Technology

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft on Thursday will try to gain clearance to complete a $69 billion takeover of video game maker Activision Blizzard in a legal showdown with U.S. regulators that will reshape a pastime that's bigger than the movie and music industries combined.

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city's signature zinc-grey rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Free medical clinics and legal aid clinics, where college students and their instructors help their communities while also learning more about their professions, are now commonplace.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s online safety watchdog has issued a legal notice to Twitter demanding an explanation of what the social media giant is doing to tackle a surge in online hate since Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the platform.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are ready to fight, offline.

In a now-viral back-and-forth seen on Twitter and Instagram this week, the two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a “cage match” face off.

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who has claimed for years that Google was torturing users with flashing lights crashed a car into a building near the company's New York City headquarters, injuring three pedestrians, authorities said.

BERLIN (AP) — The German government announced draft plans Thursday to boost domestic research into development of nuclear fusion, a technology some hope will provide abundant clean energy in the future, but left open how those efforts will be funded.

BEIJING (AP) — After years of breakneck growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on shoring up its vulnerabilities to the United States and other outside actors, worried about risks posed by hackers, advances in artificial intelligence and pressure from rival governments.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Calling the rapid growth of artificial intelligence tools a “moment of revolution,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that the government must act quickly to regulate companies that are developing it.

LONDON (AP) — European Union consumer protection groups urged regulators on Tuesday to investigate the type of artificial intelligence underpinning systems like ChatGPT, citing risks that leave people vulnerable and the delay before the bloc’s groundbreaking AI regulations take effect.

CHICAGO (AP) — United Airlines says when flights are delayed or canceled it will use its app to send customers options for rebooking and, in some cases, vouchers for meals and hotel rooms.

United said Thursday that it began testing the service on its app late last year and found that it reduced the number of people waiting in airports lines to speak to airline agents.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Apple illegally subjected employees to “coercive” interviews and interfered with the distribution of union leaflets at a New York City Apple Store, a U.S. labor board judge ruled Tuesday.

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon was sued Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly engaging in a yearslong effort to enroll consumers without consent into Amazon Prime and making it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Robert Downey Jr. knows he has amassed an impressive collection of classic cars — one he self-deprecatingly refers to as artifacts of his success.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Joe Biden convened a group of technology leaders on Tuesday to debate what he called the “risks and enormous promises” of artificial intelligence.

DETROIT (AP) — Electric vehicle maker Rivian says it will follow General Motors and Ford and join Tesla's charging network next year.

Employees are suing Twitter over tens of millions of dollars in bonuses they say the social media company failed to pay despite promises it would.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco claims that in the month's leading up to billionaire Elon Musk's acquisition of the company, executives including former finance chief Ned Segal “repeatedly” promised employees that 50% of their 2022 bonuses would be paid.

OROVADA, Nevada (AP) — Just 45 miles (72 kilometers) from the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation where Daranda Hinkey and her family corral horses and cows, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s clean energy plan is taking shape: construction of one of the largest lithium mines in the world.

NEW YORK (AP) — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has opened a Senate investigation into Amazon’s warehouse safety practices, the latest in a series of probes he’s initiated against big corporations in his role as chairman of a committee that oversees health and labor issues.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A prosecutor's review of voting problems in a Pennsylvania swing county where ballot paper ran out last year found no evidence of criminal activity or purposeful efforts to prevent voting, according to a new report that blamed inexperienced supervisors.

HONG KONG (AP) — China’s Alibaba Group has announced a major management reshuffle as the e-commerce giant restructures into six different business divisions to adapt to fast-changing technologies.

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Gannett has filed a civil lawsuit against Google and its parent company Alphabet, claiming that they unlawfully hold monopolies in the advertising technology tools that publishers and advertisers use to buy and sell online ad space.

BERLIN (AP) — Intel and the German government signed a deal Monday that will see the U.S. company spend more than 30 billion euros ($32.8 billion) to build a chip manufacturing site in the eastern city of Magdeburg, after Germany pledged to cover a third of the investment required.

YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — An American push to establish “green shipping corridors” is key to reducing carbon emissions from the shipping industry, U.S.

Wind and solar power are sometimes dinged for not producing electricity 24 hours a day, but one of the most abundant minerals on the planet, iron, could be key to changing that.

HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese shoppers were treated to deep discounts, new products and payment plans as online merchants sought to revive their sluggish appetite for spending during China’s first major online shopping festival after the end of zero-COVID policies.

Albums from Kelly Clarkson and Portugal. The Man, as well as the new season of “And Just Like That” are among the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.

Among the offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists are “The Bear” back for a second helping, Gabrielle Union leading “The Perfect Find” and the Criterion Channel delving into the cliche of the gay best friend.

Loved “Everything Everywhere All at Once?” Can't get enough of “The Flash” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” this month?

“Let’s do things differently this time.”

Those are the first words you hear at the beginning of this month’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” an otherworldly meditation on multiple realities and how our lives might unfold.

BOSTON (AP) — In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft's flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance have reached an agreement in court that lets the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange continue to operate in the United States as it battles SEC fraud charges.

WASHINGTON (AP) — If you hopped on Reddit to scroll through your favorite forums this week, you may have encountered “private” or “restricted” messages. That’s because thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site's data.

The corporate parent of Facebook and Instagram plans to open a digital gateway for kids as young as 10 years old to enter virtual reality through the Meta Quest headset, despite rising concerns about children spending too much time on social media.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.

ATLANTA (AP) — Commercial operation of a new reactor at a Georgia nuclear power plant has been delayed for at least another month.

Georgia Power Co. said Friday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has a problem in the hydrogen system that is used to cool its main electrical generator.

Albums from John Mellencamp and Killer Mike, as well as the return of Chris Hemsworth's gun-for-hire anti-hero in Netflix's “Extraction 2” are among the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.

The production company founded by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, is splitting ways with Spotify less than a year after the debut of their podcast “ Archetypes."

BEIJING (AP) — China's government on Friday rejected as “far-fetched and unprofessional” a report by a U.S. security firm that blamed Chinese-linked hackers for attacks on hundreds of public agencies, schools and other targets around the world.

LONDON (AP) — British antitrust regulators cleared Amazon’s purchase of robot vacuum maker iRobot on Friday, but the $1.7 billion deal still faces scrutiny in the United States and Europe.

The Competition and Markets Authority said it decided not to escalate its initial investigation because it concluded that the deal would not result in a “substantial lessening of competition” within the United Kingdom.

The Department of Energy and several other federal agencies were compromised in a Russian cyber-extortion gang's global hack of a file-transfer program popular with corporations and governments, but the impact was not expected to be great, Homeland Security officials said Thursday.

The massive federal effort to expand internet access to every home in the U.S. took a major step forward on Friday with the announcement of $930 million in grants to shore up connections in remote parts of Alaska, rural Texas and dozens of other places where significant gaps in connectivity persist.

Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

NEW YORK (AP) — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried may face two criminal trials after a federal judge on Thursday granted a request by prosecutors to delay a trial on some of the charges until next year.

A union organizer who was fired by Amazon was reinstated by the company after she filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — All major social media platforms do poorly at protecting LGBTQ+ users from hate speech and harassment — especially those who are transgender, non-binary or gender non-conforming, the advocacy group GLAAD said Thursday.

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Amazon unveiled the first phase of its new headquarters complex in Virginia Thursday, a pair of gleaming, amenity-packed office towers that its leaders hope will persuade employees accustomed to working from home during the pandemic to happily return to the office.

TikTok is planning to pour “billions of dollars” in Southeast Asia over the next few years, aiming to drive growth in one of its biggest markets amid heightened scrutiny in the U.S.

The company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, made the announcement Thursday during a speech at a TikTok forum in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload were each sentenced by a New Zealand court on Thursday to more than two years in prison.

The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors want Elizabeth Holmes to pay $250 each month to victims of her failed blood testing startup after she leaves prison, but her attorneys are pushing back citing “limited financial resources" available to the disgraced founder of Theranos.

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron called Wednesday for boosting the development of artificial intelligence in Europe while putting in place “smart” regulations that don’t impede tech companies' growth.

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union regulators hit Google with fresh antitrust charges Wednesday, saying the only way to satisfy competition concerns about its lucrative digital ad business is by selling off parts of the tech giant's main moneymaker.

LONDON (AP) — Lawmakers in Europe signed off Wednesday on the world’s first set of comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, clearing a key hurdle as authorities across the globe race to rein in AI.

LONDON (AP) — Two of the U.K.'s four mobile phone operators agreed Wednesday to merge their businesses to capitalize on the rollout of next-generation 5G wireless technology in the country.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Advanced Micro Devices has revealed a new artificial intelligence chip in its race to compete with rival chipmaker Nvidia in supplying the foundation for a boom in AI-fueled business tools.

TOYOTA, Japan (AP) — Toyota executives fielded challenges and reaped praise from investors at an annual general meeting Wednesday where shareholders ultimately rejected demands the automaker do better on fighting climate change.

The electric car market is speeding up as consumer interest in EVs grows and a steady stream of new models arrive to fill different niches. Speed is the operative word when it comes to describing the 2023 Kia EV6 GT and Tesla Model Y Performance.

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft's planned $69 billion purchase of video game company Activision Blizzard was blocked by a federal judge Tuesday, giving more time for an antitrust review of the deal.