hemul75/Getty ImagesOkay. Deep breath. This is surreal. I just added an entire new feature to my software, including UI and functionality, just by typing four paragraphs of instructions. I have screenshots, and I'll try to make sense of it in this article. I can't tell if we're living in the future or we've just descended to a new plane of hell (or both).Let's take a step back. Google's Jules is the latest in a flood of new coding agents released just this week. I wrote about OpenAI Codex and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot Coding Agent at the beginning of the week, and ZDNET's Webb Wright wrote about Google's Jules. Also: I test a lot of AI coding tools, and this stunning new OpenAI release just saved me days of workAll of these coding agents will perform coding operations on a GitHub repository. GitHub, for those who've been following along, is the giant Microsoft-owned software storage, management, and distribution hub for much of the world's most important software, especially open source code. The difference, at least as it pertains to this article, is that Google made Jules available to everyone, for free. That meant I could just hop in and take it for a spin. And now my head is spinning. Usage limits and my first two prompts The free access version of Jules allows only five requests per day. That might not seem like a lot, but in only two requests, I was able to add a new feature to my software. So, don't discount what you can get done if you think through your prompts before shooting off your silver bullets for the day. My first two prompts were tentative. It wasn't that I wasn't impressed; it was that I really wasn't giving Jules much to do. I'm still not comfortable with the idea of setting an AI loose on all my code at once, so I played it safe. My first prompt asked Jules to document the "hooks" that add-on developers could use to add features to my product. I didn't tell Jules much about what I wanted. It returned some markup that it recommended dropping into my code's readme file. It worked, but meh. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI did have the opportunity to publish that code to a new GitHub branch, but I skipped it. It was just a test, after all. My second prompt was to ask Jules to suggest five new hooks. I got back an answer that seemed reasonable. However, I realized that opening up those capabilities in a security product was just too risky for me to delegate to an AI. I skipped those changes, too. It was at this point that Jules wanted a coffee break. It stopped functioning for about 90 minutes. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThat gave me time to think. What I really wanted to see was whether Jules could add some real functionality to my code and save me some time. Necessary background information My Private Site is a security plugin for WordPress. It's running on about 20,000 active sites. It puts a login dialog in front of the site's web pages. There are a bunch of options, but that's the key feature. I originally acquired the software a decade ago from a coder who called himself "jonradio," and have been maintaining and expanding it ever since. Also: Rust turns 10: How a broken elevator changed software foreverThe plugin provides access control to the front-end of a website, the pages that visitors see when they come to the site. Site owners control the plugin via a dashboard interface, with various admin functions available in the plugin's admin interface. I decided to try Jules out on a feature some users have requested, hiding the admin bar from logged-in users. The admin bar is the black bar WordPress puts on the top of a web page. In the case of the screenshot below, the black admin bar is visible. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI wanted Jules to add an option on the dashboard to hide the admin bar from logged-in users. The idea is that if a user logged in, the admin bar would be visible on the back end, but logged-in users browsing the front-end of the site wouldn't have to see the ugly bar. This is the original dashboard, before adding the new feature. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETSome years ago, I completely rewrote the admin interface from the way it was when I acquired the plugin. Adding options to the interface is straightforward, but it's still time-consuming. Every option requires not only the UI element to be added, but also preference saving and preference recalling when the dashboard is displayed. That's in addition to any program logic that the preference controls. In practice, I've found that it takes me about 2-3 hours to add a preference UI element, along with the assorted housekeeping involved. It's not hard, but there are a lot of little fiddly bits that all need to be tweaked. That takes time. That should bring you up to speed enough to understand my next test of Jules. Here's a bit of foreshadowing: the first test failed miserably. The second test succeeded astonishingly. Instructing Jules Adding a hide admin bar feature is not something that would have been easy for the run-of-the-mill coding help we've been asking ChatGPT and the other chatbots to perform. As I mentioned, adding the new option to the dashboard requires programming in a variety of locations throughout the code, and also requires an understanding of the overall codebase. Here's what I told Jules. 1. On the Site Privacy Tab of the admin interface, add a new checkbox. Label the section "Admin Bar" and label the checkbox itself "Hide Admin Bar". [Place this in the MAKE SITE PRIVATE block, located just under the Enable login privacy checkbox and before the Site Privacy Mode segment.] I instructed Jules where I wanted the AI to put the new option. On my first run through, I made a mistake and left out the details in square brackets. I didn't tell Jules exactly where I wanted it to place the new option. As it turns out, that omission caused a big fail. Once I added in the sentence in brackets above, the feature worked. 2. Be sure to save the selection of that checkbox to the plugin's preferences variable when the Save Privacy Status button is checked. This makes sure Jules knows that there is a preference data structure, and to be sure to update it when the user makes a change. It's important to note that if I didn't have an understanding of the underlying code, I wouldn't have instructed Jules about this, and the code would not work. You can't "vibe code" something like this without knowing the underlying code. 3. Show the appropriate checked or unchecked status when the Site Privacy tab is displayed. This tells the AI that I want the interface to be updated to match what the preference variable specifies. 4. Based on the preference variable created in (2), add code to hide or show the WordPress admin bar. If Hide Admin Bar is checked, the Admin Bar should not be visible to logged-in WordPress front-end users. If the Hide Admin Bar is not checked, the Admin Bar should be visible to logged-in front-end users. Logged-in back-end users in the admin interface should always be able to see the admin bar. This describes the business logic that the new preference should control. It requires the AI to know how to hide or show the admin bar (a WordPress API call is used), and it requires the AI to know where to put the code in my plugin to enable or disable this feature. And with that, Jules was trained on what I wanted. Jules dives into my code I fed my prompt set into Jules and got back a plan of action. Pay close attention to that Approve Plan? button. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI didn't even get a chance to read through the plan before Jules decided to approve the plan on its own. It did this after every plan it presented. An AI that doesn't wait for permission raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Just saying. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI desperately want to make a Skynet/Landru/Colossus/P1/Hal kind of joke, because I'm freaked out. I mean, it's good. But I'm freaked out. Here's some of the code Jules wrote. The shaded green is the new stuff. I'm not thrilled with the color scheme, but I'm sure that will be tweakable over time. Also: The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025More relevant is the fact that Jules picked up on my variable naming conventions and the architecture of my code and dived right in. This is the new option, rendered in code. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETBy the time it was done, Jules had written in all the code changes it planned for originally, plus some test code. I don't use standardized tests. I would have told Jules not to do it the way it planned, but it never gave me time to approve or modify its original plan. Even so, it worked out. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI pushed the Publish branch button, which caused GitHub to create a new branch, separate from my main repository. Jules then published its changes to that branch. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThis is how contributors to big projects can work on those projects without causing chaos to the main code line. Up to this point, I could look at the code, but I wasn't able to run it. But by pushing the code to a branch, Jules and GitHub made it possible for me to replicate the changes safely down to my computer to test them out. If I didn't like the changes, I could have just switched back to the main branch and no harm, no foul. But I did like the changes, so I moved on to the next step. Around the code in 8 clicks Once I brought the branch down to my development machine, I could test it out. Here's the new dashboard with the Hide Admin Menu feature. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI tried turning the feature on and off and making sure the settings stuck. They did. I also tried other features in the plugin to make sure nothing else had broken. I was pretty sure nothing would, because I reviewed all the changes before approving the branch. But still. Testing is a good thing to do. I then logged into the test website. As you can see, there's no admin bar showing. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETAt this point, the process was out of the AI's hands. It was simply time to deploy the changes, both back to GitHub and to the master WordPress repository. First, I used GitHub Desktop to merge the branch code back into the main branch on my development machine. I changed "Hide Admin Menu" to "Hide admin menu" in my code's main branch, because I like it better. I pushed that (the full main branch on my local machine) back to the GitHub cloud. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETThen, because I just don't like random branches hanging around once they've been incorporated into the distribution version, I deleted the new branch on my computer. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETI also deleted the new branch from the GitHub cloud service. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETFinally, I packaged up the new code. I added a change to the readme to describe the new feature and to update the code's version number. Then, I pushed it using SVN (the source code control system used by the WordPress community) up to the WordPress plugin repository. Journey to the center of the code Jules is very definitely beta right now. It hung in a few places. Some screens didn't update. It decided to check out for 90 minutes. I had to wait while it went to and came back from its digital happy place. It's evidencing all the sorts of things you'd expect from a newly-released piece of code. I have no concerns about that. Google will clean it up. The fact that Jules (and presumably OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot Coding Agent) can handle an entire repository of code across a bunch of files is big. That's a much deeper level of understanding and integration than we saw, even six months ago. Also: How to move your codebase into GitHub for analysis by ChatGPT Deep Research - and why you shouldThe speed with which it can change an entire codebase is terrifying. The damage it can do is potentially extraordinary. It will gleefully go through and modify everything in your codebase, and if you specify something wrong and then push or merge, you will have an epic mess on your hands. There is a deep inequality between how quickly it can change code and how long it will take a human to review those changes. Working on this scale will require excellent unit tests. Even tools like mine, which don't lend themselves to full unit testing, will require some kind of automated validation to prevent robot-driven errors on a massive scale. Those who are afraid these tools will take jobs from programmers should be concerned, but not in the way most people think. It is absolutely, totally, one-hundo-percent necessary for experienced coders to review and guide these agents. When I left out one critical instruction, the agent gleefully bricked my site. Since I was the person who wrote the code initially, I knew what to fix. But it would have been brutally difficult for someone else to figure out what had been left out and how to fix it. That would have required coming up to speed on all the hidden nuances of the entire architecture of the code. Also: How to turn ChatGPT into your AI coding power tool - and double your outputThe jobs that are likely to be destroyed are those of junior developers. Jules is easily doing junior developer level work. With tools like Jules or Codex or Copilot, that cost of a few hundred bucks a month at most, it's going to be hard for management to be willing to pay medium-to-high six figures for midlevel and junior programmers. Even outsourcing and offshoring isn't as cheap as using an AI agent to do maintenance coding. And, as I wrote about earlier in the week, if there are no mid-level jobs available, how will we train the experienced people we're going to need in the future? I am also concerned about how access limits will shake out. Productivity gains will drop like a rock if you need to do one more prompt and you have to wait a day to be allowed to do so. Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNETAs for me, in less than 10 minutes, I turned out a new feature that had been requested by readers. While I was writing another article, I fed the prompt to Jules. I went back to work on the article, and checked on Jules when it was finished. I checked out the code, brought it down to my computer, and pushed a release. It took me longer to upload the thing to the WordPress repository than to add the entire new feature. For that class of feature, I got a half-a-day's work done in less than half an hour, from thinking about making it happen to published to my users. In the last two hours, 2,500 sites have downloaded and installed the new feature. That will surge to well over 10,000 by morning (it's about 8 p.m. now as I write this). Without Jules, those users probably would have been waiting months for this new feature, because I have a huge backlog of work, and it wasn't my top priority. But with Jules, it took barely any effort. Also: 7 productivity gadgets I can't live without (and why they make such a big difference)These tools are going to require programmers, managers, and investors to rethink the software development workflow. There will be glaring "you can't get there from here" gotchas. And there will be epic failures and coding errors. But I have no doubt that this is the next level of AI-based coding. Real, human intelligence is going to be necessary to figure out how to deal with it. Have you tried Google's Jules or any of the other new AI coding agents? Would you trust them to make direct changes to your codebase, or do you prefer to keep a tighter manual grip? What kinds of developer tasks do you think these tools should and shouldn't handle? Let us know in the comments below. Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.Featured

Not providing enough practical experience in science classes will have a direct impact on whether children work in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) roles in the future, research suggests. EngineeringUK and The Royal Society’s Science education tracker asked hundreds of science teachers about delivering hands-on lessons and found there has been a decline in practical classes, with teachers highlighting many of the barriers standing in the way of being able to deliver this style of teaching. “We know the frequency of hands-on practical science has dropped,” said Becca Gooch, head of research at EngineeringUK. “Our Science Education Tracker research in partnership with the Royal Society highlighted this, as well as how critically vital practical science is as a motivating factor for learning science for years seven to nine. “Hands-on practicals help bring science to life for young people and boost interest in science, as well as developing important skills,” she added. “We need more young people, especially girls, choosing to continue with science and progress into engineering and technology careers. So, we need school students to have many more opportunities to get hands-on in their science lessons.” More than half of children in years seven to nine highlighted how important practical science lessons are for motivating them to learn more about the subject, especially for students who are less interested in the topic – if there are fewer practical science lessons, it actually serves to put people off of studying the subject later on in their education. With EngineeringUK and The Royal Society reporting that a diverse engineering and tech workforce in the future is directly linked to young people engaging in science and other STEM subjects, more needs to be done to maintain an interest in these subjects into further education and beyond. One of the reasons young people, and especially girls, don’t choose tech or other STEM careers is because they don’t fully understand what they involve or what the kinds of people working in those careers look like, so hands-on lessons can help in informing young people about what skills they may use in a future career. Female students are slightly more likely to engage with a subject when there is practical work involved than their male counterparts – practical elements of learning were a motivator for 54% of female students versus half of males – and having a good teacher is also more important to girls than boys. But hands-on science lessons have been on the decline over the past 10 years, with 44% of students across the UK taking part in practical work at least once every two weeks in 2016, dropping to 37% in 2019, and falling further to just over a quarter in 2023 – and now in many cases, practical demonstrations have been replaced with videos. Teachers pointed to a number of barriers in the way of delivering hands-on lessons, the biggest of which are what is required in the curriculum, and the time they have – with the amount of time it takes for teachers to develop practical sessions that relate directly to the learning goals laid out in the curriculum, teachers said in many cases they can’t feasibly work them into their teaching. Unfortunately, a child’s socio-economic background can stand between them and certain educational pathways, and the area a school is in can prevent access to certain funding and resources. What schools are able to provide can be varied depending on funding and area, and 26% of teachers said a lack of equipment stood in the way of offering more practical lessons. Some 27% said they don’t have the money to buy the equipment. Read more about STEM in schools Computer science has a persistent gender divide, but research by BCS has found more women are now being accepted on computing university courses. Speaking at the Bett Show this year, the UK’s education secretary outlined the ways in which teachers will be using technologies such as AI in the future, including planning lessons and marking work. Almost a quarter said they don’t have enough technicians with the skills available to facilitate hands-on science lessons, and almost 40% of teachers said vacancies in science departments have stopped students from receiving practical teaching. A small number of science teachers also expressed concerns about their ability to deliver practical sessions, with 3% saying they lack the training and 2% saying they lack the confidence to do so, a trend that has existed for some time. EngineeringUK and The Royal Society pointed out that practical science lessons are important for increasing student interest in STEM, fuelling the talent pipeline in the future, and gave a number of recommendations to help enable teachers to offer more hands-on lessons. The first was a call to government to take advantage of the current curriculum review to streamline it and allow science lessons to offer more practical lessons, as well as to make practical learning part of the curriculum to ensure all students are able to experience these kinds of lessons as part of their learning. Resources for schools was the third suggestion from EngineeringUK and The Royal Society. Going forward, schools need more investment to make sure they have the equipment, training and technical assistance needed to give students the opportunity for practical lessons.

Places Hand-Painted Shopfronts in Rural Uganda Olivia Krawczyk introduces the hand-painted signs for businesses large and small in Kumi, Uganda. Better Letters May 22, 2025 • 6 min read "Pure & Tasty" in Kumi, Eastern Uganda. Outside of the continent itself, the most well-known facets of signs and sign painting from Africa are perhaps the Ghana's wild film posters and the 'Danfo' vehicle lettering from Nigeria. Last year, I shared some books and articles in the bonus material that accompanied the Deadly Prey feature in BLAG 04, but these are also heavily skewed towards countries in West Africa.Books about hand-painted signs in Africa. From left: African Signs (2010) by Rob Floor and Gert van Zanten, and Chez Bonne Idée (1986) and Ici Bon Coiffeur (1992), both by Jean-Marie Leratby.I was therefore very happy to see some material from Uganda, East Africa, which graphic designer Olivia Krawczyk shares here alongside her comments on what she's learned about the signs.Hand-Painted Shopfronts in Rural UgandaWalking along the streets of rural Uganda, you can’t help but notice the almost random ‘pop’ of colour on buildings. Their striking exteriors are, more often than not, part of the hand-painted advertisements that cover them.Nile is one of the most popular Ugandan beer brands and their signs are frequently painted on bars where you can quench your thirst for one.During my working visits to Uganda, I'm based in Kumi town, which is about a five-hour drive from the capital, Kampala. I spend a lot of time in the surrounding rural areas of the Kumi District, where the painted buildings have always caught my eye. This was nothing more than a passing interest until my last trip in 2023 when curiosity took over and I set out to learn a little bit more about the signs.The Art of Making DoIn Uganda's Kumi District, money is short, but competition is high, with whole rows of shops frequently selling exactly the same products and services. The most common are hairdressers, tailors, DIY stores, and, in the central market, food and drink stalls.So how do you stand out in this environment where the buildings all look similar, the streets are packed with people, and you have limited funds? Armed with paint and a whole lot of determination, shopkeepers turn their spaces into vibrant reflections of their trades. These amateur creations convey the impression of a competition to see who can fit the most writing onto their shop or sign, often including multiple phone numbers. The results might not be polished, but they sure are authentic.A classic DIY sign cramming five phone numbers into the pricing of meats sold by this butchers on the side of the road just outside of Kumi.Y.Y. Coaches, Kumi's public transport booking office, gives you no less than six numbers to try, and if any of those phones need repairing, there's always the Agg & Sons Phone Clinic, which is advertised by this more professionally finished shopfront.With tight budgets, the upkeep of these signs isn’t always a priority and this, paired with the constant exposure to the sun, means that they start looking rundown pretty quickly.This abandoned shopping plaza has old remnants of hand-painted, including one for the New York City Salon. Even the barbeque in front has a 'sausages' ghost sign on it.In the process of looking more closely at these faded walls, I started to notice some that are quite distinct from these DIY creations. They frequently advertise things unrelated to the shop inside — a launderette painted with advertising for a SIM card, for example — and the designs are often repeated on multiple buildings.White Star Magic laundry bars being advertised on a farmers' wholesale and retail shop, and spaghetti promoted via the medium of a hairdressing salon frontage.Corporate MuralsI soon realised that not everyone has the time, skill, or resources to paint their shop, This, coupled with bigger companies looking to advertise their products, has lead to a mutually beneficial arrangement: the companies paint the shop with their advertising, while the small business owner gets some extra income from renting the space. As a bonus, their shop looks smarter than the one next door, helping to attract more customers.The Renedol painkiller brand have painted this entire building, in stark contrast to the bare concrete on the one next door.Before the addition of these painted billboards, the buildings all look very much alike, and are often in a poor state of repair. So its a no-brainer to say 'yes' when a company offers to paint your whole shop for free in exchange for their logo being front and centre.It's unlikely you can actually buy milk here, but the shop owner is happy to host the hand-painted sign and save money on decorating.Condom signs are quite common, and this one does have a connection with its host building via the Medi-Care Clinic below.These corporate messages are eye-catching bursts of colour as you walk along the streets of Kumi, and almost all of them are hand-painted — it took me a while to realise this, as the pictorial elements are so often convincing.Freshly painted signs covering the entrance to Kumi's central market. They are advertising the Fortune Gold vegetable oil brand, the self-proclaimed 'Taste of Uganda'.The DownsideNothing lasts forever, though. Walking around Kumi and other rural areas of Uganda, you will see many buildings that were once brightly coloured but are now left in a state of disrepair. The advertisers that commissioned the signs rarely maintain them, leaving business owners with crumbling paint and no funds to fix it.Business continues below while the paint comes loose on the Gentex advertising above.However, these aren't just buildings; they're storytellers. They tell tales of resilience, resourcefulness, and the bridge between small local businesses and large corporations.Photography and text by Olivia Krawczyk.More brand advertising for Fortune sunflower oil and Star laundry bars.In Kumi, Uganda, hand-painted messages like this — "Pray for my enemies alwa[y]s, Kumi Boys" — are a common sight on trucks, mixing faith, local pride, and personal expression to create a form of moving street poetry.The Ugandan take on 'commit no nuisance' signs with the fine being about £20 ($25), and advertising for Sadolin paints providing the back drop for street vendor displays in Kumi, Uganda.

At CES 2025, NVIDIA presented Zorah, a revolutionary RTX neural rendering tech demo that showcases the latest advancements in geometry, lighting, and character rendering, all built with Unreal Engine 5.From the beginning, the vision was to create an environment that felt grounded and believable yet unique enough to serve as a foundation for a fantasy world. Inspired by Baroque architecture and cinematic references, artists at Lightspeed Studios blended intricate details and historical elements into a unified, immersive setting, working hand-in-hand with technical teams."With the fidelity now achievable, our team focused on micro details that enhance realism both from afar and up close. We wanted every corner of the environment to surprise and engage viewers. As such, every asset in the project went through Adobe Substance 3D Painter, Designer, or Photoshop at some point during production."Enjoy a collection of concept art, props, materials, and more, brought to life by the incredible art team behind Zorah:See more here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

Samsung wants you to have a lot of fun this weekend. Memorial Day means lots and lots of sales—but here’s one that you won’t forget any time soon. Right now, Samsung has slashed hundreds off its 49-inch Odyssey G9 monitors and you’ll get an extra 27-inch Odyssey G5 for free if you buy one. That’s an incredible deal, if you ask me. The Samsung Odyssey OLED G95SD is one of those massive ultrawide 49-inchers, complete with a 5120×1440 resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, and 0.03ms response time. The OLED panel elevates it to next-level greatness for ultra-vivid colors and deep blacks. Normally available for $2,199.98, right now you can get it for $1,899.99 (14% off). If that one’s too expensive but you still want an enormous 49-inch OLED ultrawide with 5120×1440 resolution, then jump on the Samsung Odyssey OLED G91SD. This one has a slower-but-still-fast 144Hz refresh rate, and it has the same 0.03ms response time. It’s normally available for $1,599.98, but you can get it now for $1,299.99 (19% off). And then there’s the Samsung Odyssey G95C, another huge 49-inch curved ultrawide monitor with that same luxurious 5120×1440 resolution along with a 240Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time. This one’s notably cheaper because it doesn’t have an OLED panel. Normally available for $1,599.98, right now you can get this super-large display with a gigantic discount for just $799.99 (50% off). Buy any of the above on-sale 49-inch Odyssey G9 gaming monitors and Samsung will throw in a 27-inch Odyssey G55C for free. This one has a more standard size but an excellent resolution of 2560×1440, a refresh rate of 165Hz, and a response time of 1ms. It’s a $299.99 value, which is pretty insane to give away in BOGO style like this. If you’ve been looking to upgrade your home PC setup, this is an incredible opportunity. With an ultrawide 49-incher and a 27-inch supplementary display, you’ll have the battlestation of your dreams for a crazy price. Don’t miss this chance! Buy now from Samsung Buy now from Samsung Buy now from Samsung

Image: Daedalic EntertainmentEmbracer Group has seemingly been scrambling to right the ship after a turbulent few years, and its latest announcement reveals yet another significant move for the company. As reported by Game Developer, Embracer posted an investor statement to confirm that it is renaming its core gaming division from the working-title 'Middle Earth & Friends' to 'Fellowship Entertainment'. In addition, it's also looking to spin off the Coffee Stain Group into a "standalone group of community-driven game developers and publishers". The company notes that Fellowship Entertainment will have a total of approximately "6,000 employees across more than 30 countries". Here's a look at what it will be working on along with the teams it will encompass: "The group will be steward of the commercial rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as intellectual properties Kingdom Come Deliverance, Metro, Dead Island, Killing Floor, Darksiders, Remnant and Tomb Raider, amongst more than 300 other gaming IPs. "Fellowship Entertainment will consist of companies such as 4A Games, Aspyr Media, CrazyLabs, Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Dark Horse, Deca Games, Eidos-Montréal, Flying Wild Hog, Gunfire Games, Limited Run Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Milestone, PLAION, Tarsier Studios, THQ Nordic, Tripwire Interactive, Vertigo Games, and Warhorse Studios amongst more than 40 other companies." Meanwhile, Coffee Stain Group will consist of "more than 250 passionate game developers and publishers". We thought it might be fun to come up with our own alternatives to Fellowship Entertainment, so if you have any ideas yourself, be sure to let us know with a comment: Second Breakfast Games Tom Bombadeveloper One Does Not Simply Games You Shall Not Game Pass (sorry, Phil) Po-Tay-Toes Entertainment Sackville-Baggames It Comes in Pints Entertainment Sullied name Group discontinues all operations in Russia What do you make of this news from Embracer Group? Is this the turning point for the publisher? Let us know your thoughts. [source embracer.com, via gamedeveloper.com] Share:0 1 Nintendo Life’s resident horror fanatic, when he’s not knee-deep in Resident Evil and Silent Hill lore, Ollie likes to dive into a good horror book while nursing a lovely cup of tea. He also enjoys long walks and listens to everything from TOOL to Chuck Berry. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Xenoblade Dev Monolith Soft Is On The Hunt For New 2D And 3D Designers Recruitment sessions start next month Switch 2's Price May Pose "Challenges" For First-Year Sales, Says Furukawa Hence the lower-than-expected sales forecast Palworld Dev Announces "Disappointing" Game Changes Resulting From Nintendo's Lawsuit "We have had to make certain compromises" Nintendo Says Switch 2 Price Changes May Still Occur Depending On Tariffs Console price remains unchanged for now EA And Respawn Hit By Hundreds Of Layoffs As New Project Cancelled Between 300 to 400 people have lost their job

Though many of the old artists’ residences have been gobbled up by new high-rises, pockets of nostalgia persist on the streets of New York’s NoHo neighborhood. Nine years ago, New Operations Workshop founder Gabriel Yuri was fortunate enough to find one when his real estate broker showed him a partially renovated 860-square-foot studio apartment in a 19th-century building that had been, at different times, a furrier, an artist refuge, and a home for women. Even in its haphazard state—with new walls plastered over some of the 1830s brickwork and half-finished hardwood flooring—the Diller Scofidio + Renfro alum could see the potential.Gabriel Yuri sits at a Tom Dixon screw table in the dining area, where custom shelving, a George Nelson pendant, and his grandmother’s Jens Risom chairs play off one another in their round and linear forms. “Most of what I was finding had been renovated to remove the charm,” Yuri remembers of the boring box apartments that had dominated the listings. “I wanted something that had history and character, so it was great that I got to this one while it still had some of that intact.”Many might have been daunted by the workload, but Yuri welcomed the challenge. He spent nearly four years peeling back the renovations—often himself, sometimes with the help of a handyman—restoring the original pine floors in the living room and revealing more of the existing brick, exposed pipework, and steel beams that had been covered up throughout the space. And his lucky streak continued: When new neighbors discarded the original tin ceiling tile during their own renovation, Yuri installed them in his kitchen and entry hallway—a sweet nod to the building’s past that complements the new industrial-style steel kitchen cabinetry. He also found original transom windows, which he used above the bedroom door to allow light to penetrate deeper into the apartment, and crafted a banquette sectional sofa and daybed in the living room to hide structural adjustments from the building’s façade work.A plaster of Paris bust of Yuri’s grandmother sits atop an old I-beam side table in the entry hallway, signaling the apartment’s industrial-chic aesthetic. The Tutsi milk jug was bought at auction. “I wanted to embrace the industrial aesthetic but also elevate it by blending it with a collection of things with balance and harmony,” says Yuri. In the living room, that meant pairing a vintage Hans Wegner lounge chair inherited from his grandmother with a sculptural Hinterlands cocktail table. But while the building itself served as an architectural muse, Yuri found inspiration in yet another beacon from a bygone era: his grandmother, who passed away just before he purchased the loft. “She wasn’t a designer but had the most incredible design sensibility,” he says. He repurposed her collection of midcentury furnishings—including the Jens Risom chairs in the dining room and the Hans Wegner lounge chair in the living room—as well as artwork and artifacts from her home in Queens. In the bedroom, he incorporated her stained glass pocket doors as a room divider and created a wood-and-cement-block bookcase inspired by the ones she often crafted herself. “The whole time I was keeping an eye out for what could fit in,” he says, noting the pops of red that were her (and his) favorite color. “It felt good to keep these things that I had grown up with and give them a new life.”Blended with contemporary additions, like the Tom Dixon table in the dining room and the live-edge platform bed in the bedroom, midcentury lighting that bridges the modern and industrial aesthetics at play, plus pieces picked up on his travels, the eclectic mix imparts layers of soul that give Yuri’s home a cocooning feeling of warmth and personal history.“The biggest response I get is how calm it feels,” he says. “I’m a homebody. I like to read and listen to albums and usually work from home. It’s nice to be surrounded by so many references to the past in such a busy, constantly changing city.”Above the custom Maharam-upholstered banquette sofa, Yuri has arranged an assortment of artwork on a steel shelf, including works by Paul Sepuya, Sarah Oppenheimer, and his mother, as well as a self-made piece that was once on display in the lobby of the Guggenheim. The table lamp is by In Common With, and the wood-and-steel magazine rack is of his own design. A memento from his time working at the iconic Starrett-Lehigh building, the hanging window acts as a divider between the living and dining areas. The transom windows that appear in the newly erected bedroom wall, which was started before Yuri purchased the apartment but redone in a much slimmer configuration, were found on site, and Yuri installed a herringbone floor over the previous owner’s renovations. Steel cabinetry and stained butcher block countertops from IKEA give the kitchen a sleek update. A seagrass CB2 rug, an Alvar Alto stool, and a city-themed drying rack by Seletti, as well as a collection of his grandmother’s vintage Hasami pottery and a conical tea kettle by Aldo Rossi for Alessi, infuse the space with warmth and personality. A custom oak platform bed adds earthy elegance in the bedroom, a space made cozier with custom felted wool drapery, cotton cashmere sheets by RH, and a throw blanket by El Rey for Nordic Knots. A pair of Yuri’s grandmother’s Arthur Umanoff side chairs create a sense of symmetry, as do the antique glass naval sconces and reclaimed pine flooring. Inspired by the simple bookshelves his grandmother made in her Queens, New York, home, Yuri crafted this efficient cinderblock and wood organizational system in the bedroom. Yuri painted the existing clawfoot tub in Farrow & Ball’s Off Black to coordinate with the new RH vanity and slate tile flooring for a moody effect against the existing brick walls.

Video games' soaring prices have a cost beyond your wallet - the concept of ownership itself As the industry's big squeeze reaches consumers, a grim bargain emerges. Image credit: Adobe Stock, Microsoft Opinion by Chris Tapsell Deputy Editor Published on May 22, 2025 Earlier this month, Microsoft bumped up the prices of its entire range of Xbox consoles, first-party video games, and most (or in the US, all) of its accessories. It comes a few weeks after Nintendo revealed a £396 Switch 2, with £75 copies of its own first-party fare in Mario Kart World, and a few months after Sony launched the exorbitant £700 PS5 Pro (stand and disc drive not included), a £40 price rise for its all-digital console in the UK, the second of this generation, and news that it's considering even more price rises in the months to come. The suspicion - or depending on where you live, perhaps hope - had been that when Donald Trump's ludicrously flip-flopping, self-defeating tariffs came into play, that the US would bear the brunt of it. The reality is that we're still waiting on the full effects. But it's also clear, already, that this is far from just an American problem. The platform-holders are already spreading the costs, presumably to avoid an outright doubling of prices in one of their largest markets. PS5s in Japan now cost £170 more than they did at launch. That price rise, mind, took place long before the tariffs, as did the £700 PS5 Pro (stand and disc drive not included!), and the creeping costs of subscriptions such as Game Pass and PS Plus. Nor is it immediately clear how that justifies charging $80 for, say, a copy of Borderlands 4, a price which hasn't been confirmed but which has still been justified by the ever graceful Randy Pitchford, a man who seems to stride across the world with one foot perpetually bared and ready to be put, squelching, square in it, and who says true fans will still "find a way" to buy his game. The truth is inflation has been at it here for a while, and that inflation is a funny beast, one which often comes with an awkward mix of genuine unavoidability - tariffs, wars, pandemics - and concealed opportunism. Games are their own case amongst the many, their prices instead impacted more by the cost of labour, which soars not because developers are paid particularly well (I can hear their scoffs from here) but because of the continued, lagging impact of their executives' total miscalculation, in assuming triple-A budgets and timescales could continue growing exponentially. And by said opportunism - peep how long it took for Microsoft and the like to announce those bumped prices after Nintendo came in with Mario Kart at £75. Anyway, the causes are, in a sense, kind of moot. The result of all this squeezing from near enough all angles of gaming's corporate world is less a pincer manoeuvre on the consumer than a suffocating, immaculately executed full-court press, a full team hurtling with ruthless speed towards the poor unwitting sucker at home on the sofa. Identifying whether gaming costs a fortune now for reasons we can or can't sympathise with does little to change the fact that gaming costs a fortune. And, to be clear, it really does cost a fortune. Things are getting very expensive in the world of video games. £700 for a PS5 Pro! | Image credit: Eurogamer Whenever complaints about video game prices come up there is naturally a bit of pushback - games have always been expensive! What about the 90s! - usually via attempts to draw conclusions from economic data. Normally I'd be all on board with this - numbers can't lie! - but in this case it's a little different. Numbers can't lie, but they can, sometimes, be manipulated to prove almost anything you want - or just as often, simply misunderstood to the same ends. (Take most back-of-a-cigarette-packet attempts at doing the maths here, and the infinite considerations to bear in mind: Have you adjusted for inflation? How about for cost of living, as if the rising price of everything else may somehow make expensive games more palatable? Or share of disposable average household salary? For exchange rates? Purchasing power parity? Did you use the mean or the median for average income? What about cost-per-frame of performance? How much value do you place on moving from 1080p to 1440p? Does anyone sit close enough to their TV to tell enough of a difference with 4K?! Ahhhhh!) Instead, it's worth remembering that economics isn't just a numerical science. It is also a behavioural one - a psychological one. The impact of pricing is as much in the mind as it is on the spreadsheet, hence these very real notions of "consumer confidence" and pricing that continues to end in ".99". And so sometimes with pricing I find it helps to borrow another phrase from sport, alongside that full-court press, in the "eye test". Sports scouts use all kinds of numerical data to analyse prospective players these days, but the best ones still marry that with a bit of old-school viewing in the flesh. If a player looks good on paper and passes the eye test, they're probably the real deal. Likewise, if the impact of buying an $80 video game at full price looks unclear in the data, but to your human eye feels about as whince-inducing as biting into a raw onion like it's an apple, and then rubbing said raw onion all over said eye, it's probably extremely bloody expensive and you should stop trying to be clever. Video games, to me, do feel bloody expensive. If I weren't in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to source or expense most of them for work I am genuinely unsure if I'd be continuing with them as a hobby - at least beyond shifting my patterns, as so many players have over the years, away from premium console and PC games to the forever-tempting, free-to-play time-vampires like Fortnite or League of Legends. Which leads, finally, to the real point here: that there is another cost to rising game and console prices, beyond the one hitting you square in the wallet. How much is GTA 6 going to cost? $80 or more? | Image credit: Rockstar The other cost - perhaps the real cost, when things settle - is the notion of ownership itself. Plenty of physical media collectors, aficionados and diehards will tell you this has been locked in the sights of this industry for a long time, of course. They will point to gaming's sister entertainment industries of music, film and television, and the paradigm shift to streaming in each, as a sign of the inevitability of it all. And they will undoubtedly have a point. But this step change in the cost of gaming will only be an accelerant. Understanding that only takes a quick glance at the strategy of, say, Xbox in recent years. While Nintendo is still largely adhering to the buy-it-outright tradition and Sony is busy shooting off its toes with live service-shaped bullets, Microsoft has, like it or not, positioned itself rather deftly. After jacking up the cost of its flatlining hardware and platform-agnostic games, Xbox, its execs would surely argue, is also now rather counterintuitively the home of value gaming - if only because Microsoft itself is the one hoiking up the cost of your main alternative. Because supplanting the waning old faithfuls in this kind of scenario - trade-ins, short-term rentals - is, you guessed it, Game Pass. You could even argue the consoles are factored in here too. Microsoft, with its "this is an Xbox" campaign and long-stated ambition to reach players in the billions, has made it plain that it doesn't care where you play its games, as long as you're playing them. When all physical consoles are jumping up in price, thanks to that rising tide effect of inflation, the platform that lets you spend £15 a month to stream Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Oblivion Remastered and the latest Doom straight to your TV without even buying one is, at least in theory (and not forgetting the BDS call for a boycott of them) looking like quite an attractive proposition. Xbox, for its part, has been chipping away at this idea for a while - we at Eurogamer had opinions about team green's disregard for game ownership as far back as the reveal of the Xbox One, in the ancient times of 2013. Then it was a different method, the once-horrifying face of digital rights management, or DRM, along with regulated digital game sharing and online-only requirements. Here in 2025, with that disdain now platform-agnostic, and where games are being disappeared from people's libraries, platforms like Steam are, by law, forced to remind you that you're not actually buying your games at all, where older games are increasingly only playable via subscriptions to Nintendo, Sony, and now Xbox, and bosses are making wild claims about AI's ability to "preserve" old games by making terrible facsimiles of them, that seems slightly quaint. More directly, Xbox has been talking about this very openly since at least 2021. As Ben Decker, then head of gaming services marketing at Xbox, said to me at the time: "Our goal for Xbox Game Pass really ladders up to our goal at Xbox, to reach the more than 3 billion gamers worldwide… we are building a future with this in mind." Four years on, that future might be now. Jacking up the cost of games and consoles alone won't do anything to grow gaming's userbase, that being the touted panacea still by the industry's top brass. Quite the opposite, obviously (although the Switch 2 looks set to still be massive, and the PS5, with all its price rises, still tracks in line with the price-cut PS4). But funneling more and more core players away from owning games, and towards a newly incentivised world where they merely pay a comparatively low monthly fee to access them, might just. How much a difference that will truly make, and the consequences of it, remain up for debate of course. We've seen the impact of streaming on the other entertainment industries in turn, none for the better, but games are a medium of their own. Perhaps there's still a little room for optimism. Against the tide there are still organisations like Does It Play? and the Game History Foundation, or platforms such as itch.io and GOG (nothing without its flaws, of course), that exist precisely because of the growing resistance to that current. Just this week, Lost in Cult launched a new wave of luxurious, always-playable physical editions of acclaimed games, another small act of defiance - though perhaps another sign things are going the way of film and music, where purists splurge on vinyl and Criterion Collection BluRays but the vast majority remain on Netflix and Spotify. And as uncomfortable as it may be to hear for those - including this author! - who wish for this medium to be preserved and cared for like any other great artform, there will be some who argue that a model where more games can be enjoyed by more people, for a lower cost, is worth it. Game Pass often offers great value, but the library is always in a state of flux. Collectors may need to start looking at high-end physical editions. | Image credit: Microsoft There's also another point to bear in mind here. Nightmarish as it may be for preservation and consumer rights, against the backdrop of endless layoffs and instability many developers tout the stability of a predefined Game Pass or PS Plus deal over taking a punt in the increasingly crowded, choppy seas of the open market. Bethesda this week has just boasted Doom: The Dark Ages' achievement of becoming the most widely-played (note: not fastest selling) Doom game ever. That despite it reaching only a fraction of peak Steam concurrents in the same period as its predecessor, Doom: Eternal - a sign, barring some surprise shift away from PC gaming to consoles, that people really are beginning to choose playing games on Game Pass over buying them outright. The likes of Remedy and Rebellion tout PS Plus and Game Pass as stabilisers, or even accelerants, for their games launching straight onto the services. And independent studios and publishers of varying sizes pre-empted that when we spoke to them for a piece about this exact this point, more than four years ago - in a sense, we're still waiting for a conclusive answer to a question we first began investigating back in 2021: Is Xbox Game Pass just too good to be true? We've talked, at this point, at great length about how this year would be make-or-break for the triple-A model in particular. About how the likes of Xbox, or Warner Bros., or the many others have lost sight of their purpose - and in the process, their path to sustainability - in the quest for exponential growth. How £700 Pro edition consoles are an argument against Pro editions altogether. And about how, it's becoming clear, the old industry we once knew is no more, with its new form still yet to take shape. There's an argument now, however, that a grim new normal for preservation and ownership may, just as grimly, be exactly what the industry needs to save itself. It would be in line with what we've seen from the wider world of technology and media - and really, the wider world itself. A shift from owning to renting. That old chestnut of all the capital slowly rising, curdling at the top. The public as mere tenants in a house of culture owned by someone, somewhere else. It needn't have to be this way, of course. If this all sounds like a particularly unfavourable trade-in, remember this too: it's one that could almost certainly have been avoided.

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park.The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert—and it’s just far enough away from Nevada’s communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. Read the full story. —James Temple This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution. Check out the rest of the package here. A new atomic clock in space could help us measure elevations on Earth In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss one. The misalignment happened because they measured elevation from sea level differently. To prevent such costly construction errors, in 2015 scientists in the International Association of Geodesy voted to adopt the International Height Reference Frame, or IHRF, a worldwide standard for elevation. Now, a decade after its adoption, scientists are looking to update the standard—by using the most precise clock ever to fly in space. Read the full story. —Sophia Chen Three takeaways about AI’s energy use and climate impacts —Casey Crownhart This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself. This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O’Donnell (and the work of many others on our team). Over that time, with the help of leading researchers, we quantified the energy and emissions impacts of individual queries to AI models and tallied what it all adds up to, both right now and for the years ahead. There’s a lot of data to dig through, and I hope you’ll take the time to explore the whole story. But in the meantime, here are three of my biggest takeaways from working on this project. Read the full story.This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again. Artificial intelligence comes with a shimmer and a sheen of magical thinking. And if we’re not careful, politicians, employers, and other decision-makers may accept at face value the idea that machines can and should replace human judgment and discretion. One way to combat that might be resurrecting the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional think tank that detected lies and tested tech until it was shuttered in 1995. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI startup The former Apple design guru will work with Sam Altman to design an entirely new range of devices. (NYT $)+ The deal is worth a whopping $6.5 billion. (Bloomberg $)+ Altman gave OpenAI staff a preview of its AI ‘companion’ devices. (WSJ $)+ AI products to date have failed to set the world alight. (The Atlantic $)2 Microsoft has blocked employee emails containing ‘Gaza’ or ‘Palestine’ Although the term ‘Israel’ does not trigger such a block. (The Verge)+ Protest group No Azure for Apartheid has accused the company of censorship. (Fortune $) 3 DOGE needs to do its work in secret That’s what the Trump administration is claiming to the Supreme Court, at least. (Ars Technica)+ It’s trying to avoid being forced to hand over internal documents. (NYT $)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)4 US banks are racing to embrace cryptocurrency Ahead of new stablecoin legislation. (The Information $)+ Attendees at Trump’s crypto dinner paid over $1 million for the privilege. (NBC News)+ Bitcoin has surged to an all-time peak yet again. (Reuters)5 China is making huge technological leaps Thanks to the billions it’s poured into narrowing the gap between it and the US. (WSJ $)+ Nvidia’s CEO has branded America’s chip curbs on China ‘a failure.’ (FT $)+ There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review)6 Disordered eating content is rife on TikTokBut a pocket of creators are dedicated to debunking the worst of it. (Wired $) 7 The US military is interested in the world’s largest aircraftThe gigantic WindRunner plane will have an 80-metre wingspan. (New Scientist $) + Phase two of military AI has arrived. (MIT Technology Review)8 How AI is shaking up animationNew tools are slashing the costs of creating episodes by up to 90%. (NYT $) + Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry. (MIT Technology Review)9 Tesla’s Cybertruck is a flop Sorry, Elon. (Fast Company $)+ The vehicles’ resale value is plummeting. (The Daily Beast)10 Google’s new AI video generator loves this terrible joke Which appears to originate from a Reddit post. (404 Media)+ What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “It feels like we are marching off a cliff.” —An unnamed software engineering vice president jokes that future developers conferences will be attended by the AI agents companies like Microsoft are racing to deploy, Semafor reports. One more thing What does GPT-3 “know” about me?One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it. These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s former AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + Don’t shoot the messenger, but it seems like there’s a new pizza king in town 🍕 ($)+ Ranked: every Final Destination film, from worst to best.+ Who knew that jelly could help to preserve coral reefs? Not I.+ A new generation of space archaeologists are beavering away to document our journeys to the stars.

REBECCA BAILEY / AFP Course à l’IA : la guerre des puces s’intensifie entre les Etats-Unis et la Chine Publié aujourd’hui à 14h00 Article réservé aux abonnés Les faitsMalgré la désescalade sur les droits de douane, Washington a durci la réglementation sur l’utilisation des puces électroniques chinoises, provoquant des représailles chinoises. Il n’a pas fallu attendre longtemps pour que le ton monte de nouveau entre les deux premières puissances mondiales. A peine la trêve sur le front douanier décrétée, lundi 12 mai, à Genève, entre les Etats-Unis et la Chine, que la bataille a repris de plus belle sur le secteur stratégique de la course à l’intelligence artificielle (IA). Dès le 13 mai, l’administration Trump a commencé à dessiner les contours de sa stratégie pour freiner le rattrapage chinois dans les puces électroniques, suscitant l’ire de la Chine. Pour cause : selon une directive de la branche du département du commerce américain chargée du contrôle des exportations sensibles, le bureau de l’industrie et de la sécurité, « utiliser des puces Huawei Ascend où que ce soit dans le monde risque d’enfreindre les règles de contrôle d’exportations américaines ». Washington explique que les dernières puces du fabricant chinois Huawei, les Ascend 910, ont été conçues ou produites avec certains logiciels ou équipements qui sont d’origine américaine. La mention « où que ce soit dans le monde » a depuis été supprimée du communiqué du département du commerce, mais le mal est fait. « La récente tentative de blocus complet sur les puces chinoises est un acte manifeste d’unilatéralisme et d’intimidation », a dénoncé le ministre des affaires étrangères chinois, Wang Yi, mardi 20 mai. La très relative atmosphère de dialogue entre la Chine et les Etats-Unis qui est ressortie de la trêve commerciale de quatre-vingt-dix jours décidée sur les rives du lac Léman est déjà entamée. Pour Pékin, Washington a « gravement porté atteinte au consensus » de Genève. Poursuites pénales dans le monde Il vous reste 79.17% de cet article à lire. La suite est réservée aux abonnés.