• Trump’s EPA plans to ignore health effects of air pollution

    January 13, 2026

    Ever since Ronald Reagan was president, the Environmental Protection Agency has assigned a value to human life. If you think too long about it, it’s a bit crass, but the upshot was to provide some cost-benefit analysis of pollution controls. Lowering pollution can prolong human life, so if the health benefits of reducing pollution outweighed the costs, then there was an economic argument to be made in favor of those reductions.  Every administration since has assigned some value to human life when determining how to regulate air pollution. The Trump administration is planning to throw decades of accepted practice out…

  • GWM offering range-wide deals after record year in Australia

    January 13, 2026

    GWM is offering discounts of up to $6000 across its entire model range, as it aims to maintain its momentum following a record year in Australia in 2025. The Haval Jolion small SUV is being offered with reductions of between $1000 and $3000, with discounts of $2000 to $4000 on the Haval H6 mid-size SUV, $2000 on the similarly sized Haval H7, $1000 on the Tank 300 off-road SUV, between $1000 to $2000 on the Tank 500 large SUV and Cannon ute, and between $2000 and $6000 on the Cannon Alpha ute. A couple of GWM models – the Cannon…

  • Apple’s Mac mini M4 is back on sale for $499

    January 13, 2026

    The holiday season is fully in the rear view mirror and real life is here to stay. But that doesn’t mean the time for gifts is over — especially ones for yourself. You can still take advantage of great January sales on some awesome tech products. Take the Apple Mac mini M4, which is down to $500 from $599. The 17 percent discount gives you 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD for only about $20 more than the computer’s Black Friday sale. Its beefier models are also on sale: opting for 512GB of SSD will cost you $690, down…

  • Pebble founder says his new company is ‘not a startup’

    January 13, 2026

    Pebble’s founder, Eric Migicovsky, is doing things differently with his reboot of the Pebble smartwatch brand and an AI ring. The team is small, inventory isn’t being manufactured before it’s sold, and there’s no outside funding. Most importantly, he says, the new company, Core Devices, is “not a startup.” “We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Image Credits:Pebble “Startups are good for the world,” he clarified. “You need to have money in order…

  • Google AI Releases Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): An Open-Source Standard Designed to Power the Next Generation of Agentic Commerce

    January 13, 2026

    Can AI shopping agents move beyond sending product links and actually complete trusted purchases end to end inside a chat? Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is Google’s new open standard for agentic commerce. It gives AI agents and merchant systems a shared language so that a shopping query can move from product discovery to an authenticated order without custom integrations for every retailer and every surface. https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-commerce-protocol-ucp/ What problem is UCP solving? Today, most AI shopping experiences stop at recommendation. The agent aggregates links, you handle stock checks, coupon codes, and checkout flows on separate sites. Google’s engineering team describes…

  • Meta appoints ex-Trump and Bush official as its new president and vice chairman

    January 13, 2026

    Meta has appointed Dina Powell McCormick, a banking executive and former Republican White House official, as its new president and vice-chairman. The company said McCormick will help guide its overall strategy and execution as a part of the management team. “Dina’s experience at the highest levels of global finance, combined with her deep relationships around the world, makes her uniquely suited to help Meta manage this next phase of growth as the company’s president and vice chairman,” said Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. McCormick was a partner at Goldman Sachs and ran its Global Sovereign investment banking business. She…

  • Meta-backed Hupo finds growth after pivot to AI sales coaching from mental wellness

    January 13, 2026

    When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first launched his company about four years ago, it wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, finance services, or insurance companies. The company originally began as Ami, a mental wellness platform focused on how people manage pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time. “I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but across sports,…

  • Monarch Money is offering 50 percent off its budgeting app for new users

    January 13, 2026

    The start of the new year is a great time to get your finances in order, and a good budgeting app can help with that. Instead of laboring over a spreadsheet, you can try one of our favorite budgeting apps for less than usual. Monarch Money is running a sale that gives new users 50 percent off one year of the service, bringing the final cost down to just $50. Just use the code NEWYEAR2026 at checkout to get the discount. Monarch Money makes for a capable and detailed budgeting companion. You can use the service via apps for iOS,…

  • Hands-on with Bee, Amazon’s latest AI wearable

    January 13, 2026

    In early tests with a review unit of Bee, we found the device itself was easy to use. It’s just a press of a button to turn recording on or off. In the app, you can configure whether a double press bookmarks a section of the conversation, processes the current conversation, or both, and you can set whether a press and hold gesture lets you leave a voice note or chat with the AI assistant. (Bee’s companion app currently reminds you to enable voice notes, so we did.) Like many other AI products and services, such as Plaud, Granola, Fathom,…

  • More Ford Raptor models are coming soon

    January 13, 2026

    Ford is readying new Raptor variants for its high-performance off-road sub-brand as it works to become “the Porsche of off-road”. Currently, Ford produces hardcore Raptor variants of just three models – the Ranger, Bronco and F-150 – but just one of this trio is sold in Australia: the Ranger Raptor, which routinely accounts for up to 15 per cent of demand for the country’s top-selling model over the past three years. However, the American automaker is planning a fresh assault on a growing market niche it wants to own. Speaking at this year’s Dakar Rally, in which Ford has fielded…