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Showing posts from February, 2022

The Changing Fortunes of the Worlds Richest

Despite several days of declines, stock indices finished the week slightly higher, offsetting some of this month’s widespread losses. But the market’s troubles look far from over.  Many tech company CEOs and founders were unsurprisingly among the billionaires whose fortunes fell the most since the market close on Friday, January 21, according to Forbes’ calculations. Leading the declines for the second week in a row: Tesla chief exec Elon Musk, whose fortune fell $22 billion after shares of his electric vehicle maker had yet another rough week, falling over 10%. Even though Tesla posted record profits after reporting quarterly earnings on Wednesday, investors focused on the company’s warning that supply chain issues may hurt growth in 2022.  Musk also took to Twitter on Thursday to insult President Joe Biden, apparently in response to being snubbed at a White House forum for electric vehicle makers. Still the world’s richest person, Musk now has a net worth of $222.2 billion, ...

U.S. Embassy Shares Anti-Russia Twitter Meme As Digital War Over Ukraine Intensifies

Nearly a thousand years ago, the newly converted Christian population in what is now Ukraine decided to build something grand, a church to rival the Hagia Sophia, then the gravitational center of their Eastern Orthodox faith. So sometime in the 11th Century, an army of builders—likely recruited directly from the Byzantine Empire, the home of the Hagia Sophia—constructed a blue, many-domed cathedral in Kyiv, filling it with over 800 square feet of mosaics and frescoes. In this century, Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral has continued to enjoy pride of place in Ukrainian consciousness. In 2019, over 100,000 people lined up outside on cobblestone streets to see an official declaration: The Ukranian Orthodox church would seperate from the one in Russia. Around the same time, Ukranian Orthodox officials gathered there to vote and elect a new leader. And most recently, U.S. officials used St. Sophia in a Twitter meme on Tuesday morning. The tweet, sent by the State Department’s official account for...