A top Twitter executive responsible for safety and content moderation is leaving the company. The executive quit Friday, shortly after Twitter owner Elon Musk publicly complained about the platform’s handling of posts about transgender topics. Ella Irwin confirms her departure but isn't saying why she left. Twitter has faced turmoil including mass layoffs, staff quitting, and the firing of top executives since Musk took over last year. Next to Musk, Irwin was the most prominent voice of the company’s ever-changing content policies in recent months. Twitter has struggled to bring back advertisers turned off by Musk’s drastic changes and loosening of rules against hate speech.

YouTube says it will stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election and other past U.S. presidential elections were marred by widespread fraud, errors or glitches. The Google-owned video service said in a blog post Friday that it wanted to avoid the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm. The updated policy will not stop YouTube from removing material that attempts to deceive voters in future elections, including the upcoming 2024 presidential election. The change comes as YouTube and other major social media companies have come under fire for not doing more to combat election misinformation.

An Amazon worker in Alabama that has been vocal in unionization efforts, has been terminated by the company, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The union says Jennifer Bates is dealing with injuries she received while working at Amazon and that her termination comes shortly after reaching three years of service with the company. Bates worked at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where some workers organized the biggest unionization push at the company since it was founded in 1995. Amazon has a history of crushing unionizing efforts at its warehouses and its Whole Foods grocery stores.

Customers of Venmo, PayPal and CashApp should not store their money with those apps for the long term because the funds may not be covered by deposit insurance. That's according to a warning from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Thursday. The alert comes several weeks after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank. Those institutions experienced bank runs after fearful customers with uninsured deposits pulled their money en masse. Money stored on a payment app is not being held in a traditional bank account. So, if there is an event similar to a bank run with the payment apps, those funds may not be protected.

A bill that would force Big Tech companies to pay news agencies for using their content passed its first big test in the state Legislature on Thursday. Proponents said the measure will provide a lifeline to local news organizations, but opponents said the bill favors out-of-state big newspaper chains and could violate the First Amendment. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, has vowed to remove news stories from Facebook if the bill were to become law. Similar efforts to bolster local journalism have been attempted by the United States Congress, with little success. The California bill received bipartisan support.

A Los Angeles startup that is designing facilities to remove carbon dioxide from the ocean says it has struck a pre-purchase agreement with Boeing. Equatic says it will provide the aerospace giant with a byproduct of the carbon removal process to help it cut emissions from planes. The carbon removal company says the deal is a pre-purchase agreement for the hydrogen that it produces when it removes the greenhouse gas from the ocean. The green hydrogen could then be used as a component in sustainable aviation fuel. Aviation currently accounts for about 2.5% of worldwide emissions of the greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

Twitter may now be worth one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social media platform just seven months ago. The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund has reduced the market value of its equity stake in Twitter for a third time, now putting it at $6.55 million. That’s down from the nearly $20 million the Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its stake at in October. Fidelity Investments, a financial services company, is privately held, not public, but is required by the SEC to regularly disclose its holdings. Because Twitter is a private company now called X Holdings Corp., information about its finances can’t be verified.

Amazon has agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations it violated a child privacy law and deceived parents by keeping for years kids’ voice and location data recorded by its Alexa voice assistant. Separately, the company has agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring. Amazon says it disagrees with the FTC’s claims on both matters and denies violating the law. But it says the settlements “put these matters behind us” and its devices and services aim to protect consumer privacy.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose slightly last week but remains at healthy levels that continue to show a strong U.S. labor market. U.S. applications for jobless claims were 232,000 for the week ending May 27, an increase of just 2,000 from the previous week. The weekly claims numbers are considered representative of the number of U.S. layoffs. The four-week moving average of claims, which flattens out some of the week-to-week volatility, fell by 2,500 to 229,500. Overall, 1.8 million people were collecting unemployment benefits the week that ended May 20, about 6,000 more than the previous week.

A humble Corolla running on liquid hydrogen has made its racing debut, part of a move to bring the futuristic technology into the racing world and to demonstrate Toyota Motor Corp.’s resolve to develop hydrogen vehicles. The Corolla is powered by a combustion engine common in regular cars, and not by a battery and motor that drive electric vehicles. The car won't be appearing in dealerships anytime soon. Toyota officials said the 24-hour race at Fuji Speedway near Mount Fuji was just meant to test the technology. Toyota, a powerhouse for hybrids, has fallen behind in the global shift to battery EVs. But it’s been banking on hydrogen for years.

Last year was a mixed bag pay-wise for the women who run companies in the S&P 500 -- compensation increased for more than half of them, but the median pay package fell 6%. Of the 343 CEOs in the compensation survey of S&P 500 companies done by the AP and Equilar, only 20 were women. Because they are a small group, changes in pay for only a few can easily skew the overall figures. The drop comes after a 26% jump in pay for female CEOs in 2021, a year when pay packages reflected a recovering economy and soaring stock prices and profits.

China’s commerce minister met Tesla Ltd. CEO Elon Musk and promised to support the development of foreign companies. Musk joined a series of CEOs from global companies including Apple Inc. who have met with Cabinet officials this year following the end of anti-virus controls that blocked most travel into China. The ruling Communist Party is trying to revive investor interest in China’s slowing economy and reassure companies that have been rattled by anti-monopoly and data-security crackdowns, raids on consulting firms and tension with Washington. The commerce minister, Wang Wentao, said Beijing will “support long-term, stable development of foreign-invested enterprises in China."

China has warned of the risks posed by advances in artificial intelligence while calling for heightened national security measures. The statement issued after a meeting Tuesday chaired by Communist Party leader and President Xi Jinping underscores the tension between the government’s determination to seize global leadership in cutting-edge technology and concerns about the possible social and political harms of such technologies. It followed a warning by scientists and tech industry leaders in the U.S., including high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, about the perils AI poses to humankind. The official Xinhua News Agency said Xi urged “dedicated efforts to safeguard political security and improve the security governance of internet data and artificial intelligence.”

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is in custody at the Texas prison where she will spend the next 11 years serving her sentence for overseeing an infamous blood-testing hoax. Holmes could be seen Tuesday from outside the prison’s gates walking into the a federal women’s prison camp located in Bryan, Texas.  She wore jeans, a brown sweater and was smiling as she spoke with two prison employees accompanying her. Her arrival comes more than a year after a jury convicted Holmes on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022. She was sentenced to prison time in November.

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has reported to a federal prison in Texas — marking the start of her 11-year sentence for overseeing a notorious blood testing hoax. Holmes was convicted last year for duping investors who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in the failed Silicon Valley startup. On Tuesday, she entered a federal women’s prison camp in Bryan, Texas — a minimum-security facility where the federal judge who sentenced Holmes in November recommended she be incarcerated. Federal Prison Camp Bryan, located around 95 miles from Houston, houses about 650 women.

A federal appeals court has breathed new life into a rural Nevada town's unusual bid to halt government repairs to an aging irrigation canal that burst and flooded more than 500 homes in 2008. The town of Fernley and area farmers and ranchers say the renovation that began this year would eliminate leaking water they have used for a century to help fill their wells east of Reno. The government says locals don't have any rights to the water that belongs to U.S. taxpayers. A federal appeals court recently ordered a lower court to reconsider the case.

Robots are on display at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London, where visitors can get a glimpse of the future. The event this week is sort of the Olympics of the robot world. Student teams compete in a host of challenges like robot cooking and autonomous driving contests, academics present their research and startups show off their latest technology. Packs of robotic dogs swarmed the exhibition floor Tuesday. Visitors used virtual reality headsets and joysticks to move the arms of android sentries on wheels. Organizers say new artificial intelligence systems are part of the buzz at this year’s show.

Scientists and tech industry leaders, including executives at Microsoft and Google, have issued a new warning about the perils that artificial intelligence poses to humankind. The statement posted online Tuesday says that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, are among the hundreds of leading figures who signed the statement. Worries about artificial intelligence systems outsmarting humans and running wild have intensified with the rise of a new generation of highly capable AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Nvidia has joined the exclusive club of companies with a $1 trillion market capitalization as the chipmaker benefits from the growing use of artificial intelligence. Nvidia Corp. joins tech titans like Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft in the $1 trillion club. Its stock rose 5% in Tuesday trading, eclipsing $408 per share. Last week the maker of graphics chips for gaming and artificial intelligence reported a quarterly profit of more than $2 billion and revenue of $7 billion, both exceeding Wall Street’s forecasts.

U.S. highway safety regulators have closed an investigation into Tesla allowing video games to be played on center touch screens while vehicles are moving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents posted Tuesday that Tesla disabled the feature called “passenger play” with an online software update in December of 2021 under pressure from the agency. The agency says removing “passenger play” resolved its concerns about distracted driving. The 2021 software update covered more than 580,000 vehicles from the 2017 through 2022 model years. The agency said it opened the investigation in December of 2021 after getting a complaint from a Tesla owner that games could be played by the driver while the vehicles are moving.

Europe's largest desalination plant for drinking water had largely remained idle since its construction near Barcelona over a decade ago. But since a prolonged drought gripped Spain last year the plant has been running at full throttle to help keep some five million people adapt to climate change and not go thirsty. Before the drought desalination provided just 3% of Barcelona's drinking water. Now desalination is its leading source of water, providing 33% of the city’s water compared to 19% that currently comes from its shrinking rivers. But desalination comes with high costs both for taxpayers and for the environment due to its high energy costs which can actually make the underlying conditions of climate change worse.