David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, has spent the better part of two years telling clients, investors, and anyone who would listen that a dealmaking renaissance was just around the corner. Now, with the first half of 2025 in the rearview mirror and merger activity showing tangible signs of life, Solomon is doubling down — projecting that 2026 could be a landmark year for mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street.
The software sector has endured one of its most punishing stretches in recent memory, with valuations cratering and investor sentiment souring amid fears that artificial intelligence will render traditional enterprise software obsolete. Yet amid the wreckage, JPMorgan is making a contrarian call: buy the dip.
For decades, the high-yield bond market served as a broad financing engine for America’s most diverse array of industries — from energy producers and retailers to telecommunications firms and manufacturing companies. That era is rapidly drawing to a close. Software and technology companies now represent an unprecedented concentration risk in the junk bond universe, a development that Deutsche Bank analysts are flagging as one of the most significant structural vulnerabilities in the history of leveraged credit markets.
In a move that signals a new era of regulatory oversight in the mobile economy, both Apple and Google have formally agreed to a sweeping set of commitments with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) designed to ensure fair treatment of app developers. The agreements, announced in late June 2025, represent one of the most significant regulatory interventions into the app store duopoly that has defined smartphone commerce for nearly two decades.
Google is significantly expanding its suite of personal safety tools, giving users far more granular control over how their private information surfaces across the internet. The upgrades, announced in February 2026, represent the search giant’s most aggressive push yet to help individuals scrub sensitive data from search results — a move that arrives amid growing consumer anxiety over data exposure, identity theft, and the proliferation of AI-powered scraping tools that can harvest personal details at scale.
For years, the implicit bargain of the internet was simple: users handed over their data in exchange for free services. Search engines indexed the world’s information. Social networks connected billions of people. Email platforms organized digital lives. But as artificial intelligence has surged from a research curiosity into the defining technology of the decade, that bargain is being renegotiated — and millions of consumers are discovering just how difficult it is to claw back what they’ve already given away.
Somewhere in the constellation Cygnus, roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth, a dying star is putting on one of the most spectacular shows in the cosmos. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking new image of the Egg Nebula — formally designated CRL 2688 — showcasing the dramatic and violent process by which a sun-like star sheds its outer layers in the twilight of its existence. The image, released by NASA and the European Space Agency, offers astronomers and space enthusiasts alike a front-row seat to one of the universe’s most fascinating transitional phases.
In a cramped London flat, a content creator with a smartphone and a knack for algorithmic manipulation has been quietly assembling one of the most prolific anti-immigrant disinformation operations on TikTok — reaching millions of viewers with fabricated stories designed to stoke fear, resentment, and hatred toward migrants in the United Kingdom.
In the annals of financial mishaps, there are costly errors — and then there is what may be the most expensive typographical mistake ever made. A Bitcoin user recently sent approximately $40 billion worth of the cryptocurrency to the wrong address, a blunder so staggering in scale that it has captivated the digital asset world and raised urgent questions about the fundamental architecture of decentralized finance.
A sweeping new initiative backed by Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is putting artificial intelligence in education to its most rigorous test yet — not by asking whether the technology works in a lab, but whether it can survive the messy, complicated reality of American public schools.