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There was a time when few people in the coastal Pakistani city of Gwadar understood what climate change was. After a decade of extreme weather, many more do. Rain battered Gwadar for almost 30 consecutive hours last February. Torrents washed out roads, bridges, and lines of communication, briefly cutting the peninsula town off from the rest of Pakistan. Homes look like bombs have struck them and drivers swerve to avoid craters where asphalt used to be. Gwadar is in Balochistan, an arid, mountainous, and vast province in Pakistan’s southwest that has searing summers and harsh winters. The city, with about 90,000 people, is built on sand dunes and bordered by the Ar…

Higher education is under pressure from every direction. Shifts in finance and policy, high tuition costs, and a decline in public trust have forced colleges and universities to rethink how they prepare people for work. At the same time, employers face persistent talent shortages and widening skills gaps. These challenges have created momentum for a more practical, outcome-driven model built on deeper collaboration between educators and employers. When these partnerships are designed well, they can strengthen workforce infrastructure. They can also align education with labor market needs and expand career pathways. CLOSE THE MIDDLE SKILLS GAP Strong employer-ed…

The stat that women receive less than 2% of VC funding is often cited—but that figure tells only part of the story. Angel investors, non-dilutive grants, and other funding methods are shifting the landscape for women and other underrepresented founders—especially at a time when DEI initiatives are in peril. This panel explores how investors are closing the funding gap and what you should know to get the capital you need. View the full article

When an X user recently pointed out the eye-popping increase in billionaires’ wealth since 2015, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, a billionaire himself, responded with his opinion on why, but he urged followers to consider a different question: “Why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?” Cuban said. It is the right question to be asking. Because while the debate over wealth inequality continues, the solution has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The top 10% of U.S. households now control 67% of all wealth, while the bottom half holds just …

Once the ball starts rolling in the Spanish league, the game is on for some 50 analysts who start looking for signs of online piracy. They scan websites, social media posts, IPTV platforms and streaming portals in search of illegal broadcasts of La Liga matches. The trained analysts identify the pirated content and take the steps needed to take them off air, including notifying Internet intermediaries like Cloudflare, the U.S.-based company whose content-delivery network is believed to manage nearly 20% of the Internet traffic worldwide. And that’s when the real fight begins for the Spanish league. La Liga, one of the most active European leagues fighting piracy and a…

A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game “League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday. Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was “continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” Other platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information. New Jersey Transit said parts of its digi…

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it was investigating an outage that took place in the morning that brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks. Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved, and that it was was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” or application programming interface that allow software systems to communicate with each other. The company said the outage was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,…

Country music fans have something extra to be thankful for each November beyond turkey. Traditionally, the Country Music Association Awards—aka the CMA Awards—take place during the second-to-last month of the year. Wednesday, November 19, is the big day in 2025 for the 59th annual event. Let’s get you up to speed on everything you need to know about “country music’s biggest night” so you can confidently two-step your way through the evening. What’s the venue for the 2025 CMA Awards? The 59th CMA Awards will be held at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Who’s hosting the 2025 CMA Awards? Lainey Wilson is back to emcee the awards. Last year, sh…

CNBC and its sister networks, including USA, Golf Channel, and E!, are spinning off from their former parent company Comcast NBCUniversal to form a new publicly traded company called Versant. As part of the new company, some of the brands in the portfolio have to rebrand to get rid of NBC’s iconic Peacock mark, CNBC included. CNBC’s new logo, which goes live December 13, might take viewers some time to get used to. The financial news network’s new logo was designed in house to easily match the preexisting visual assets it uses on air. The typography of the mark based is on the network’s font, Gotham, and it shows a triangle cutting into the letter N and float…

The devil might’ve worn Prada in 2006, but two decades later, the fashion elite are wearing books. Case in point: Coach’s hot new accessory is a keychain made out of literal hardcovers. Coach revealed the new “book charms” in a series of social posts on February 25. Created in collaboration with the publisher Penguin Random House, the charms include adorably teeny, fully readable versions of classics like Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, alongside more recent titles like Untamed by Glennon Doyle and A Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita. The book bag charms will be available for $95 on the Coach website …

For the next two weekends (April 10-12 and April 17-19), Los Angeles is going to be quieter than normal. This is because many Angelenos will be hitting the road to attend the popular Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival located in Indio, California. For those who aren’t able to attend in person, never fear: There’s a free livestreaming option that allows you to avoid port-a-potties. Here’s everything you need to know about both weekends of this rocking event, including how to watch from your living room. How did Coachella begin? The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was created by concert promoters Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett in 1999. T…

Coca-Cola said Wednesday that its chief operating officer will become its next CEO in the first quarter of 2026. The Atlanta beverage giant said its board elected Henrique Braun as CEO effective March 31. James Quincey, Coke’s current chairman and CEO, will transition to executive chairman of the company. Braun, 57, has worked at Coca-Cola for three decades. Prior to assuming the COO role earlier this year, he led operations in Brazil, Latin America, Greater China and South Korea. He has held positions overseeing Coke’s supply chain, new business development, marketing, innovation, general management and bottling operations. Braun was born in California and raised in B…

For the first time in over a decade, Coca-Cola is relaunching its iconic “Share a Coke” campaign. This time around, it’s targeting Gen Z. When “Share a Coke” first debuted in Australia in 2011, replacing the “Coca-Cola” logo on Coke bottles with 150 of the most popular names in the region, it sold 250 million named bottles and cans in a nation of just under 23 million people. The idea was so successful that, over time, Coca-Cola replicated it in 70 different countries. And this April 1, a new version of “Share a Coke” is rolling out globally. The bones of the concept are the same as when it debuted more than a decade ago: In each local market, a range of the most…

Watch out, Dr. Pepper: Mr. Pibb is in the house. After almost 25 years, Coca-Cola announced in late October that it’s bringing back Mr. Pibb, its spicy cherry soda that first launched in 1972. If you were born after the turn of the century, chances are you may have never seen a can of Mr. Pibb. That’s because, in 2001, Coca-Cola renamed and rebranded the drink to Pibb Xtra, and it’s remained largely untouched since then. Now, Coca-Cola is giving Mr. Pibb another chance. The company is reformulating the beverage, adding extra caffeine, and giving the entire brand a makeover. Its new branding is a combination of burgundy, red, and black, complete with an eye-catchin…

The Coca-Cola Co. said sales of premium beverages and mini cans helped boost its third-quarter results despite tepid demand in the U.S. and elsewhere. The Atlanta beverage giant said Tuesday it continues to see a divergence among consumers in North America and Europe, with higher-income buyers opting for its more expensive brands like Smartwater, Topo Chico, and Fairlife, while middle- and lower-income consumers are under more pressure. Henrique Braun, Coke’s chief operating officer, said the company has focused on affordability by shrinking package sizes and leaning into sales of mini cans. Earlier this month, Coke announced it will sell individual, 7.5-ounce min…

A new ad from the Coca-Cola Co. opens with a shot of a typewriter clacking out Stephen King’s The Shining. The viewer follows a passage being written in an old-timey typeface until there’s a reference to a bottle of Coke. Suddenly, the type appears as the cola company’s script logo. The ad is part of a new campaign called “Classic” running in Spain and the U.K., in which Coca-Cola highlights instances when its brand name appears in literature by rendering them in the books’ original first-edition typefaces. The passages are printed in black, and references to either “Coke” or “Coca-Cola” in passages from King’s The Shining, J. G. Ballard’s Extreme Metaphors, and V. S.…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Half of all LLM usage is for writing computer code The tech industry insists that AI will “transform” how companies, both large and small, operate. Tech VCs and AI founders predict that major business functions will be reshaped, one by one, to be handled by AI agents. For a while, many speculated which function would be transformed first. It wasn’t customer service, legal, or marketing: it was software development. Generative AI’s first killer app is coding. Tools like Cursor and Windsurf ca…

Critics of AI caution that as a relatively new technology, its long-term effects on the human brain are still unknown. But a new study shows that AI could be just as dangerous in the short-term, with sessions of AI use only 10 minutes long leading to impaired brain performance. The study, conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT, and UCLA, challenged participants to complete a set of fraction-based math problems. Half the group was tasked to solve the problems on their own, while the other half was given access to an AI assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model—only to have that AI helper removed without warning for the test’s final three problems. …

Crypto heavyweight Coinbase said on Tuesday it has bought investment platform Echo in a nearly $375 million cash-and-stock deal, aiming to bring fundraising tools to its platform. Dealmaking within the digital assets industry has picked up pace this year as a crypto-friendly The President administration encourages companies to expand their business in the U.S. Last week, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken unveiled a $100 million deal for futures exchange Small Exchange, paving the way to launch a fully U.S.-based derivatives suite. Echo’s platform makes raising capital and investing more accessible to the crypto community through private and public token sales. …

Coinbase said on Monday it will buy prediction markets startup The Clearing Company, its tenth acquisition this year, as the crypto exchange looks to expand beyond its core digital assets business. Prediction markets let users buy and sell contracts tied to the outcomes of real-world events, ranging from elections and economic data to sports and policy decisions, effectively turning investors’ forecasts into tradable markets. Supporters say the prices can reflect collective expectations more accurately than polls or forecasts, while critics argue the products blur the line between financial markets and betting, drawing growing scrutiny from regulators. Predict…