India’s big cities are learning that electric buses need trained drivers to handle them. Public electric buses in Bengaluru caused 18 accidents, six of them fatal, over 15 months ending August 2025, while two crashes in Mumbai between December 2024 and January 2025 killed a dozen people. The accidents have also stretched beyond major metros, […]
Three charts that show the long shadow of Maduro’s economic disaster in Venezuela. BY IGNACIO ALBE ANDENRIQUE MILLÁN-MEJÍA WASHINGTON—Nicolás Maduro is out, but the economic legacy of his policies, and of Chavismo more broadly, remains. In the more than ten years he was in power, inflation soared, businesses collapsed, investment fled and withered, and the […]
Within hours of the deal for TikTok’s U.S. operations being announced last week, Issam Hijazi noticed a big uptick in users to his social media platform UpScrolled. That stream of disgruntled users fleeing TikTok over censorship concerns turned into a flood this week, crashing UpScrolled’s servers. UpScrolled, launched last July, supports text posts, photos, short-form […]
Iran was ranked among the world’s rising startup ecosystems as recently as last year. A year later, it is in the middle of a conflict, and a weeks-long internet shutdown is choking off the local economy and freezing tech activity. “We cannot do most tasks,” an Iranian engineer who works with Digikala, the country’s largest […]
On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident. The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley. Somwanshi […]
In April 2023, Texas Republican Representative Michael McCaul led an official visit by U.S. lawmakers to Taiwan, meeting with senior officials and business leaders to discuss ways to strengthen the “economic and defense relationship” between the two countries. The same year, McCaul’s wife purchased stock, valued at up to $250,000, in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing […]
More than 84 world leaders, 800 CEOs, and thousands others gathered amid the Alps this week to attend the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Artificial intelligence — bubbles, jobs, robots, and surveillance — dominated tech-related panels and conversations at the summit. From Elon Musk’s vision for humanoid robots to Larry Fink’s bullish […]
Iran’s near-total communications blackout has entered its 16th day, but that’s just a live test. Following repressive crackdown on protests, the government is now building a system that grants web access only to security-vetted elites, while locking 90 million citizens inside an intranet. Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani confirmed international access will not be restored until […]
China’s ByteDanceiByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm.READ MORE has struck a deal with a clutch of investors to set up a new U.S.-focused TikTok that complies with the country’s regulatory requirements. ByteDance will retain a 19.9% stake in the […]
‘When someone passes away, there are always regrets,’ said Roro, a young Chinese woman who is a content creator and currently studies in Melbourne, Australia. ‘Once she was gone,’ she continued, ‘I realised I had never even bought her a hat. My mum had cancer and needed to undergo chemotherapy, so she often wore various […]