🍔 Burger King rolls out AI headsets that track employee 'friendliness'

Burger King is testing AI-powered employee headsets that monitor staff interactions with customers and oversee store operations. The AI system, called BK Assistant, compiles "friendliness scores" at the fast-food chain's locations based on employees' conversations.

An AI chat-bot dubbed "Patty", embedded in the headsets, answers questions from employees about how to prepare menu items and flags when a product needs restocking. Burger King's chief digital officer told that the fast-food outlet had trained the OpenAI-powered system to identify terms including "please" and "thank you" in order to evaluate staff friendliness. The system analyses audio from drive-thru interactions.

The tool is designed to streamline restaurant operations to let managers and staff focus more on guest service and team leadership. All 500 US Burger King restaurants are poised to have access to the BK Assistant AI platform by the end of 2026.

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🇦🇪🇸🇦UAE and Saudi boost oil exports

UAE oil producer Abu Dhabi is set to export more of its flagship Murban crude in April. Oil hit $73 a barrel on Friday, the highest level since July.

"The boost in exports will definitely create a short-term buffer of any Strait of Hormuz disruptions and/or any shipping companies deciding to avoid the region," said Scott Shelton, analyst at TP ICAP.

State-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) offered additional volumes to partners in its onshore concession. Two onshore fields will be shut for maintenance in May, affecting export availability. Partners in Murban crude producer ADNOC Onshore, which include BP (BP.L), TotalEnergies (TTЕF.PA) , China National Petroleum Corp, Inpex (1605.T), Zhenhua Oil and South Korea's GS Energy, are entitled to about 40% of production of the grade at about 2 million barrels per day.

#BRICS

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🇺🇸 Trump directs US agencies to toss Anthropic's AI as Pentagon calls startup a supply risk

U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he is directing the government to stop work with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would declare the startup a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the AI lab after a showdown about technology guardrails.

Trump added there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defense Department and other agencies that use the company's products. If Anthropic does not help with the transition, Trump said, he would use "the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow."

The moves further set a precedent that U.S. law alone would constrain how AI is deployed on the battlefield, with the Pentagon seeking to preserve all flexibility in defense and not be limited by warnings from the technology's creators against powering weapons with unreliable AI. In a statement, Anthropic said it would challenge any risk designation in court by the Department of War.

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🤖 Nvidia plans new chip to speed AI processing

Nvidia plans to launch a new processor designed to help OpenAI and other customers build faster, more efficient AI systems. The company is developing a new system for "inference" computing, a form of processing that allows AI models to respond to queries. The new platform is set to be unveiled at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in San Jose next month and will incorporate a chip designed by startup Groq.

Earlier OpenAI was unsatisfied with the speed at which Nvidia’s hardware can spit out answers to ChatGPT users for specific types of problems such as software development and AI communicating with other software. It needs new hardware that would eventually provide about 10% of OpenAI’s inference computing needs in the future.

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🛢 OPEC+ may consider larger oil output boost

OPEC+ may consider a larger than planned output increase and Saudi Arabia and the UAE have already raised exports in anticipation of possible oil disruption. Eight members of the grouping of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies - Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UAE, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria and Oman - were already scheduled to meet on Sunday at 11:00 GMT.

The eight OPEC+ members raised production quotas by about 2.9 million bpd from April through December 2025, roughly 3% of global demand, before pausing further increases for January to March 2026 due to seasonal weakness.

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🇰🇷 South Korea set to finally get a fully functioning Google Maps

South Korea will soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps doesn't work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.

The approval was made "on the condition that strict security requirements are met," the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth.

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⚡️🇷🇺🇨🇳 Russia and China call for emergency United Nations Security Council meeting following events in Iran.

U.N. diplomats said the 15-member body would meet at 4 p.m. local time in New York (21:00 GMT) on Saturday. Russia's U.N. mission said Russia and China requested an emergency meeting. The meeting was also called for by France, Bahrain, and Colombia. The meeting will be chaired by Britain, which holds the monthly council presidency.

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🤖 ASML says next-gen EUV tools ready to mass-produce chips, marking key shift for AI chip production  

ASML Holding's next-generation chipmaking machine is ready for manufacturers to start bringing it into use for production at high volumes, a big step for the chip industry.

The Dutch company produces the world's only commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) tools, which are a critical piece of equipment for chipmakers. This new tool will help chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Intel produce more powerful and efficient chips. ASML plans to release this data, which represents a key milestone, at a technical conference in San Jose on Thursday, the company's chief technology officer, Marco Pieters, told.

The High-NA EUV tools now experience limited downtime, have produced 500,000 dinner-plate-sized silicon wafers and can draw sufficiently precise patterns that make up the circuits on the chip, the ASML data shows, Pieters said.

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🤝 Meta signs multi-billion-dollar deal to rent Google AI chips

Meta Platforms has signed a multi-billion dollar deal to rent AI chips from Google to develop new AI models. Earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said it would sell up to $60 billion in AI chips to Meta. The Facebook owner earlier this month also signed a deal with Nvidia to buy its current and future AI chips.

Google was pushing to make its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) a viable alternative to Nvidia's market-leading GPUs. TPU sales have become a crucial growth engine of Google's cloud revenue as it seeks to prove to investors that its AI investments are generating returns. Also Meta is also in talks with Google to buy the TPUs for its data centers as early as next year, though the status of those discussions could not be determined. 🤔

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⚡️Trump confirms Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead

President Donald Trump said Saturday that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead following a barrage of joint US-Israeli strikes on the nation. The president noted that Khamenei’s killing in a Truth Social post, calling him “one of the most evil people in History.” In his post, Trump again urged Iranians to overthrow the current regime, calling it the “single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”

Iranian state media confirms that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. 40 days of public mourning have been announced in the wake of Khamenei’s killing and seven days of public holidays.

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🤖 Google wants Intrinsic to be ‘Android of robotics’ as it pushes into physical AI

Earlier this week, Google announced that Intrinsic, an internal robotics software project, will be moved from the “Other Bets” category into the main company. Now Google is aiming to mimic its Android strategy for robots.

Intrinsic’s flagship product, Flowstate, is a web-based platform that allows users to build robotic applications without having to write thousands of lines of code. Intrinsic’s team will work closely with DeepMind’s AI technology stack, Google’s Gemini, infrastructure and cloud teams.

Joining Google allows Intrinsic to amplify collective work across frontier AI spanning R&D through to deployment and daily operations enabling industrial use cases in manufacturing and logistics.

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🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russia and Ukraine agree local truce to allow repairs at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) posted on X that a truce had taken effect in southern Ukraine to enable the restoration of the 330-kilovolt supply line to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Situated in the southeast of the country, the plant is Ukraine’s largest and houses six of its 15 operational nuclear power reactors. Both countries have accused each other of raising the risk of a catastrophic accident by staging attacks near to the plant.

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✈️ Archer to bring Starlink onboard midnight air taxis

Archer Aviation Inc. announced it will work with Starlink to bring stable, reliable and high-speed connectivity to its air taxis, marking Starlink’s entry into the emerging air mobility category and an industry-first collaboration.

Under the agreement, Archer will install Starlink into its Midnight aircraft and conduct testing. Midnight is Archer’s piloted electric air taxi designed to carry up to 4 passengers while producing less noise and emissions than a traditional helicopter. Midnight is built with redundant systems across the aircraft — including 12 total engines and propellers — allowing Archer to target similar levels of safety as commercial airliners. Archer’s goal is to enable passengers in Midnight to travel across cities in 5-15 minutes.

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