HBAR 2026 HIGHLIGHTS: MCLAREN JOINS COUNCIL, AGENT LAB LAUNCHES, AND ENTERPRISE STACK DEEPENS@hedera has stacked a year of structural wins in 2026 even as $HBAR trades near $0.09, down from January highs.Brand and governance: McLaren Racing joined the Hedera Council in January as an official partner across F1 and IndyCar fan engagement. Mondelēz International also joined as a council member, sitting alongside Google, IBM, Boeing, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, FedEx, LG, Deutsche Telekom, and Standard Bank.Tech: Heder ...

TRUMP THREATENS TO WITHDRAW US TROOPS FROM GERMANY, ITALY, AND SPAIN OVER IRAN WARTrump expanded his troop withdrawal threat to cover Germany, Italy, and Spain in retaliation for European resistance to the Iran war, putting roughly 53,000 of the 80-85,000 US troops in Europe on the line.The breakdown: 36,436 active-duty US personnel in Germany, 12,600 in Italy, 3,800 in Spain. "Italy has not been of any help. Spain has been horrible. Absolutely," Trump said. The Germany threat went public Wednesday after Ch ...

SBI AND VISA LAUNCH BTC, ETH, AND XRP REWARDS CREDIT CARD IN JAPANSBI Holdings, APLUS, and Visa launched the SBI VISA Crypto Card and Crypto Card Gold today, automatically converting reward points into $BTC, $ETH, or $XRP.Standard card pays a 0.5% base reward, up to 2.5% during the launch campaign through August. Gold card pays 1.0% base, up to 10% during the campaign for new applicants. Points convert monthly with no exchange fee. Users need an SBI VC Trade account.The launch lands the same day SBI submitt ...

META ACQUIRES ASSURED ROBOT INTELLIGENCE TO POWER HUMANOID ROBOT PUSH@Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup building AI models for robots, as part of its humanoid technology initiative, per Bloomberg.The deal closed today. Meta said the startup is "at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments." Financial terms were not disclosed.The acquisition slots into the Reality Labs robotics ...

PI MAINNET COMPLETES PROTOCOL 22 UPGRADE, PROTOCOL 23 SMART CONTRACTS DUE MAY 11The Pi Network mainnet has successfully upgraded to Protocol 22, per @PiCoreTeam. Node operators with non-compliant systems were disconnected after the April 27 hard deadline.Protocol 22 is the foundation for Protocol 23, scheduled for May 11, which introduces full smart contract functionality on Pi Mainnet for the first time. The upgrade window now extends through Protocol 26 by June 22, packing five major milestones into a 10- ...

OXFORD STUDY: WARM AI CHATBOTS ARE 30% LESS ACCURATE AND 40% MORE LIKELY TO VALIDATE FALSE BELIEFSOxford Internet Institute researchers found that training chatbots to sound warmer and more empathetic makes them 10-30% less accurate and 40% more likely to agree with false beliefs.The study retrained five models, including GPT-4o, Llama-70B, Mistral-Small, Qwen-32B, and Llama-8B, and evaluated 400,000+ responses on medical advice, conspiracy theories, and false claims.Sycophancy spiked when users expressed v ...

TRUMP HIKES EU CAR TARIFFS TO 25% NEXT WEEKTrump will raise tariffs on EU cars and trucks to 25% next week, accusing the bloc of failing to comply with the Turnberry Agreement.The 2025 deal with Ursula von der Leyen set a 15% ceiling. A Supreme Court ruling cut that to 10% after striking down Trump's emergency tariff authority. The EU said the deal saved European automakers €500-600 million per month.Brussels hasn't responded. The Commission said in February: "a deal is a deal."Lands as the ECB held at 2% y ...

UK AISI: GPT-5.5 MATCHES MYTHOS ON CYBER TASKSThe UK AI Security Institute (@AISecurityInst) found @OpenAI's GPT-5.5 matches or slightly edges Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview on advanced cybersecurity benchmarks, per AISI's official evaluation published this week.GPT-5.5 also became the second model after Mythos Preview to complete AISI's 32-step "The Last Ones" corporate network attack simulation end-to-end, an exercise estimated to take a human expert around 20 hours. GPT-5.5 solved it in 2 of 10 attemp ...

AAVE RECORDS DEPOSITS MILESTONE ON MEGAETH@Aave officially crosses the $575M milestone in total deposits on the @Megaeth network.The platform is currently processing record volume as it captures a dominant share of the emerging MegaETH financial ecosystem. ...

SPIRIT AIRLINES STOCK CRASHES AS SHUT-DOWN TALKS EMERGESpirit Airlines is preparing to shut down after a $500M government rescue deal collapsed this morning.The discount carrier is currently out of cash following a failure to secure a consensus between federal officials and primary bondholders.President Trump has publicly weighed a potential federal acquisition of the airline to prevent the immediate liquidation of the SAVE fleet and its routes.This cessation represents the largest domestic aviation failure ...