Twelve state attorneys general did what federal antitrust enforcement did not. The venue shift is the story, not the pause. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order on July 20 barring Paramount Skydance from closing its 110 billion dollar acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, granting a…
Sony will stop pressing PlayStation games to disc in 2028. What ends with the disc is the ability to own a game, lend it, resell it, or keep it after the company stops selling it. Sony said it will stop releasing new PlayStation games on physical optical discs from January 2028, citing consumer preference for…
The official statistics were designed to measure a labor market that no longer exists. Part of Society, Economy & Wellness — examining how economic pressure reshapes labor, access, and everyday life. NEWS DESK | SOCIAL STORYTELLERS COLLECTIVE Unemployment is low. Job openings are high. Wages, at least nominally, rose faster in the last few years…
The Abidjan conference’s central theme was not a policy wonk preference — it was the continent’s most explicit public rejection of a dependency framework that has governed its relationship with global capital for two decades. The 2026 African Economic Conference, hosted in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire from July 9 to 11, centered its program on “Strengthening…
A 2026 study names the specific mechanism: for Black men navigating workplaces shaped by racial stress, the performance of strength is an adaptive strategy — and that strategy makes crisis invisible until it’s too late. Understanding it as an environmental pattern changes what an institutional response would look like. In American public life, the conversation…
The Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy statement in July that names something AI companies have been doing quietly for years: designing outputs around objectives you don’t know about. The question is whether naming it is the same as stopping it. On July 1, the Federal Trade Commission issued a proposed policy statement targeting what…
Macroeconomic recovery and climate catastrophe are not mutually exclusive — they coexist regularly in countries where growth is concentrated in one sector while the majority population absorbs the cost of a different reality entirely. Nigeria is projected to grow at 4.1% in 2026, according to the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s July…
A counting error and a residency-first proposal reveal the same thing: the city’s safety net is being redesigned around who deserves access to it, not who needs it most. San Francisco changed how it counts its homeless population in early 2026 after years of HUD-reported figures the SF Standard identified as systematically inaccurate — undercounting…
The same week Nigeria’s Finance Minister opened trading at the London Stock Exchange, the UK Home Office tightened travel restrictions on 33 African nations. The policy says border management. The timing says something else. On July 13, Nigeria’s Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele stood on the floor of the London Stock Exchange alongside the President of…
The companies eliminating jobs are the same companies announcing record AI investment — and the people being let go are not being transitioned into the economy being built. California has shed more than 110,000 tech jobs in 2026, according to tracking data compiled by Parriva, TechCrunch, and the SkillSyncer workforce tracker. Nationally, 302 tech layoff…