 |
|
|
|||||
Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group and OpenAI stepped up their AI partnership Monday, setting up a 50-50 held company called SB OpenAI Japan.SoftBank Chief Masayoshi Son and OpenAI Chief Sam Altman appeared at an event in Tokyo, talking up their collaboration and inviting Japanese companies to join.Son, holding a shiny blue crystal ball as a symbolic prop, said its AI service Cristal could be used by companies for planning, marketing, emails, and figuring out old source codes.Cristal will first roll out in Son’s own SoftBank Group companies, which include Arm, a semiconductor and software company, and PayPay, an electronic payment service. SoftBank said it plans to spend $3 billion a year to integrate Cristal across its companies.“This will be superintelligence for the company. I’m so excited,” Son told reporters and other participants at the Transforming Business through AI event.Altman talked about the just announced “deep research,” which allows ChatGPT to carry out more complicated tasks, including preparing reports by browsing the web and finding thousands of sources far more quickly than a human worker.Deep research will be available in Japan in the Japanese language, he said.“This partnership with SoftBank will accelerate our vision for bringing transformative AI to some of the world’s most influential companies, starting with Japan,” said Altman.SoftBank and OpenAI, along with Oracle, are part of the Stargate project supported by President Donald Trump, investing up to $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.Son said Stargate will expand into Japan, as well as other nations.The technology sector has been shaken by the recent announcement from Chinese newcomer DeepSeek that it has come up with very smart but low-cost AI. Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@yurikageyama Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Worries about President Donald Trump’s tariffs are hurting U.S. stocks Monday as financial markets worldwide drop on concerns about a potential trade war.The S&P 500 was down 1.4% in early trading following similar losses for stock markets across Asia and Europe. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 435 points, or 1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.8% lower.Everything from bitcoin to the Mexican peso fell, not just the stocks of U.S. companies expected to be the first to feel pain from Trump’s tariffs on goods imported from Canada, Mexico, and China. On Wall Street, some of the sharpest losses hit Big Tech and other companies that could be hit hardest by higher interest rates.The fear is that Trump’s tariffs will push up prices for groceries, electronics and all kinds of other bills for U.S. households, putting upward pressure on a U.S. inflation rate that’s largely been slowing since its peak three summers ago. Stubbornly high or accelerating inflation could keep the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates, which it began doing in September to give the U.S. economy a boost.To be sure, U.S. stock prices remain close to their all-time high, which was set less than two weeks ago. And Monday’s losses weren’t as bad as some other recent drops, such as one in December when the Fed hinted fewer rate cuts may arrive in 2025 than expected.But much of Wall Street had been hoping Trump’s talk of tariffs through the presidential campaign was just that, talk, and an opening point for negotiations with U.S. trading partners. Now that Trump has followed through, the fear is about how much retaliation will occur in what could be an escalating trade war that damages economies worldwide, including the United States.“The uncertainty at this stage is tremendousnot only of how these eventual negotiations will play out, but worries about how this is only the tip of the iceberg and more tariffs are on the horizon,” said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment officer at BMO Wealth Management.Traders on Wall Street are already paring expectations for how many cuts to interest rates the Federal Reserve may deliver this year, if any. Lower interest rates can encourage U.S. employers to hire more workers, while also goosing prices for investment, but the downside is they can give inflation more fuel.“Living in the Midwest, I might feel the trade war soonest and most,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management, because of how much crude oil flows over the northern U.S. border to make gasoline. “Our refiners can’t easily switch away from Canadian crude.”Crude oil prices rose, suggesting inflationary pressure may already be starting. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 1.3% to $73.45. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 0.8% to $76.29.Trump himself warned Americans they may feel “some pain” from the tariffs, which he said would be “worth the price” to make America great again. He also said Sunday night that import taxes will “definitely happen” with the European Union and possibly with the United Kingdom as well.Among all the uncertainties upsetting Wall Street was the basic question of how Trump would decide whether and when Canada, China, and Mexico are doing enough to lift the tariffs.“It’s hard to map out how long this could last,” Jacobsen said.Wall Street famously hates uncertainty, and prices fell nearly across the board. Nearly 90% of all the stocks in the S&P 500 dropped.Constellation Brands, the company that sells Modelo and Corona beers and also sells alcohol in Canada, fell 5.6%. Automakers, which import heavily from Mexico, also sank. General Motors dropped 5%.Instead of stocks and crypto, investors moved instead into U.S. government bonds, which are seen as some of the safest possible investments. The resulting rally in their prices drove longer-term Treasury yields down.The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.50% from 4.55% late Friday.It’s a reprieve, at least temporarily, from a rise in longer-term Treasury yields that has shaken Wall Street in recent months. Yields have climbed in part on expectations for just such tariffs from Trump, and the possible result of higher interest rates they could entail. Short-term Treasury yields rose Monday as expectations waned for cuts to rates from the Fed. The yield on the two-year Treasury rose to 4.24% from 4.21%Higher yields put pressure on all kinds of investments, but they’re particularly burdensome on stocks seen as the most expensive.That puts the spotlight on companies like Nvidia and other winners of the artificial-intelligence boom. Nvidia fell 5.3% and was the heaviest single weight on the S&P 500.They’d already come under pressure last week, after a Chinese upstart said it had developed a large language model that could perform as well as big U.S. rivals, but without having to use the most expensive, top-flight chips.That raised doubt about whether all the investment Wall Street had assumed would occur for chips, large data centers and electricity would really have to occur. Such assumptions had driven stocks like Nvidia, Constellation Energy, and others to record after record.The tariffs took center stage in a week where other events would typically take center stage, including a report on Friday showing how many workers U.S. employers hired last month.In stock markets abroad, indexes fell 1.5% in London, 1.7% in Paris and 1.8% in Frankfurt. In Asia, South Korea’s Kospi sank 2.5%, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.7%. Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott, AP Business Writers
Category:
E-Commerce
Immigration Judge Ana Partida sat before a mostly empty courtroom on an afternoon in October, her body angled toward a television on one of the side walls. None of the people scheduled to appear before Partida, who hears cases inside San Diegos Otay Mesa Detention Center, were present in person. Thats because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had transferred all of them to other locations around the country, even though their cases were already underway in San Diego. One by one, an ICE attorney asked Partida to move the detainees cases to courts closer to their new locations. All of the people who were transferred had attorneys in San Diego, including some through a county program that represents people in local immigration custody for free. Moving their cases would mean, at least for those with county attorneys, that their lawyers would no longer be able to represent them. Partida said that she felt she had no choice but to move many of the cases because she had been experiencing technology issues and a lack of cooperation from the other detention centers in presenting people for their hearings when she tried to keep them on her docket. During two afternoons, Capital & Main observed the judge having to restart the videoconference software multiple times and struggling with dropped calls from detainees held at other facilities. This has become a very big problem, she told one attorney as she ordered the case moved. ICE started transferring an unusually high number of detainees who already had attorneys out of the facility back in the spring of 2024, according to many attorneys who regularly represent clients there. At the time, the agency told Michael Garcia, head of San Diego Countys free immigration legal defense program, that it had to move people because of an uptick in the number of border crossings in the area. But crossings dropped and still transfer picked up again in fall 2024. ICE said it follows a 2012 agency memorandum regarding transfers that says officers will not transfer people who have documented attorneys on file, family in the area, pending hearings in ongoing cases, or been granted bond or scheduled for a bond hearing unless the local ICE field office director determines that the move is necessary. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials use a network of detention facilities for the intake of individuals detained by the agency, a spokesperson said on behalf of the agency via email. All noncitizen transfers and transfer determinations are nonpunitive and based on a thorough and systematic review of the most current information available. But in many of the cases that attorneys described to Capital & Main, ICE is transferring people who have attorneys, family, and pending hearings in the San Diego area. Garcia said he recently met with ICE again to ask why his attorneys clients keep getting transferred. ICEs position was that this is strictly because of the needs of the facility, Garcia said. They didnt have any numbers that they showed me that indicated an increase in the number of detentions. In September, the month that Garcias team noticed that transfers were ticking up again, Border Patrol agents in San Diego made the lowest number of apprehensions the sector has seen in more than a year, according to Customs and Border Protection data. That month, San Diego agents apprehended people entering the United States roughly 13,300 times. Thats less than half of the roughly 32,500 crossings that agents apprehended in May 2024, when Garcia said transfers first increased dramatically. Several attorneys whose clients have been transferred noted that many of the courts where detainees from Otay Mesa have gone have higher asylum denial rates than the San Diego facility. Studies have shown that having an attorney can make a big difference in asylum outcomes. The county program that offers free legal representation to people detained by ICE in San Diego County was launched partway through 2022. Since then, in the past two fiscal years, Otay Mesa judges denied asylum in roughly 67% of cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, which gathers government data through public records requests. Judges at the receiving courts denied asylum in 74% to 95% of cases in that same time period, the data show. The court with the highest denial rate during that time period was Adelanto, in San Bernardino County. Thats the court where attorney Aude Ruffings client from Jamaica ended up after his transfer. Ruffing, who contracts with the San Diego County program to take detained cases, said that ICE decided to move her client soon after she submitted the paperwork for his asylum claim. She said the transfer caused a several-month delay in the case getting to trial. Ruffing said she felt bad for her client but that he has been dealing with the situation surprisingly well. Hes just been really patient, she said. Hes been a real trooper through the process. Meanwhile, the transfers are complicating cases at the Otay Mesa courts. On the afternoon in October, the first person on Judge Partidas docket, a man from Nicaragua, wasnt in the courtroom or on the video conference system. He was still in ICE custody, but the agency hadnt produced him for his case. Capital & Main isnt identifying the Nicaraguan man or other asylum seekers in this article due to the uncertain fate of their ongoing cases. Partida asked the ICE attorney what they should do. I dont know how counsel and the court want to proceed if the respondent is not here, ICE attorney David Aronlee told the judge, using the legal term for someone who has a case before the court. I dont have an answer for how we can proceed at this point. The mans legal representative, Victor Valdez-Gonzalez, complained that the organization that had offered to do a psychological evaluation for his clients asylum application could no longer complete it because the man had been moved out of state. On another afternoon in October, a slim man sat alone in his blue detainee uniform in front of Partida. She asked why the mans wife wasnt in court. His wife had previously been held at Otay Mesa as well, but Partida soon learned that ICE had transferred the woman to Louisiana. ICE hadnt been able to produce the wife via video because of the time difference, ICE attorney Antonio Estrada told Partida. At the couples last hearing in September, Partida had combined their cases so that they could be heard together and get one decision for both husband and wife, saving time for the court. Having both partners at the same detention center wouldve also meant that they could both testify in the case. At the October hearing, Partida separated the cases and sent the wifes case to aLouisiana judge. She said the couple would now have to write statements to be used in each others cases since ICE wouldnt arrange for them to testify in person for each other. When the couples attorney pushed back, Partida said she couldnt count on being able to hear the woman via video for their scheduled hearings. There is nothing this court can do to bring the respondent back to Otay Mesa, Partida said. Many of the people that ICE has transferred in this second push already had their final hearings scheduled, according to Garcia, meaning that they were almost done. The transfers meant delays in those cases, further contributing to the immigration courts ever-worsening backlog. Garcia said that in May, when ICE transferred 43 of his attorneys cases, 37% had already scheduled their trials, known in immigration court as merits hearings. In September, ICE transferred 31 of his programs cases and 74% were at that final stage, he said. Once you get the individual hearing set, thats when you have done all the work, you have presented all the evidence, you have worked with the client for months, thats when ICE sends them to another detention center, said Rocio Sanchez Flores, an immigration attorney who contracts with the county program. Sanchez Flores represents an Afghan woman who fled the Taliban with her husband, who had worked as a translator for the Afghan National Directorate of Security communicating with U.S. forces, Sanchez Flores said. The couple were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border when they requested asylum. The wife was held at a detention facility in California while the husband was sent to one in Washington. The husbands case was scheduled to finish earlier than the wifes, Sanchez Flores said. A few days after her final hearing was scheduled, ICE transferred the wife to Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. In October, the husband won his case, Sanchez Flores said, meaning that his wife could now get asylum through him. Sanchez Flores contacted the ICE attorney on the wifes case to ask for a joint motion to close. Instead, Sanchez Flores said, another ICE attorney made a motion to change venue and move the wifes case out of the San Diego court. This came as a shock to me because its way easier to just terminate the case, Sanchez Flores said. The government doesnt have to waste resources. She can get released and obtain asylum through her husband. As a result, the wife spent an extra month in ICE custody. Kate Morrissey, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||