The social media site announced that users in the US, UK, Sweden, and Australia will soon be given access to a feature that allows people to discover and score AXS tickets to events, the company announced in a press release.
What the company calls Certified Artists will also be able to use the feature to promote and link directly to tickets for their own AXS live shows, the outlet reported.
“TikTok has become one of the most important global platforms for music content attracting an incredible community of artists and fans.” Marc Ruxin, Chief Strategy Officer for AXS, said in the press release. “By combining the reach and influence of TikTok artists with AXS’ global ticketing platform, the partnership will provide seamless ticket-buying access to some of the world’s most iconic venues, festivals, and tours.”
The feature is similar to one offered by TikTok and Ticketmaster — whose parent company, Live Nation, could face an antitrust lawsuit by the DOJ over allegations that the company is stifling competition among other ticket sellers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Ticketmaster feature, which launched on TikTok in 2022 and expanded globally in 2023, is another example of the app’s outreach to music artists.
Music executives are keenly aware of how the app can bring artists from obscurity to fame — or make old hits popular once again, as Business Insider’s Dan Whately reported — and are leaning into TikTok as an influential music marketing tool.
TikTok has recently drawn the ire of the music industry as well — the social media app and massive record label United Music Group are locked in a battle on how much artists should be paid to have their music on TikTok.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s fate in the US remains uncertain as lawmakers push for a ban on TikTok should its Chinese parent company ByteDance fail to divest from the app.
TikTok redirected BI to its press statement, as did AEG, the parent company of AXS.
The $2.4 billion mission landed the rover in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake. It’s the ideal spot to search for the fossils of Martian microbes that may have existed when the planet was lush with lakes and rivers.
Perseverance’s main mission is to collect samples of the rock and sediment along the lake bed and the crater rim, in hopes of finding a sign that life once thrived on the red planet. The rover has done a fine job — so far it’s secured 24 samples — but NASA no longer knows how it’s going to bring them to Earth for analysis.
The remains of an ancient river delta at the edge of Jezero Crater, captured by the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter.
Those aren’t light sabers, they’re Perseverance’s sample tubes, stashed on the Martian surface.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA’s original design for the retrieval mission, called Mars Sample Return, has fallen apart. The agency is asking companies to step in and propose better ideas.
“We are looking at out-of-the-box possibilities that could return the samples earlier and at a lower cost,” Nicola Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a press briefing on Monday. “This is definitely a very ambitious goal. We’re going to need to go after some very innovative new possibilities for design, and certainly leave no stone unturned.”
NASA’s old plan costs $11 billion and takes too long
Perseverance used its sample-collection arm to try coring a Mars rock on August 6, 2021.
NASA’s original proposal for the Mars Sample Return is “mind-bendingly complicated,” David Parker, director of space exploration at the European Space Agency, said in 2021.
The idea was to launch two rockets toward Mars, one carrying a lander and one carrying an orbiter.
The lander would be the largest ever sent to Mars. It would touch down near the stash of samples that Perseverance set up, deploy a rover to fetch the sample tubes, and load them onto a small rocket attached to the lander.
An illustration shows a concept of how NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission would launch Perseverance’s samples from the surface of Mars.
Then the rocket would launch the samples into Mars orbit, where it would eject them toward the orbiter, which would be the largest spacecraft NASA ever sent to Mars.
This illustration shows a concept for a rocket (left) releasing a sample container (right) high above the Martian surface.
The orbiter would have to grab the samples, journey back to Earth, and drop the sample vessel on a fiery plummet to our planet’s surface, where a team would retrieve them.
The mission plan relied about $4 billion in new technology and a decade of mission design and construction.
But the projected cost has ballooned to $8 to $11 billion since Perseverance touched down at Jezero Crater. Independent reviews have also concluded that instead of one decade to bring the samples to Earth, it would take two.
“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the briefing. “It’s the decade of the 2040s that we’re going to be landing astronauts on Mars.”
At the current price tag, Mars Sample Return would “cannibalize” other NASA missions, Nelson said. So the agency is calling all hands on deck, inside and outside of NASA, to come up with a new plan.
NASA wants companies with ‘tried-and-true’ technology
Fox said that NASA needs to see short proposals from companies or laboratories by May 17. Then the agency will choose a few of those competitors to further develop their ideas over a 90-day period, with complete proposals on NASA’s desk by late fall or early winter.
Some of NASA’s most tried-and-true contractors include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and SpaceX. Startups like Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are getting their foot in the NASA door through the agency’s new moon program.
“What we’re hoping is that we will be able to get back to some more traditional tried-and-true architectures,” Fox said. “Anything requiring huge leaps in technology usually, from experience, takes a lot of time.”
As for the return trip from Mars to Earth, that will be a technological leap no matter what.
“We’ve never launched from another planet, and that’s actually what makes Mars Sample Return such a challenging and interesting mission because it really is the first of a kind,” Fox said.
But Josh York, the 40-year-old CEO of in-home personal training company Gymguyz, takes it a step further and starts his mornings at 3:29 a.m., he told Fortune.
After having a cold rinse in the shower, he launches into an hour-and-a-half workout followed by a three-minute ice bath.
“It’s what makes me superhuman,” he told the outlet.
2. Bob Iger prefers to work out in a dark room with the TV on mute
It’s meant to have benefits like promoting heart health and benefiting cells. Experts warn against taking more than one tablespoon daily to avoid consuming too much vitamin A.
4. Or if you’re Elon Musk, your morning routine includes eating a doughnut
Another popular diet with successful CEOs is only eating within specific time windows — intermittent fasting.
6. Taking an afternoon nap in the office
Robin Zeng, whose role as CEO of the world’s largest EV battery manufacturing firm CATL makes him known as China’s “Battery King,” takes a daily nap at noon in the office, according to an interview with the FT.
Jack Dorsey, who runs financial services company Block, adhered to a strict wellness schedule that allowed him “just to stay above water,” when he was also CEO of Twitter. Each day involved walking five miles, meditating for two hours, and only eating one meal.
She advocates “eyes-open” meditation, which involves being mindful at any moment in everyday life.
“Once you learn how to do eyes-open meditation — something you can literally incorporate at any time — you can be engaged with the world but still very connected to yourself,” said previously told Business Insider. “I rely on it to feel more whole.”
9. A massage just before midnight
If reading a book and meditating isn’t relaxing enough, Steven Barlett, a former CEO and founder famed for his Diary of A CEO podcast, calls for an 11 p.m. massage.
“I often get massages in the evening — it sounds crazy, but usually my masseuse comes over at 11 p.m,” he told The Telegraph.
10. A more unusual habit among CEOs, Tobias Lutke says he never works later than 5:30 p.m.
“The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night,” he said in a thread on Twitter, now X.
Iranian state television confirmed in a ticker that the attack came in the form of an “extensive drone operation,” Radio Free Europe reporter Kian Sharifi noted in a post on X. An IDF spokesperson indicated dozens of drones had been launched from Iran, according to Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian.
The attack follows months of escalating tensions in the region, though the two countries have traded attacks for years as part of a long-simmering conflict between the adversaries. Iran threatened to retaliate after Israel struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, reportedly killing several high-level Iranian military commanders.
The April strike was significant, Business Insider’s Jake Epstein reported, as it could be considered the first time Israel targeted high-ranking officials at an Iranian government-affiliated site.
“I don’t think either Israel or Iran wants this to escalate into a full-blown war; that’s my assessment,” Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told Business Insider, confirming that dozens of drones had been launched toward Israel.
Hassan-Nahoum added: “But if this goes wrong, this could turn into a world war. So, hopefully they won’t have done too much damage, and we will be able to defend ourselves and not have anybody getting hurt from this. But if a lot of Israelis do get injured or killed, then this will definitely escalate to something much bigger.”
In response to the drones being launched, she said, Israel will be shutting down its airspace beginning at 12:30 a.m. local time for a total of 7 hours and that Israelis have been told to shelter at home in the meantime. Hassan-Nahoum noted that she expects continued American support for Israel in response to the attacks, which the White House confirmed in a statement the country is prepared to provide.
“President Biden is being regularly updated on the situation by his national security team and will meet with them this afternoon at the White House,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement. “His team is in constant communication with Israeli officials as well as other partners and allies. This attack is likely to unfold over a number of hours. President Biden has been clear: our support for Israel’s security is ironclad. The United States will stand with the people of Israel and support their defense against these threats from Iran.”
America has provided Israel with roughly $130 billion in military and economic aid since the country’s founding in 1948, according to October information from the State Department.
Since the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, America’s military support of the country has ratcheted up. However, enthusiasm to continue providing aid has been waning among some lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s scorched-earth response to the attacks, which has left at least 31,184 Palestinians dead and 72,889 injured, per March numbers reported by the United Nations.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
Oakland Airport wants what San Francisco has — its name.
The Port of Oakland’s Board of Commissioners decided in a unanimous vote on Thursday to change the name of their airport from “Metropolitan Oakland International Airport” to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.”
Oakland officials argue that because the name change would more accurately represent the airport’s location in the San Francisco Bay, it would increase the airport’s traffic, and in turn, bolster the city’s economy.
The Port of Oakland estimated in an agenda report that the name change, which would not alter the airport’s three-letter code “OAK,” would cost $150,000 to implement.
Port officials in Oakland argued that their airport is just as close, if not closer, to many parts of San Francisco as San Francisco’s SFO is, when traveling via the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.
But, San Francisco officials don’t want to share.
Ahead of Oakland’s Thursday vote, San Francisco’s city attorney David Chiu posted on X, formerly Twitter, that the name change “would cause immense confusion for travelers and infringes on SFO’s trademark.”
“If these plans are not abandoned, SF will take legal action,” he added. Chiu also wrote a letter to the Oakland Port’s Board President and other officials urging them to reconsider.
San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, also formally voiced her opposition in a letter to Oakland officials, taking the time to throw a bit of shade at OAK.
“We encourage Oakland Airport to follow a similar model to SFO and grow its airport services rather than adding ‘San Francisco’ to its name,” Breed wrote.
“Oakland is a great city with a rich history,” she added. “It does not need the name San Francisco as part of its airport to stand out.”
But Oakland officials say the city actually really does need it.
“I think 30,000 jobs and tax revenue is on the line,” Oakland Port board member Yui Hay Lee said before the vote, according to The Wall Street Journal. “The bottom line is we really have no choice. Doing nothing is not an option.”
The city of Oakland — which has a population of over 400,000 people, according to the US Census Bureau — has faced serious financial setbacks in recent years.
After closing its largest ever budget shortfall, a deficit of about $360 million last summer, the city has since found a $177 million hole in its two-year fiscal plan, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in March.
Some progressives want Sonia Sotomayor to consider retiring from the Supreme Court.
They argue that it’s important to avoid a repeat of what happened with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But so far, not one elected Democrat in Congress — including progressives — has joined those calls.
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In recent weeks, progressive figures have grown louder in calling for Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor to consider resigning from the Supreme Court.
Those calls, however, have yet to echo within the halls of Congress — even among lawmakers one might expect to jump on board.
“I don’t think you can tell the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, who’s still in her 60s, when to retire,” said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California. “Some members of Congress are in their 70s and 80s.”
Not even members of the progressive “Squad” are on board with the idea.
“I’m not in favor of telling people when they should retire,” said Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. “I just think it’s a waste of energy and time to have these silly debates.”
“I haven’t really delved into that conversation much,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. “So I don’t really have much of a comment on it at the moment.”
Generally, those who want Sotomayor to step down have argued that the 69-year-old justice’s health could falter in the coming years, owing to her type 1 diabetes diagnosis and a Huffington Post report that she has traveled with a medic.
Given the possibility of former President Donald Trump winning in November — or of Republicans retaking the Senate and refusing to confirm another Democratic nominee — the “Retire Sotomayor” crowd is aiming to safeguard against the possibility of 7-2 conservative court.
Hanging over the discussion is the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020 just months before the end of the Trump administration. Years earlier, Ginsburg had resisted calls to retire during the Obama administration. She was swiftly replaced by conservative Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which laid the groundwork for decisions like the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Yet there’s little indication that Sotomayor isn’t healthy enough to serve, and the arguments in favor of her retirement are built on a fair degree of speculation about her condition.
For now, calls for Sotomayor’s retirement remain limited to some prominent progressives and media figures. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal has gone the furthest of anyone, telling NBC News recently that Sotomayor “has to weigh the competing factors” and that Democrats “should learn a lesson” from Ginsburg.
In recent days, several other Democratic senators have told reporters that they oppose calls for the justice to retire. But while it’s the Senate that deals with the confirmation of justices, the lower chamber also has some say over the court, too: the House could theoretically move to impeach a justice, if it came to that.
“Taking into account what happened to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I get it,” said Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California. But the progressive Democrat said that people need to “chill out” about Sotomayor, noting that he was recently at an event with the 94-year-old civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, and that she seemed healthy.
Ironically, Gomez also pointed to Ginsburg — who survived several bouts of cancer and died at age 87 — to support his defense of Sotomayor.
“I’m not concerned,” said Gomez. “How many health issues did Ruth Bader Ginsburg have? And she kept on trucking for years.”
“I think it’s an overreaction to a recent experience on the court with Justice Ginsburg,” said Rep. Chuy Garcia, a progressive Democrat from Illinois, saying that Sotomayor is an “extraordinary Justice” whose “lived experience is very insightful to the court.”
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota — who waged an entire Democratic presidential primary campaign based on the premise that Joe Biden is too old — said Sotomayor’s situation is a “very different context” than Biden’s.
But Phillips said that if it became clear that Sotomayor was gravely ill, he would have a different opinion.
“Then it becomes an issue of great acute consequence,” said Phillips. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was ill. We knew she had cancer. We knew she was old.”
“Nutrition facts” style labels for internet plans are finally a reality.
As of Wednesday, the FCC now requires internet providers to break down costs and services for customers.
The FCC says the move should encourage competition and help consumers take charge of their services.
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If you’ve ever had trouble figuring out exactly what fees your internet provider is charging you and what internet speed you’re actually getting, the FCC has your back.
The Federal Communications Commission is now requiring internet providers to give customers a breakdown of all the costs, fees, and speeds associated with their plan in a simple “nutrition facts” format, just like you might see on the back of a bag of chips.
Beginning on April 10, all internet companies that have more than 100,000 customers must display these labels at every point of sale, both online and in stores, the FCC said in a press release on Wednesday. That includes companies that provide both home, or fixed, internet services, as well as mobile broadband.
Providers with fewer than 100,000 customers have until October to roll out the labels.
And the labels aren’t just designed for new customers — internet service providers must also make them available to current customers in their online account portals and provide the label when a customer asks for it.
Specifically, the labels must include a variety of detailed information, like introductory rates, data allowances, contract length, early termination fees, and more. They also must include links to information about network management practices and privacy policies, the FCC explained.
“Broadband Labels are designed to provide clear, easy-to-understand, and accurate information about the cost and performance of high-speed internet services,” the FCC said in its press release. “The labels are modeled after the FDA nutrition labels and are intended to help consumers comparison shop for the internet service plan that will best meet their needs and budget.”
The labels have been eight years in the making.
The FCC first proposed the nutrition facts-style labels as a voluntary option in 2016, but didn’t mandate them until 2022 following an order from Congress under the 2021 infrastructure law, Reuters reported.
Air defenses are essential to Israel’s security. Much of its population is within reach of rockets and missiles fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthis. These defenses are also expensive.
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Earlier this year, Israeli officials amended its 2024 budget to allocate $15 billion more in war spending as Israel’s war in Gaza stretches the country’s budget thin.
This massive comet is the size of Mount Everest, burns bright green, and gets its name for the horn-like shape of its coma. So, of course, I wanted to see it.
Not only that — I wanted to try to get a picture of it. But I knew photographing a comet would be no easy feat. They’re unpredictable, moving objects that can either be stunningly visible or near impossible to spot.
To create his striking images, he uses high-tech equipment, including huge telescopes with sky-tracking scopes, and advanced photo-processing software.
This is one of Bartlett’s most recent photos of 12P/Pons-Brooks, taken using a telescope and a sky tracking scope.
Dan Bartlett
Even with his professional skills and equipment, photographing comets can be difficult. Bartlett said he encounters “every challenge you could imagine,” from his scope not working to not being able to get the comet in focus.
As for me, I’m an amateur with only a standard DSLR, a tripod, and my iPhone. But if the weather was clear and the comet was visible, I’d still have a chance of getting the shot, Bartlett said, as long as I paid attention to three things:
Knowing where to look. A comet is hard to photograph if you don’t know where it is.
ISO rating. Bartlett suggested I set my ISO around 1,000 – 1,600.
Choose the right exposure. When photographing comets, your exposure should be short enough that the comet isn’t blurry, but the right setting depends on the speed of the comet and the focal length of the camera.
Where it all went wrong
Even in the darkness of totality, I wasn’t able to spot the “Devil comet” with my naked eye or my camera.
If I’d had a telescope or binoculars, I might have been able to use them to locate the comet on the horizon, and then direct my camera’s zoom lens toward it. But instead, I shot vaguely in the direction of where I thought the comet might be, and only captured darkness.
Plus, I was amazed by how quickly totality whizzed by. During this window, I was also trying to snap photos of the sun’s corona, which left me only about one minute to search for the comet and adjust my camera settings before the sun began to emerge from the moon’s shadow.
All in all, I learned that photographing a comet with a standard DSLR is tricky. Ideally, you should use a telescope with a sky tracking scope to help pinpoint its position and zoom in on its features.
And in general, I wouldn’t recommend trying to snap a picture of a comet during a total solar eclipse. The fleeting minutes of darkness afforded by totality make it challenging to locate the comet, adjust your settings, and frame the shot before the sun reappears.
Ex-Colorado Rep. Ken Buck said many conservatives have compromised their values over populism.
“The Constitution is just a thing of the past to the very same people who were Tea Party patriots,” he told WaPo.
Buck retired from the House in March, leaving months before his term was set to end.
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During his nearly decadelong tenure in the US House of Representatives, Ken Buck was well-known for his conservatism.
But the former Colorado congressman recently told The Washington Post that over the years, some of his fellow conservatives shifted their focus from curtailing government spending to shielding former President Donald Trump from criticism — while becoming more partisan in the process.
“I think that the populist wave has eroded the conservative values that I had when I came to this place,” the former lawmaker told the newspaper. “Now we’re impeaching people like it’s some kind of carnival and the Constitution is just a thing of the past to the very same people who were Tea Party patriots 10 to 12 years ago.”
Last month, shortly before he left Congress, the House Freedom Caucus voted to remove Buck from the group for “nonattendance,” according to Axios.
During his interview with the Post, Buck also stressed that the desire for ideologically pure pieces of legislation has been detrimental to the GOP’s ability to secure conservative victories, adding that “you have to have consensus” to find success on Capitol Hill.
