A French passenger who was on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak has tested positive for the virus and her condition is deteriorating, French authorities said. France’s Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu will hold a meeting on the hantavirus crisis on Monday. FRANCE 24’s James André reports from Paris, France.
Mike Novogratz’s firm will pick protocols and size exposures while Sharplink keeps its core staked ETH position intact.
ETH, the native cryptocurrency of smart contract giant, Ethereum, is up 1.5% during Tuesday’s U.S. market session to trade at $2,382. The uptick follows the broader market momentum as Bitcoin reclaimed the $80,000 psychological level amid the de-escalating tension in the middle east. Despite the price appreciation, Ethereum coin faces a risk of renewed selling pressure as on-chain data highlights significant profit-taking from a prominent whale.
The activity coincides with a notable shift in ETH’s option market which projects negative outliers in forward and ATM implied volatility for multiple expirations. In addition, a notable discount in long-dated futures contracts of ETH signals weak conviction in buyers, reinforcing the narrative for temporary upswing before the next breakdown.
The blockchain analytics platform, Arkham Intelligence, recently highlighted a notable profit-taking transaction from a prominent whale wallet, 0x237B…FB6aAb. The wallet owner transferred approximately 3,000 ETH in two different transactions on May 5th, transferring about 2,000 coins to an OKX deposit address and another 1,000 to Binance worth a combined $7.15 million at the prices of the day.
This coincided with a slight increase in Ethereum price that day, recording a spike from $2,350 and $2,390. It is not clear whether the price movement precipitated the decision or was just coincidental with the decision but the track record of the wallet indicates a measured approach as opposed to reactive selling.
Over the lifetime of the wallet – since its first recorded transaction on 30 December 2022 – the operator has experienced a series of buying and selling cycles. The broader pattern shows a wave of heavy outflows in late March 2026, a pause, then fresh buying activity returning in early April and again at the start of May. The last sell-off is preceded by an accumulation window which opened around April 11th and lasted about three weeks before it was unwound.
The numbers crunch out the real story: an average entry around $2,580 versus an average exit around $3,020, resulting in an approximate of $72.98 million realized gains. With close to 94% of the position now liquidated, whoever controls this wallet has extracted the bulk of their profit and appears to be in the final stages of closing out this particular trade cycle entirely.
Historically, whale selling has often coincided with local top or renewed correction trend, signaling a potential downswing in Ethereum price.
The options market in the Ethereum is sending a mixed signal, depending on where you are on the calendar. In a series of contracts spanning late May through the end of July, both forward and at-the-money implied volatility are below their anticipated levels – a signal that traders who position in those windows are not hedging against a significant amount of movement.
The short term view is otherwise. The May 6th expiration is unique with a higher at-the-money implied volatility and a skew in the direction of calls. Whoever is trading in that contract is either hedging against an overnight spike, or is making a directional bet that something will move before the end of the day tomorrow. The market becomes silent after that date.
The June 26th Ethereum futures contract on ETHUSD_260626 is trading below spot, and the basis is compressing to 1.913. When in a market where futures are usually priced above current prices, the flipping, or tightening, of the relationship becomes notable.
Long-dated traders are not paying up on forward exposure that historically represents a deceleration of directional enthusiasm, but not actual panic. The June expiry is too far off that putting it there would represent thoughtful opinions and not reactive hedging.
The compressed basis sits alongside the softer implied volatility readings seen across Deribit’s longer-dated options, painting a consistent picture of muted conviction heading into summer.
In the past three months, the Ethereum price showed a slow yet steady recovery above the $1,800 support. Interestingly, the price rally resonated strictly within two parallel trendlines, indicating the formation of a rising channel pattern.
The chart setup offers dynamic resistance and support to price, driving a directional acceleration. Amid the recent recovery, the Ethereum price reclaimed the 20-and-50-day exponential moving average, reinforcing the renewed recovery in the market.
Currently trading at $2,371, the Ethereum ETH-1.17% coin is just 7.65% away from challenging the pattern’s resistance trendline at $2,533. The 200-day EMA slope wavering close to this resistance, creates a strong resistance zone for buyers.
Therefore, the potential breakout would have a higher impact in price, bolstering a stray recovery to $3,045, followed by a leap towards $3,400.
However, a deeper analysis into ETH’s technical chart shows a significant drop in trading volume despite price recovery. This suggests weak conviction or less interest from traders to commit towards a long/buy position in the market.
Therefore, the Ethereum price faces a risk of renewed selling pressure at the channel resistance. If the sellers continue to defend the overhead trendline would revert and prolong this slow paced recovery.
Under a pessimistic condition, the Ethereum price could breach the bottom trendline of the pattern. With sustained selling, the post-breakout fall could drag the asset roughly 19% from the breakdown point to retest the $1,750 support.
The Razr Ultra is a genuinely impressive flip phone. But at $1,500, it’s competing with devices it has absolutely no business competing with.
Circle’s Arc whitepaper gained institutional backing after the company revealed a $222 million ARC token presale and tied the blockchain to its expanding AI-finance strategy.
See visuals like this from many other data creators on our Voronoi app. Download it for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
The world’s largest social media platforms now rival countries in scale, with several apps serving more than one billion monthly users.
This graphic highlights the world’s most popular social media platforms using 2026 data from Salesforce, which counts the number of monthly active users for each platform.
Facebook remains the world’s biggest social media platform with more than 3.1 billion monthly users, reflecting roughly 40% of the global population.
Facebook, created in 2004, is owned by Meta (formerly Facebook Inc.), one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization.
Yet Meta’s dominance extends well beyond Facebook, as it also owns runners-up Instagram and WhatsApp (both 3 billion). Meta acquired Instagram for just $1 billion in 2012, and acquired WhatsApp two years later for nearly $20 billion.
The table below lists the 15 most popular social media platforms worldwide alongside their owners and monthly active users.
| Rank | Platform | Owner | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meta | 3.1B | |
| 2 |  Meta | 3B | |
| 3 | Meta | 3B | |
| 4 | YouTube | Google | 2.5B |
| 5 | TikTok |  ByteDance | 2B |
| 6 | Tencent | 1.4B | |
| 7 | Messenger | Meta | 1B |
| 8 | Telegram |  Telegram | 1B |
| 9 | Snapchat | Snap Inc. | 900M |
| 10 | Reddit Inc. | 850M | |
| 11 | Douyin | ByteDance | 755M |
| 12 | X (Twitter) | X Corp. | 650M |
| 13 | Pinterest Inc. | 578M | |
| 14 | Threads | Meta | 400M |
| 15 | Microsoft | 310M |
While Facebook is popular with people of all ages, Instagram has become especially popular among young adults and millennials. Meanwhile, WhatsApp has become the world’s most widely used messaging app and is essential for communication in countries like Brazil and India.
Beyond the Big 3, Meta also owns Messenger (1 billion), another popular messaging app integrated with Facebook, as well as Threads (400 million), an Instagram offshoot designed to compete with X and its roughly 650 million users.
While most of the world’s top social media platforms have historically been American, Chinese companies have rapidly expanded their influence in recent years.
Within China itself, Tencent’s WeChat (1.4 billion) has become the country’s primary digital platform, extending beyond messaging to include payments, shopping, and gaming.
Then there’s ByteDance, which has reshaped the global social media landscape. The company created Douyin (755 million) for the Chinese market and its international counterpart TikTok (2 billion), which has become one of the world’s fastest-growing social platforms.
TikTok’s widespread popularity, especially among younger users, has also triggered regulatory scrutiny and restrictions in countries including India and the United States.
Following growing U.S. restrictions on TikTok, ByteDance agreed to enter a joint venture with American companies in 2025.
When social media first originated in the 2000s, it was designed for young adults to stay connected. Facebook famously wanted to put the entire college experience online. However, since then social media has extended far beyond its initial purpose.
YouTube (2.5 billion) is the largest video-sharing site in the world, while Reddit (850 million) has become a massive online forum for people to congregate around shared interests.
Finally, there’s LinkedIn (310 million). The social networking platform was acquired by Microsoft for over $26 billion in 2016 and is today a central hub for working professionals in various sectors to connect, network, and find or advertise jobs.
Is there a generational component? Find out with What are Gen Z’s Favorite Social Media Platforms? on Voronoi.Use This Visualization
Chicago’s long-running casino project hit a visible turning point Thursday, as Bally’s raised the final steel beam on its permanent riverfront complex, bringing the structure up to full height after years of delays.
The moment unfolded at the former Freedom Center printing site, a 30-acre property in River West now being reshaped into a $1.7 billion entertainment destination along the Chicago River. Bally’s Chairman Soo Kim acknowledged the uneven path to reach this stage, telling those gathered, “We had some fits and starts. We’re going to be done early next year. We’re excited to finish it all up.” A mix of current and former city leaders attended, including Mayor Brandon Johnson and former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, alongside hundreds of construction workers standing among cranes and active machinery.
With the topping-off complete, the project’s core structures now stand fully upright. That includes a 34-story hotel tower and the main casino building. Plans call for a 500-room hotel, a 3,000-seat theater, an exhibition hall, 10 restaurants, and 4,000 gaming positions, making it the largest casino in Illinois.
Chicago picked Bally’s in 2022 after a competitive bid, originally targeting an early 2026 opening. That timeline slipped as the project ran into multiple issues. Demolition was paused after debris spilled into the river, and regulators later halted work due to an unauthorized waste hauler. Engineers also forced a redesign when foundation plans raised concerns about nearby water infrastructure, prompting the relocation of the hotel tower. Bally’s now says the permanent site should open in the first quarter of 2027, aligning with a revised state deadline that allows operations at the temporary Medinah Temple casino through September of that year.
The Chicago development comes as Bally’s reports stronger financial performance tied to expansion efforts. The company recently posted a jump in quarterly revenue, driven in part by growth across its casino portfolio and ongoing investments in major projects like Chicago. That broader momentum has helped position the riverfront development as a centerpiece of its long-term strategy.
For Chicago, the financial expectations remain high. The temporary casino generated $15.9 million in local taxes last year, falling short of projections. Officials are counting on the permanent complex to bring in more than $100 million annually.
“The casino, the hotel, entertainment venue and restaurants are anticipated to generate more than $100 million in new revenue every year,” Johnson said. “The revenue will support our police and fire pensions and our ongoing efforts to build a more equitable, safe and affordable Chicago where every community has the opportunity to thrive.”
Competition across Illinois has intensified, with new and expanded casinos opening statewide. Kim said Bally’s is aiming to draw visitors well beyond the region.
I think this is a game changer,” Kim said. “The city wanted a facility that would actually compete… for the 50 million-plus tourists that come to Chicago. There’s nothing like this in the Chicagoland area.”
As the signed beam topped with an American flag was lifted into place, Lightfoot reflected on the project’s long-term impact. “This is so important to the financial future of our city, which is why I personally fought so hard to make this happen,” Lightfoot said. “It’s not like birthing a child, but it’s pretty damn close. This is a lasting legacy for the city.”
Featured image: Max Bender/Unsplash
The post Bally’s Chicago casino reaches full height as $1.7B riverfront project nears completion appeared first on ReadWrite.
AI is transforming the world of work—and many people are unhappy about that fact. KPMG’s 2025 American Worker Survey found that 52% of workers worry that AI will take their jobs, with that figure rising to 60% for Gen Z. A recent report by the AI firm Writer found that almost a third of employees report sabotaging their company’s efforts towards AI transformation. There are few, if any, parallels for this level of resistance to the adoption of a technology in the modern workplace. Yet most businesses that fail to adapt to the emergence of AI will soon find themselves out of business altogether.
In early 2023, Eric Vaughan, CEO of the enterprise software company IgniteTech, decided that generative AI was an existential threat and that his entire organization needed to transform or it would die. He dedicated 20% of payroll to AI training, reimbursed employees for tools they purchased themselves, brought in outside experts, and instituted “AI Mondays”—a mandate that every employee, across every function, should spend one full day per week working exclusively on AI projects. The result was resistance rather than radical adoption. People refused to use the new tech, skipped out on training sessions, and even deliberately sabotaged the company’s AI transformation efforts. Vaughan’s response was to largely abandon the idea of transforming the existing workforce. It turned out that “changing minds was harder than adding skills,” so Vaughn began a program aimed at building a new workforce that was more amenable to AI. Within a year, IgniteTech had replaced nearly 80% of its staff.
On one level, this scorched-earth policy seems to have worked. IgniteTech has since developed new products, completed a major acquisition, and posted operating margins that are rare in the software industry. Vaughan has said he would do it all again. But consider what success required. Vaughan’s inability to successfully deliver a cultural transformation to match the technological one meant he was left with no option but to gut his company and rebuild it, with all the inefficiencies and financial and human costs that strategy involves.
There are smoother, more efficient routes to success in the AI future. The 90-day plan below offers one path forward.
{“blockType”:”mv-promo-block”,”data”:{“imageDesktopUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png”,”imageMobileUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png”,”eyebrow”:””,”headline”:”Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? “,”dek”:”Faisal Hoque’s books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and tech—turning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.”,”subhed”:””,”description”:””,”ctaText”:”Learn More”,”ctaUrl”:”https:\/\/faisalhoque.com”,”theme”:{“bg”:”#02263c”,”text”:”#ffffff”,”eyebrow”:”#9aa2aa”,”subhed”:”#ffffff”,”buttonBg”:”#ffffff”,”buttonHoverBg”:”#3b3f46″,”buttonText”:”#000000″},”imageDesktopId”:91420512,”imageMobileId”:91420514,”shareable”:false,”slug”:””,”wpCssClasses”:””}}
The goal of this phase is to understand your existing culture in terms of its day-to-day employee experience, because that’s where the AI transformation will ultimately succeed or fail.
1. Surface the gap between stated and lived culture. Every organization has a stated culture—the values on the wall, the mission on the website, the language used in leadership communications. Every organization also has a lived culture—what actually happens in meetings, how decisions really get made, the behaviors that are rewarded on the ground. Use a combination of employee listening, direct observations, and one-to-one conversations between senior leaders and workers to map the gap.
2. Assess psychological safety with rigor. Use validated instruments to measure psychological safety at the team level. Pockets of low safety are where your AI initiatives will fail first. Identify them and prioritize them.
3. Audit the signals employees actually receive. Are employees who experiment rewarded or subtly punished? Are the people who raised concerns about risk listened to or sidelined? Did the last layoff protect the employees most likely to help the organization adapt, or did it hit them hardest? These signals shape behavior much more than any pronouncements about culture ever could.
4. Map the informal power structure. Every organization has an official org chart and a shadow hierarchy of people whose opinions shape how colleagues interpret leadership’s actions. In a well-functioning culture change effort, these people become the most important accelerators of the transformation. In a dysfunctional one, they become the most effective blockers. You cannot succeed without engaging them explicitly and early.
5. Have the conversation about AI fears. Ask employees directly: What do they fear about AI in this organization? What do they believe leadership is not telling them? What would have to be true for them to trust the strategy? The fears that are never surfaced are the ones that most powerfully shape behavior—and no cultural system can be redesigned around forces that leadership refuses to acknowledge.
For a deeper look at why cultural change exhausts organizations and what to do about it, see How to beat change fatigue.
Now that the system is mapped, the focus moves to changing it. This phase targets the specific mechanisms—signals, structures, and conversations—that transform culture.
1. Change what gets rewarded. Culture is downstream of incentives. Redesign performance evaluations and recognition to visibly value the behaviors that an AI-ready culture requires. Reward experiments run, failures named and learned from, knowledge shared across teams, psychological safety built. The changes do not have to be huge but they do have to be visible and consistent enough that staff can see that the rules have really changed.
2. Make experimentation safe and cheap. Create structures that make it easy for employees to run small AI experiments without bureaucratic friction. Provide access to sandboxed environments, a defined approval pathway for low-risk experimentation, and a small pool of discretionary funding. If your current system requires a business case and three levels of approval before someone can test an AI tool on a real workflow, it is not ready for AI.
3. Redesign meetings as the cultural operating system. Meetings are where culture is reinforced or broken every single day. Audit your most important recurring meetings. Do they reward the person with the most confident opinion or the person who has actually learned something? Do they create space for dissent or shut it down? Small, deliberate changes to meeting design—who speaks first, how disagreement is handled, whether learning is surfaced alongside results—produce outsized cultural shifts.
4. Protect the truth-tellers. In every organization managing a transformation, someone is raising hard truths that leadership does not want to hear. How those people are treated is the single most important signal of whether the culture is actually changing. If they are visibly valued, protected, and listened to, the culture shifts. If they are sidelined, every employee watching will learn that the lesson and the culture will inevitably revert to its past state.
5. Communicate honestly about the workforce transition. The defining question in most employees’ minds is what AI means for their job. Vague reassurance about augmentation over replacement fools no one. Specific, honest communication about what is changing, which roles are being redefined, who is being reskilled, how affected employees will be supported, and what the organization commits to is what builds trust.
6. Create cross-functional working sessions. AI-ready cultures are built on cross-functional collaboration—data teams, business teams, security, legal, and frontline operators working together on problems that none of them could solve alone. Stand up regular working sessions that force this collaboration at the practitioner level: joint problem-solving on active AI projects, monthly sharing sessions where teams present what they have tried and what they have learned, quarterly retrospectives that bring diverse functions to the same table. These are not leadership review meetings. They are the sessions where the people doing the work will build the shared understanding and mutual trust that AI deployment demands.
For more on why AI readiness requires organizational redesign rather than individual training, see What AI Reskilling Really Requires.
Energy fades. Attention moves on. The system snaps back to its defaults. This phase is about building the mechanisms that prevent reversion. The goal is to ensure that your cultural changes survive their first real stress test.
1. Celebrate the new behaviors. Identify the teams and individuals who are modeling the culture the organization is trying to build. Make their stories visible—the team that ran an experiment and openly shared what failed, the manager who protected time for learning even when delivery pressure was intense. The stories you choose to tell become the culture you build.
2. Address the blockers openly. Every organization has senior people whose daily behavior is incompatible with the culture it says it wants. By Day 75, you will know who they are. Ignoring these behaviors sends an unmissable cultural signal—one that tells every employee watching that the stated values do not really matter. The organizations that confront these situations directly earn the credibility that will allow them to keep pushing the culture forward.
3. Measure and publish the culture metrics. Track the indicators you diagnosed in Phase 1 on a defined cadence. Publish the results internally. When culture becomes something the organization looks at the same way it looks at revenue or attrition, it starts to get managed with the same rigor.
4. Make culture a question in every AI decision. When a major AI initiative is reviewed, you should always ask: What is this doing to our culture? Is this deployment building organizational capability and trust, or is it eroding both? Is the way we are implementing this consistent with the culture we say we want, or are we sacrificing the culture to hit the timeline? These questions, asked consistently over time, are what prevent transformation from hollowing out the organization from the inside.
5. Iterate. By Day 90, you have data. Use it to design the next cycle. Double down on what is working, redesign what isn’t, and confront what needs confronting.
For more on designing organizational systems around real human needs, see What is human-centric design, and why does it matter?
Eric Vaughan decided that cultural transformation was too hard, opting to replace most of his company’s staff instead. In some circumstances, that can be a viable strategy. But it is an extremely risky one. Replacing 80% of a workforce effectively ends the previous company and builds a new one from scratch. This process is both inefficient and expensive, gambling with the organization’s institutional knowledge, client relationships, and operational continuity. It is far better to drive a successful cultural transformation that brings your people with you.
The 90-day plan outlined above will not complete your cultural transformation. But it will diagnose the system you are actually working with, rewire the mechanisms that shape behavior, and embed the structures that prevent backsliding. The organizations that make these practices permanent will not need to choose between their workforce and their future success. They will have built the capacity to advance both together.
{“blockType”:”mv-promo-block”,”data”:{“imageDesktopUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png”,”imageMobileUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png”,”eyebrow”:””,”headline”:”Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? “,”dek”:”Faisal Hoque’s books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and tech—turning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.”,”subhed”:””,”description”:””,”ctaText”:”Learn More”,”ctaUrl”:”https:\/\/faisalhoque.com”,”theme”:{“bg”:”#02263c”,”text”:”#ffffff”,”eyebrow”:”#9aa2aa”,”subhed”:”#ffffff”,”buttonBg”:”#ffffff”,”buttonHoverBg”:”#3b3f46″,”buttonText”:”#000000″},”imageDesktopId”:91420512,”imageMobileId”:91420514,”shareable”:false,”slug”:””,”wpCssClasses”:””}}
Hyperliquid’s weekly volume trails newer rivals as a Lighter airdrop looms
One person in France has tested positive for Hantavirus. This comes after five people from the cruise ship were repatriated on Sunday after the vessel docked in the Spanish port of Tenerife. According to the French minister the patient’s condition worsened overnight.
