Author: Richell Fredson

Nigel Farage’s insurgent anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., scored a significant, if razor-thin, victory Friday in a parliamentary special election in the northwest of England. The result served notice that Mr. Farage, a populist fixture and close ally of President Trump, is again a rising force in British politics. Reform’s candidate, Sarah Pochin, won by just six votes over her Labour Party opponent, Karen Shore, in Runcorn and Helsby, seizing what had been a safe seat for Labour until the incumbent, Mike Amesbury, was forced to resign after being convicted of assault for punching one of his constituents. On a night of high drama,…

You’ll have to save more before you pick up the next Call of Duty or Halo game. Microsoft has announced a series of price increases that will see the recommended retail price of its first-party games increase to $79.99. The systems used to play those games are seeing a stiff increase in price as well. The Xbox Series S (512GB) is seeing prices increase by $80 from $299.99 to $379.99. The 1 TB Xbox Series X will cost $100 more, jumping to $599.99. And if you want the high-end 2 TB special edition Xbox Series X, that will now run you $729.99. Controllers will now…

Mark Zuckerberg’s plan is to make Meta the market leader in artificial intelligence. Investors will want to know how President Donald Trump’s tariffs-heavy trade policies will impact that strategy.  Those answers could start to come as soon as this week as Meta’s AI strategy takes center stage when the company hosts its first Llama-branded conference for AI developers on Tuesday then reports its latest quarterly earnings the next day. Already, tech companies are starting to talk about the potential impact they’re bracing for as a result of the Trump tariffs.  Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said Thursday during the chip giant’s first-quarter earnings call that U.S. trade…

Netflix executives messaged Thursday that all is well with the business in the face of economic turbulence. But its full-year outlook tells a slightly more nuanced story. Netflix posted a big beat on operating margin for the first quarter, reporting 31.7% compared with the average estimate of 28.5%, according to StreetAccount. And it guided well above analyst estimates for the second quarter — 33.3% against an average estimate of 30%. By its own phrasing, Netflix was “ahead” of its own guidance for the first quarter and is “tracking above the mid-point of our 2025 revenue guidance range.” Still, Netflix declined to alter…

The father of the Texas high school student stabbed to death at a track meet made an unexpected appearance at a press conference being held by the parents of the teenage murder suspect. Jeff Metcalf, who lost his son Austin Metcalf, arrived at the Dallas venue where the parents of Karmelo Anthony were speaking publicly for the first time on Thursday. Video posted by CBS Texas shows officers from the Dallas Police Department arriving about 40 minutes after the scheduled start of the press conference and escorting Metcalf from the venue without incident. Anthony family spokesperson Dominique Alexander began the press conference by…

A giant planet 124 light years from Earth has yielded the strongest evidence yet that extraterrestrial life may be thriving beyond our solar system, astronomers claim. Observations by the James Webb space telescope of a planet called K2-18 b appear to reveal the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life. Detection of the chemicals, dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) would not amount to proof of alien biological activity, but could bring the answer to the question of whether we are alone in the universe much closer. “This is the strongest evidence…

In a 2008 email, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “it is better to buy than to compete.” Now, the Federal Trade Commission is trying to prove that Zuckerberg applied that same thinking when he acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, thereby snuffing out two emerging competitors to secure Facebook’s social networking supremacy. This argument is at the heart of the FTC’s long-awaited legal showdown with Meta, which kicked off Monday. The lawsuit was filed during Trump’s first term before being refiled in 2021 under the Biden FTC. It hinges on whether the company violated antitrust law by scooping up companies that threatened its social networking monopoly in…

It’s been a stressful time, full of concern about how much goods will cost in the months ahead — particularly tech. Amid the Trump administration’s tariffs and now a “reciprocal tariff” pause, you might’ve gotten whiplash trying to keep up. But if you’re a gamer, an unfortunate truth emerges from the cacophony of news: Regardless of what the situation with tariffs might be, you can expect to pay more for your hobby. Nintendo announced the Switch 2 console last week, and some of its games are priced higher than people are accustomed to: $80 for digital and $90 for physical. However, should a price increase truly…

In early March, Karen Kama woke up early to hand out flyers in her neighborhood. She wanted people to know about a program at her local library in Reading, Pennsylvania, that helps people learn how to use the internet.  Two out of every three residents in Reading are Hispanic, so Kama’s flyers have one side in Spanish and one side in English. It was only one year ago that Kama started using the internet herself. She described for me a whole world opening up to her: using Google to translate conversations with her Spanish-speaking neighbor, playing games to keep her brain…

After more than a week of ratcheting up tariffs on products imported from China, the Trump administration issued a rule late Friday that spared smartphones, computers, semiconductors and other electronics from some of the fees, in a significant break for tech companies like Apple and Dell and the prices of iPhones and other consumer electronics. A message posted late Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection included a long list of products that would not face the reciprocal tariffs President Trump imposed in recent days on Chinese goods as part of a worsening trade war. The exclusions would also apply to modems,…