contested: Who gets to shape meaning at scale. Demonstrating how specific content influences AI answers is currently a challenge, but that’s about to change. Led by marketers, PR agencies, and brands, there’s a strong push to better understand GEO and how strategies around content, technical factors, and communication can help AI take notice of certain narratives over others. Like SEO, it will always be more art than science, but by this time next year I suspect the field of GEO won’t look nearly so nascent. On top of that, AI will be an even bigger informational gatekeeper than it is today. Litigation over compensation is important and necessary, but it shouldn’t keep the media from competing to be included in the new crucible where truth is formed. Journalists may no longer control the interfaces where people get information, but they still control the facts. Asserting that role in an AI world doesn’t mean you stop fighting for a better one. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.sustack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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A massive 243-kilogram (535-pound) bluefin tuna sold for a record 510 million yen ($3.2 million) at the first auction of 2026 at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market.The top bidder for the prized tuna at the predawn auction on Monday was Kiyomura Corp., whose owner Kiyoshi Kimura runs the popular Sushi Zanmai chain. Kimura, who has won the annual action many times in the past, broke the previous record of 334 million yen ($2.1 million) he set in 2019.Kimura later told reporters he was hoping to pay a bit less for it, but “the price shot up before you knew it.”The auction started when the bell rang, and the floor was filled with torpedo-shaped fish with their tails cut off so bidders could examine meat details such as color, texture and fattiness while walking around the rows of tuna.The pricey fish was caught off the coast of Oma in northern Japan, a region widely regarded for producing some of the country’s finest tuna, and costs 2.1 million yen ($13,360) per kilogram ($6,060 per pound).“It’s in part for good luck,” Kimura said. “But when I see a good looking tuna, I cannot resist I haven’t sampled it yet, but it’s got to be delicious.”Hundreds of tuna are sold daily at the early morning auction, but prices are significantly higher than usual for the Oma tuna, especially at the celebratory New Year auction.Due to the popularity of tuna for sushi and sashimi, Pacific bluefin tuna was previously a threatened species due to climate change and overfishing, but its stock is recovering following conservation efforts. Associated Press
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E-Commerce
With the start of the New Year squarely behind us, it’s once again time for the annual CES trade show to shine a spotlight on the latest tech that companies plan to offer in 2026.The multiday event, organized by the Consumer Technology Association, kicks off this week in Las Vegas, where advances across industries like robotics, healthcare, vehicles, wearables, gaming and more are set to be on display.Artificial intelligence will be anchored in nearly everything, again, as the tech industry explores offerings consumers will want to buy. AI industry heavyweight Jensen Huang will be taking the stage to showcase Nvidia’s latest productivity solutions, and AMD CEO Lisa Su will keynote to “share her vision for delivering future AI solutions.” Expect AI to come up in other keynotes, like from Lenovo’s CEO, Yuanqing Yang.The AI industry is tackling issues in healthcare, with a particular emphasis on changing individual health habits to treat conditions such as Beyond Medicine’s prescription app focused on a particular jaw disorder or addressing data shortages in subjects such as breast milk production.Expect more unveils around domestic robots too. Korean tech giant LG already has announced it will show off a helper bot named “CLOiD,” to handle a range of household tasks. Hyundai also is announcing a major push on robotics and manufacturing advancements. Extended reality, basically a virtual training ground for robots and other physical AI, is also in the buzz around CES.In 2025, more than 141,000 attendees from over 150 countries, regions, and territories attended CES. Organizers expect around the same numbers for this year’s show, with more than 3,500 exhibitors across the floor space this week.The AP spoke with CTA Executive Chair and CEO Gary Shapiro about what to expect for CES 2026. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. What are the main themes we can expect this week? Well, we have a lot at this year’s show.Obviously, using AI in a way that makes sense for people. We’re seeing a lot in robotics. More robots and humanoid-looking robots than we’ve ever had before.We also see longevity in health, there’s a lot of focus on that. All sorts of wearable devices for almost every part of the body. Technology is answering healthcare’s gaps very quickly and that’s great for everyone.Mobility is big with not only self-driving vehicles but also with boats and drones and all sorts of other ways of getting around. That’s very important.And of course, content creation is always very big.Is 2026 the year we finally see humanoid robots in people’s homes?You are seeing humanoid robots right now. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.But yes, there are more and more humanoid robots. And when we talk about CES five, 10, 15, 20 years now, we’re going to see an even larger range of humanoid robots.Obviously, last year we saw a great interest in them. The number one product of the show was a little robotic dog that seems so life-like and fun, and affectionate for people that need that type of affection.But of course, the humanoid robots are just one aspect of that industry. There’s a lot of specialization in robot creation, depending on what you want the robot to do. And robots can do many things that humans can’t. Will we start seeing more innovative use of AI tools in entertainment? AI is the future of creativity.Certainly AI itself may be arguably creative, but the human mind is so unique that you definitely get new ideas that way. So I think the future is more of a hybrid approach, where content creators are working with AI to craft variations on a theme or to better monetize what they have to a broader audience. Any interesting AI-powered devices or services that consumers will want to buy? We’re seeing all sorts of different devices that are implementing AI. But we have a special focus at this show, for the first time, on the disability community. Verizon set this whole stage up where we have all different ways of taking this technology and having it help people with disabilities and older people. Are you concerned about a potential AI bubble? Well, there’s definitely no bubble when it comes to what AI can do. And what AI can do is perform miracles and solve fundamental human problems in food production and clean air and clean water. Obviously in healthcare, it’s gonna be overwhelming.But this was like the internet itself. There was a lot of talk about a bubble, and there actually was a bubble. The difference is that in late 1990s there were basically were no revenue models. Companies were raising a lot of money with no plans for revenue.These AI companies have significant revenues today, and companies are investing in it.What I’m more concerned about, honestly, is not Wall Street and a bubble. Others can be concerned about that. I’m concerned about getting enough energy to process all that AI. And at this show, for the first time, we have a Korean company showing the first ever small-scale nuclear-powered energy creation device. We expect more and more of these people rushing to fill this gap because we need the energy, we need it clean and we need a kind of all-of-the-above slution. Shawn Chen, AP Technology Editor
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E-Commerce
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