B.C. engineering firm claims former CEO deleted files, stole trade secrets - Business in Vancouver

When she woke up in the middle of the night last Thursday, Jasmine Ault went to check her phone like she usually would. But she didn’t expect to see a notification telling her that her Instagram and Facebook account had been permanently disabled by Meta. It was only the start of an odyssey of frustration and anxiety spanning multiple days as Ault struggled to get to the bottom of how 20 years of personal data and professional contacts had been taken from her overnight  — all while being stonewalled by AI customer service with no option to reach a human being, even after paying extra. “It feels like I've lost everything in a metaphorical fire with my digital albums and my digital memories,” Ault, who lives in Toronto, told CBC News. “And who's going to protect those if I can only speak to AI?”Ault is only the latest victim in a pattern growing increasingly common over the past two years. Numerous Canadians have reported their Meta accounts being abruptly wiped, leaving them stuck interfacing with AI chatbots unable to grasp the complexities of their situation.

The S&P 500 lost nearly 2% last week, its biggest weekly decline since late June. The Nasdaq fell 4.5%, snapping a four-week winning streak.

China was once the top holder of U. S. Treasuries but has been shedding its massive stockpile for years, fueling fears of de-dollarization, but official data may not fully capture Beijing’s actual portfolio. The decline began in earnest around 2021, but as recently as April 2022, China still held $1 trillion in Treasury securities. U. S. data on Friday show that’s been whittled down to just $591 billion as of August, the lowest in 18 years and down from $700 billion a year earlier.

If you’ve ever pulled a fistful of leaves out of a pool pump basket, you already understand the only thing that went wrong at Africa’s only nuclear plant in August. Stuff gets sucked toward the pump, stuff piles up on the screen, the flow drops, and eventually the pump quits. Now swap the pool for the South Atlantic, swap the leaves for a mass of dead sardines, and swap your pump for one that’s keeping a 930-megawatt reactor cool. That’s pretty much what happened at Koeberg, which sits on the coast about 17 miles north of Cape Town. On Friday, August 21, Eskom, the state utility that runs the place, cut Unit 1 back to 50 percent. A cooling pump had shut itself off because the seawater intake was packed with what Eskom called “marine material,” which turned out to be fish. Lots of fish.