As from tomorrow, 39 countries plus the Palestinian Authority will be on the USA’s travel ban  list. New countries set to face full bans are Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, Syria, as well as holders of Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents. Laos and Sierra Leone have been downgraded from facing partial restrictions to to full bans. A further 15 countries, ...

The socialist Mayor-elect of New York, Zohran Mamdani (pictured ) is giving a party tomorrow after his inauguration but has banned Raspberry Pi from the celebrations. Although the party is open to all, the party organisers have banned a number of items. Here’s the list: Prohibited Items: Large Bags Weapons, fireworks or explosives Large Backpacks or duffle bags Drones or ...

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has increased its budget for FY 2026 starting in April  by 50% y-o-y to $20 billion, mainly for ICs and AI which  will see a 4x increase in government support to $7.9 billion. METI  is spending $1 billion on  Rapidus bringing cumulative government investment in the company to $1.6 billion. $2.5 billion ...

Meta has bought a Chinese AI developer called Manus for between $2 billion and $3 billion. Manus was backed by Benchmark, Zhen Fund, Tencent, and HSG (the former Sequoia China). Benchmark put in $75 million earlier this year. Microsoft has integrated the Manus AI agent into its products. Now based in Singapore, Manus was originally based in Beijing and Wuhan, ...

Surging memory prices are squeezing notebook brands’ profit margins and pricing freedom, reports TrendForce. Consequently, 2026 global notebook shipments will fall  5.4% YoY , to 173 million units, with a possibility of  them falling further – by  10.1%. There is a more conservative approach by brands toward inventory management, promotions, and product setups in response to increasing cost pressures. If ...

Here are the top ten semiconductor CEOs in 2025: C C Wei Jensen Huang Lisa Su Hock Tan Rick Tsai Noh-Jung Kwak.      Jochen Hanebeck Matt Murphy Haijun Zhao Rene Haas

Mouser is  shipping Infineon’s PSOC Edge machine learning MCUs for smart home, industrial and HMI applications. The devices integrate Arm Cortex-M55 processors and M33 coprocessors and have  Infineon’s NNLite accelerator, right-sized peripherals,  security, and support for Helium DSP and Arm Ethos-U55 integration, making them “always-on” for IoT and industrial applications. The PSOC Edge series is supported by the ModusToolbox software, ...

The dilemma is: Videos of humanoid robots playing soccer, boxing and running show them to be severely limited in their capabilities while analysts are predicting trillion dollar markets for them. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently in which the manufacturers of humanoid robots at an industry conference tried to dampen down unrealistic expectations. “We’ve been trying to figure ...

Octopus Energy, the biggest UK oil and gas supplier, has lined up investors for its software unit called Kraken at a valuation of $8.65 billion.  Investors include D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity International, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Kraken  is an OS which is licensed to other utilities suppliers – energy providers, water companies and telecoms suppliers.In the UK it ...

“TSMC’s 2nm (N2) technology has started volume production in 4Q25 as planned,” says a notice on TSMC’s website. “N2 technology features first-generation nanosheet transistor technology, with full-node strides in performance and power consumption. ”TSMC also developed low-resistance redistribution layer (RDL) and super high-performance metal-insulator-metal (MiM) capacitors to further boost performance,” adds the notice. “TSMC N2 technology will be the most ...