Financial Mindset

The  Artemis II astronauts  have captured our blue planet’s brilliant beauty as they zoom ever  closer to the moon . NASA released the crew’s first downlinked images Friday, 1 1/2 days into the  first astronaut moonshot  in more than  half a century . The first photo taken by commander Reid Wiseman shows a curved slice of Earth in one of the capsule’s windows. The second shows the entire globe with the oceans topped by swirling white tendrils of clouds. A green aurora even glows, according to NASA. “It’s great to think that with the exception of our four friends, all of us are represented in this image,” said NASA’s Lakiesha Hawkins, an exploration systems leader. She added the mission was going well. As of late Friday afternoon, Wiseman and his crew were more than 110,000 miles (180,000 kilometers) from Earth and were quickly gaining on the moon with another 150,000 miles (240,000 kilometers) to go. They should reach their destination on Monday. The t...

Iran shot down two U.S. military planes in separate attacks Friday, with one service member rescued and at least one missing, in a dramatic escalation since the war began nearly five weeks ago. It was the first time U.S. aircraft have been downed in the conflict and came just two days after President Donald Trump said in a national address that the U.S. has “beaten and completely decimated Iran” and was “going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast.” One fighter jet was shot down in Iran, officials said. A U.S. crew member from that plane was rescued, but a second was missing, and a U.S. military search-and-rescue operation was underway. Neither the White House nor Pentagon released public information about the downed planes. In a brief telephone interview with NBC News, Trump declined to discuss the search-and-rescue efforts but said what happened would not affect negotiations with Iran. “No, not at all. No, it’s war,” he said. Separately Iranian state media sa...

The numbers are staggering, but experts say what we’re seeing is only the beginning. As AI-generated child sexual abuse material surges to record levels, researchers warn that the technology isn’t just producing more harmful content, but it’s fundamentally changing how children are targeted, how survivors are re-victimized, and how investigators are overwhelmed. Investigators already had their hands full with scrubbing CSAM (child sexual abuse material) from the internet. But with generative AI, that challenge has been exacerbated. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), Europe’s largest hotline for combating online child sexual abuse imagery, documented a 260-fold increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse videos in 2025. It went from just 13 videos the year prior to 3,443. Researchers who have spent years tracking this issue say the explosion is not a surprise. It is, however, a warning. “Any numbers that we see, it’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Melissa Stroebel, vice pre...

Sam Walton’s favorite ice cream, butter pecan, is always available at the Spark Café, in the quaint town square of Bentonville, Ark. Next door is Walton’s 5&10, the five-and-dime store where in 1950, “Mr. Sam,” as he was known locally, planted the seeds of Walmart , a retail empire that became the biggest company in America . That little shop is now a museum, and parked outside is a replica of Mr. Sam’s red 1979 Ford F150, the pickup truck he used to tool around town in, often with his dog Ol’ Roy. Venture out beyond the square, and the small-town USA illusion breaks. The population of the town surrounding Walmart’s sleek new multibillion-dollar headquarters has soared from about 6,000 in the 1970s to more than 60,000 today, and it’s expected to triple in coming decades as the company attracts top tech and management talent from coastal cities. The feeling is more glossy high-design hub than Norman Rockwell painting. There’s a Soho House-like private social club and spa, boutiq...

I was 48 years old when I left my job and enrolled in the Entrepreneurial Studies program at Stanford. Most people at that stage of their careers are trying to reduce risk, not introduce it. They have steady income. They have dependents. In tech, the unspoken assumption is that if you were going to take a big swing, you should have done it already. I decided to swing anyway. For most of my career, I watched Silicon Valley celebrate a particular kind of ambition: the kind that belongs to the young. We applaud founders who drop out of school, and prodigies building in dorm rooms. Those stories are real and extraordinary. But beneath them is a quiet counter-narrative: the idea that reinvention later in life is unusual, and that seasoned operators who know an industry’s flaws intimately and set out to fix them are somehow the exception. When I speak with seasoned executives considering school or startups, the hesitation is rarely about ability or potential. It’s about perception. Risk ...

Big Oil is joining the data center game, with Chevron and Microsoft entering an exclusivity agreement on talks to colocate gas-fired power plants with an AI campus in West Texas’s oil and gas epicenter. If finalized, the deal would represent the largest collaboration to date between a U.S. oil and gas giant and Big Tech. Chevron is developing a power plant hub with 2.5 gigawatts of gas-fired power in West Texas—enough to power nearly 2 million homes—and has negotiated for months with potential hyperscaler clients. The multibillion-dollar project is scalable to 5 gigawatts and could start coming online as early as late 2027. Chevron already has a financial partnership with the Engine No. 1 investment firm and seven gas turbines ordered from GE Vernova. “No commercial terms have been finalized, and there is no definitive agreement at this time,” Chevron, Microsoft, and Engine No. 1 said in a statement. “The approach reflects an emerging shift in how power for AI is being developed, ...

Many women business owners around the world can’t get access to the financing they need. The Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, a World Bank-housed partnership, estimated that 400 million female entrepreneurs struggle to get loans, and serving them could lead to as much as $6 trillion in added value for the global economy.  Yet across Asia-Pacific, banks hesitate to lend to women entrepreneurs. That’s partly due to stereotypes, but it’s also because lending criteria wasn’t designed to capture how female-led small- and medium-sized enterprises operate. As Diana Tjoeng, head of Asia for Sydney-based NGO Good Return points out, demale business owners may lack official identity documents and formal credit histories, even if they’ve run their businesses for decades. “The specific barrier is capital,” says Lisa George, global head of the Macquarie Group Foundation. “Without access to capital, it’s very hard to get social mobility and educational mobility in life.” Earlier this y...