Softbank Gives Startups Billions Of Reasons To Hold Off Ipos

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto /) Canada has ordered large online streaming services to pay 5 percent of their Canadian revenue to the government in a program expected to raise $200 million per year to support local news and other home-grown content. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced its decision yesterday after a public comment period. "Based on the public record, the CRTC is requiring online streaming services to contribute 5 percent of their Canadian revenues to support the Canadian broadcasting system.

Enlarge (credit: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / Contributor | FilmMagic) Australia's safety regulator has ended a legal battle with X (formerly Twitter) after threatening approximately $500,000 daily fines for failing to remove 65 instances of a religiously motivated stabbing video from X globally. Enforcing Australia's Online Safety Act, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman-Grant had argued it would be dangerous for the videos to keep spreading on X, potentially inciting other acts of terror in Australia. But X owner Elon Musk refused to comply with the global takedown order, arguing that it would be "unlawful and dangerous" to allow one country to control the global Internet.

Enlarge (credit: FT montage/Getty Images) The resurrection of a car plant in Brazil’s poor northeast stands as a symbol of China’s global advance—and the West’s retreat. BYD, the Shenzhen-based conglomerate, has taken over an old Ford factory in Camaçari, which was abandoned by the American automaker nearly a century after Henry Ford first set up operations in Brazil. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, visited China last year, he met BYD’s billionaire founder and chair, Wang Chuanfu.

Enlarge (credit: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024.) The 4,000-year-old skull and mandible of an Egyptian man show signs of cancerous lesions and tool marks, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. Those marks could be signs that someone tried to operate on the man shortly before his death or performed the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an autopsy to learn more about the cancer after death. “This finding is unique evidence of how ancient Egyptian medicine would have tried to deal with or explore cancer more than 4,000 years ago,” said co-author Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft) In October 2025, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10 for most PC users, which means no more technical support and (crucially) no more security updates unless you decide to pay for them. To encourage adoption, the vast majority of new Windows development is happening in Windows 11, which will get one of its biggest updates since release sometime this fall. But Windows 10 is casting a long shadow.

Enlarge / Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, wearing their Boeing spacesuits, leave NASA's crew quarters during a launch attempt May 6. (credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett) Fresh off repairs at the launch pad in Florida, United Launch Alliance engineers restarted the countdown overnight for the third attempt to send an Atlas V rocket and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on a test flight to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were expected to awake early Wednesday, put on their blue pressure suits, and head to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to board the Starliner capsule on top of the 172-foot-tall Atlas V rocket. Once more through the door Wilmore and Williams have done this twice before in hopes of launching into space on the first crew flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.