BANGKOK (AP) – How do you persuade a population to have more babies after generations of limiting families to just one? A decade after ending China’s longtime one-child policy, the country’s authorities are pushing a range of ideas and policies to try to encourage more births – tactics that range from cash subsidies to taxing condoms to eliminating a tax on matchmakers and day care centers.
NEW YORK (AP) – President Donald Trump a week ago told the credit card industry it had until Jan. 20 to comply with his demand for a 10% cap on interest rates. With just days to go, consumer groups, politicians, and bankers alike remain unclear on what the White House has planned and whether Trump even remains serious about the idea.
DETROIT (AP) – Chinese automakers have been making inroads around the world with growing sales of their high-tech, stylish and affordable electric vehicles. That has had competitors concerned even before Canada this week agreed to cut its tariffs on Chinese EVs in exchange for concessions on Canadian farm products.
Jan. 19 – The Washington Post says Congress has dropped the ball regarding oversight of ICE, DHS. Geraldo Lunas Campos died at a Texas detention center on Jan. 3 while pleading for air as guards choked him, according to a fellow detainee. The local medical examiner’s office is considering classifying his death as a homicide, The Post reports.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Trump administration and a bipartisan group of governors on Friday tried to step up pressure on the operator of the nation’s largest electric grid to take urgent steps to boost power supplies and keep electricity bills from rising even higher.
A federal judge ruled Friday that work on a Virginia offshore wind project could resume, the third project this week to successfully challenge the Trump administration in court. The administration announced last month it was suspending leases for at least 90 days on five East Coast offshore wind projects because of national security concerns. Its announcement did not reveal specifics about those concerns.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) – Social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children in Australia since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said. “We stared down everybody who said it couldn’t be done” communications minister Anika Wells told reporters on Friday.
NEW YORK (AP) – A surging stock market and a flurry of deal making padded the profits of Wall Street’s two big investment banks, which both saw a double-digit jump in profits in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs’s net earnings rose 12% from a year earlier, posting a profit of $4.62 billion, or $14.01 a share. Meanwhile Morgan Stanley said it earned $4.4 billion.
NEW YORK (AP) – Elon Musk’s Grok keeps getting into trouble, and this time, more of the world’s governments are trying to intervene. First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data.
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