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Meta says some of its biggest cash incinerators could finally start turning profits.
The social media giant, which generated over 97% of its quarterly revenue from ads, has faced persistent questions from investors about the lack of profitability in its AI and hardware initiatives.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed those concerns head-on during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
Zuckerberg said that Muse, the AI assistant it launched last month, is unprofitable since it's "very compute intensive to run." Meta expects to start turning that around next year by massively improving Muse's efficiency.
"If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years," he said.
Meta plans to make money from Muse by taking a small transaction fee off of purchases it drives, Zuckerberg said at Meta's Connect conference last month.
Zuckerberg added that Muse, which launched only in the US and Canada, wasn't launched globally due in part to the amount of compute it requires. (Meta's North American users are generally its most lucrative.)
Zuckerberg also struck a positive note about its cash-hemorrhaging Reality Labs division, which makes products like Meta Ray-Bans and virtual reality glasses.
Meta expects Reality Labs to narrow its losses to about $15 billion in 2027, down from the $18 to $19 billion it expects to lose this year. The division should start trending toward profitability next year, as Meta's AI systems make it more useful, Zuckerberg said.
"I continue to believe that the path to delivering holographic experience, of bringing together the physical and digital worlds and everyday glasses, will come through VR first," Zuckerberg said.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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Four years of sanctions have not closed the door through which Russian metal still reaches Europe. The EU imported 1.6 million tons of Russian iron and steel products in the first eight months of 2026, paying 682 million euros, down 54% in value year on year, GMK Center, a Ukraine-based consulting company, reports, citing Eurostat data.
Every euro spent on Russian metal is revenue for a state waging war on Ukraine, and the EU has banned most of it: pig iron, direct-reduced iron, iron ore and ferroalloys. Yet one category still flows almost untouched: semi-finished steel, mostly slabs, which made up 97.8% of the imports, or 1.56 million tons worth 670 million euros.
Volumes dropped 55% year on year after the full ban on Russian pig iron and DRI took effect on 1 January 2026, and no pig iron, ferroalloys, iron ore, or DRI reached the EU from Russia in the period, the center found. Iron ore and ferroalloys fall under sectoral limits, and the largest Russian producers are subject to corporate sanctions.
Slabs are the gap in the wall. Belgium took 767,700 tons of Russian semi-finished steel, nearly half the EU total, and Italy 191,800 tons, the center said.
Demand still outstrips the rules, with a slab quota for the year to September 2026 standing at nearly 3 million tons and effectively used up within four months, the data showed. Scrap was the only other notable inflow, at 41,300 tons worth 11.7 million euros, down about a third.
The door is closing slowly, and not without a fight. The quota falls to 2.6 million tons for the year to September 2027, and to 2 million for the following year, the center added, yet attempts to halt Russian slab imports early have failed because the biggest consumer countries lobby against it.
Earlier, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy reported that the EU paid Russia €317 billion in goods since February 2022. The sum is €116 billion more than the €201 billion the bloc extended to Ukraine in financial aid over the same period.
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Two American charities recently announced a new fund to fight forest fires. They want to raise US$100 million to help countries find fires faster and put them out sooner. But the fund, announced at the UN General Assembly, is limited to South America, home to the Amazon rainforest. Southeast Asia is left out, and so […]
The post Indonesia should have a seat at new forest firefighting fund appeared first on Asia Times.
In the cover image former NIAID director Fauci and his close advisor Morens
Introduction by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
«A former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) employee pled guilty in federal court, today, to a conspiracy charge stemming from a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and the Federal Records Act in connection with communications about coronavirus research grants» we can read in statement released by United States Attorneys Office – District of Maryland.
David M. Morens, 78, of Chester, Maryland, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. Morens served as a senior advisor in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 through 2022.
He was therefore one of the closest collaborators of former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, who was charged by a US Senate committee with contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment by failing to answer 111 questions about the cover-up of the SARS-CoV-2 laboratory theory and the efficacy and dangers of Covid vaccines.
If Fauci fails to benefit from the preemptive pardon granted to him by President Joseph Biden, he risks a sentence of a few months in prison, as contempt of American justice is a misdemeanor.
While according to the statement of O. Hayes, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, Morens risks much more…
«Morens is facing up to five years in prison for conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district judge determines sentencing after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors».
He was charged with concealing funding for dangerous gain-of-function research aimed at enhancing viruses in the laboratory and conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology under Fauci’s supervision. But not only…
«Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab».
The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Previous investigations by the two congressional committees have highlighted the concrete likelihood that the artificial SARS-COV-2 was created in China with the help of Fauci’s NIAID and other entities, including the US Pentagon (via the military agency DARPA), as confirmed by a CIA whstleblower.
This is not what emerges from the investigations in the Wuhan-Gates series by Gospa News, which have also targeted of well-founded suspicions other biolaboratories, such as those in Ukraine, the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, and the University of North Carolina.
The UNC, thanks to funding from Fauci and DARPA, collaborated with the American pharmaceutical company Moderna trough the microbiologist Raloh Baric who is one of the researcher in the grant for which was indicted Morens (details below).
Moderna has ended up at the center of our journalistic investigations for two reasons:
If we add to this that in 2017, Baric himself published the recipe for laboratory-generating Covid-19 and that in 2018, DARPA, after rejecting the extremely dangerous Refuse project presented by Daszak and Fauci, funded a top-secret experiment on the SARS virus together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, the evidence to partially exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology becomes abundant…
But let’s now analyze Morens’ case in detail, as reported in the statement from the Attorney General’s Office for the District of Maryland:
Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.
Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.
The co-conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company 1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.
All these highly documented and detailed investigations of the Wuhan-Gates cycle instead prove Fauci’s covert direction under the aegis of the CIA, with which he has always collaborated, so much so as to induce the former director of US Intelligence ODNI, Havril Haines (an expert in bioweapons and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency itself) to be the main accomplice (if not director…) in the conspiracy aimed at concealing the laboratory origin of SARS-Cov-2 for which Morens will be convicted.
This certainly isn’t proof that they, in previous research, engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory, but it highlights a conspiracy that not only leads to the assumption but also led subsequent ODNI director Tulsi Gabbard to declassify classified documents to publicly accuse Fauci.
Obviously, pointing the finger at China and whitewashing the US role.
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News founder and director
by John Leake – originally published by Focal Points Substack
All links to previous Gospa News investigation have been added in the aftermath
The U.S. Department of Justice just announced in a press release that Former Senior NIAID Official Pleads Guilty to Charges Connected to Concealing Federal Records During COVID-19 Pandemic.
David M. Morens served as a Senior Advisor to the Director (specifically in NIAID’s Office of the Director) from 2006 through 2022, and was also a long-time senior advisor to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The gist of the federal criminal charge to which Morens pleaded guilty is, according to the press release:
Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.
Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.
The co-conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company 1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.
I perceive this criminal charge and guilty plea for conspiracy to defraud the US government as akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion. The real issue here is not the concealment of public records and communications, but the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab that resulted in incalculable death and damage to all of humanity.
Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room.
Morens was one of Fauci’s top advisors, and I find it highly conspicuous that he took such a keen personal interest in Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, which was reviewed by the NIH in January 2014—the beginning of the period covered by Dr. Fauci’s preemptive pardon, as I documented in my post President Biden’s Preemptive Pardon of Fauci.
by John Leake – originally published by Focal Points Substack
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