Category: News and Views

Reese’s is launching a peanut butter cup with no chocolate | CNN

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Peanut butter purists called and Reese’s answered.

Reese’s latest iteration of its wildly popular peanut butter cup will be all peanut butter, no chocolate, Hershey (HSY) announced on Monday.

The Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Cup is made entirely of peanut butter, both inside and in the peanut butter candy-flavored outer shell.

This is the first time in the company’s 90-year-history that its peanut butter cups have taken chocolate completely out of the equation. Versions of the Peanut Butter Lovers Cup came out in 2019 and 2020, but those still contained some chocolate.

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What Australia’s new law might mean for the news you see in the future | CNN

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Facebook has turned the news back on.

In Australia, the websites that were previously blocked by Facebook are now accessible and sharable once again.

But the battle involving social networks and news is just beginning.

This week Australia’s government passed a law this week that offered a glimpse at the future for Facebook and media consumers around the world.

The News Media Bargaining Code, passed Wednesday, effectively forces big tech platforms to pay publishers for news content

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FDA clears Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use | Live Science

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on Saturday (Feb. 27), making it the third shot cleared for use in the country.

“The authorization of this vaccine expands the availability of vaccines, the best medical prevention method for COVID-19, to help us in the fight against this pandemic, which has claimed over half a million lives in the United States,” Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said in a statement.

An FDA analysis showed that the single-shot vaccine had a 72% overall efficacy rate in the U.S. and 64% in South Africa, where a highly-transmissible coronavirus variant is causing most new cases, The New York Times reported. The efficacy rate in South Africa is slightly higher than the company had estimated in a recent report, up by seven percentage points.

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WhatsApp Accounts that Don’t Agree to Privacy Policy | Digital Trends

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WhatsApp recently announced it would be changing its privacy policy, in a move that has many users worried about how much of their data will be shared with WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook. Now, the service has revealed what will happen to the accounts of users who don’t agree to the new policy by the May 15 deadline.

TechCrunch contacted WhatsApp for more details on what would happen to users’ accounts if they didn’t agree to the new privacy policy. It reports that WhatsApp will “slowly ask” its users to agree to the new privacy changes, warning that they need to do so to continue having full access to the app’s features. Users who decline to accept the new policy will be able to continue using the app for a few weeks, but only in a limited way. “For a short time, these users will be able to receive calls and notifications, but will not be able to read or send messages from the app,” the company told TechCrunch.

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Texas weather: Are frozen wind turbines to blame for power cuts? | BBC News

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As freezing temperatures grip the southern United States, there have been major power failures across Texas as increased demand for heating has overwhelmed the energy grid.

Supplies of both electricity and gas have been intermittent, with the authorities saying they need to “safely manage the balance of supply and demand on the grid” to avoid another major power cut.

Republican representatives and media commentators have blamed green energy policies, in particular the increased use of wind turbines.

“So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said.

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Relief for New SBA Loans Shortened to 3 Months | Inc.com

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The U.S. Small Business Administration said that new SBA borrowers between now and the end of September will get three months of payment relief–up to $9,000 per month–instead of six months. The move is due to budgetary constraints, according to the SBA announcement. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act allocated $3.5 billion for these payments, which the SBA believes will not cover six months of payments.

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Paying $115B for Stripe or $77B for Coinbase might be quite rational | TechCrunch

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CoinDesk reported yesterday that crypto trading startup Coinbase is being valued at $77 billion on private exchanges. And Forbes reported that Stripe is being valued at $115 billion on secondary markets, where private shares can be bought and sold, albeit in a limited fashion.

I instantly wanted to write a piece headlined “Beware those super hot secondary market valuations,“ but after a little digging, I cannot. It turns out that the public markets are so hot, there is historical precedent for seemingly aggressive secondary market transactions being conservative compared to later IPO valuations. And there is further precedent for private market transactions that are more conservative in price terms than venture-determined valuations also working out.

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COVID-19 vaccines: What does 95% efficacy actually mean? | Live Science

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You have likely heard that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine efficacy is 95%, Moderna’s is 94% and Johnson & Johnson’s is 66%. But what do these numbers actually mean?

It’s not just an academic question. How people understand these numbers affects how they think about the vaccine, whether they get it and how they behave after getting it, all of which have implications for the pandemic on a larger scale.

So how should people interpret these numbers?

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