MrBeast has produced content centered on giving away expensive goods and incredible sums of money, earning the nickname 'the giveaway king'

By Toby Sterling AMSTERDAM Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML reported second-quarter earnings that beat expectations on Wednesday and

A photo of MrBeast shared by the streaming platform Kick asleep on a plane has fans concerned that the most subscribed YouTuber on the planet is broke. MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has a reported net worth of $100 million but has spoken in the past about how much money he loses when filming his highly produced and expensive YouTube videos as well as having his own Feastables and MrBeast burger ranges and advertising and sponsorship deals. However, fans have been alarmed at an apparent image of the 25-year-old asleep on a plane while flying in economy class when he could easily afford to fly in the more lavish business seats in first class or even on a private jet. The image which has since gone viral saw Kick say on their X/Twitter account "bro wtf MrBeast doing in economy?" without any indication as to whether the person in the picture was actually the YouTuber or not. Many fans of MrBeast have since latched onto the photo asking if he is in financial trouble while others weren't convinced. Dexerto have reported that the person in the picture could be a lookalike while a community note on a Drama Alert tweet also stated that there was no proof that MrBeast was actually in the photo, while also stating that it was actually a Taiwanese airline and not a Spirit Airlines plane. MrBeast is yet to respond to the image but it is highly unlikely that he is broke given that his most recent YouTube video has more than 98 million views. Regardless even if it is him, just because he's very rich doesn't mean he has to spend frivolously or think that he is above anyone else on a plane. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Parents in the southern California city of Temecula are pushing back against the local school board's recent decision to reject a social studies curriculum that includes gay rights after some board members claimed there was not enough parental involvement in the process and made comments attacking gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk.

Omegle, a popular website used to video chat with strangers, is shutting down after almost 15 years. The closure comes amid increasing criticism that the site endangered its users, with reports of child sexual abuse and other crime on the platform. Omegle allowed users to sign up and then be launched into a video chat with another stranger using the site. The two could chat for as long as they wished – until they ended that conversation and embarked on a new one. The app was launched in 2009, and became popular almost straight away. Its founder said that its popularity was a result of “meeting new people being a basic human need”. Quickly, however, it became known for explicit and other criminal content. Leif K-Brooks, the company’s founder, admitted that Omegle had been misused, “including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes”. The site attempted to introduce new features to stop that misuse, such as “monitored chats” that would allow moderators to try and stop criminals using the site. But they did not work, and the site continued to receive criticism for its lack of safety. Now Mr K-Brooks has said that the criticism has become too much, and Omegle will shut down. The intensity of the fight over use of the site had forced him to decide to shut it down, he said, and it will stop working straight away. “As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s,” wrote Leif K-Brooks, who has run the website since founding it. Omegle saw a huge surge in popularity during the pandemic, as people not only flocked to the site but recorded their interactions and shared them on social media. But that popularity also brought more awareness of the problems on the site, and increased criticism of it. Mr K-Brooks acknowledged that criticism. But he also suggested that at least some of it was in bad faith, and that it was intended to force the site to shut down. “In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users,” he wrote. He said that the site had been shut down on the basis of “fear”. “If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next?”, he wrote, comparing the end of Omegle to “shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil”. The decision to shut down Omegle comes amid increasing concern about regulation of the internet and how best to protect its users. It comes just days after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act, for instance, which aims to hold platforms to account for crimes on their platform, including online grooming.

Apple Inc. will charge an eye-popping $3,499 for its long-awaited mixed-reality headset, testing whether consumers are ready to

Minuscule traces of metal from space junk that's designed to be disposable are invisibly polluting the Earth's atmosphere, a new study has found. In recent times, spacecrafts launched into space have been designed so that they fall out of orbit and fall back down to Earth after their intended use. So instead of the materials crashing on land, they can burn up in the upper atmosphere. Although the debris of rockets and satellites burn up when re-entering the planet's atmosphere, the consequences of metal vapour being left behind currently remain unknown. But given the amount of space exploration taking place, the amount of metal vapour is expected to rise in the years to come. Physicist Daniel Murphy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has led a team of researchers to investigate what effects this metal vapour could have as well as its impact over time and this study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as per Science Alert. He listed "iron, silicon, and magnesium from the natural meteoric source" as the current refractory material in stratospheric particular. Murphy has warned how this composition could be affected by the metal vapour from space junk. "However, the amount of material from the reentry of upper-stage rockets and satellites is projected to increase dramatically in the next 10 to 30 years," he wrote. "As a result, the amount of aluminum in stratospheric sulfuric acid particles is expected to become comparable to or even exceed the amount of meteoric iron, with unknown consequences for inclusions and ice nucleation." To find out if metal vapour remained, Murphy and his team took and analyzed 500,000 stratospheric aerosol droplet samples to see if they had traces of spacecraft metals. Aerosols contain sulfuric acid droplets made from the oxidation of the carbonyl sulfide gas and in the atmosphere, this can appear naturally or as a pollutant. Metal and silicon traces can be found in these droplets too, acquired from meteors which vaporize upon atmospheric entry. Around 20 metals were discovered from this research, and while some metals had similar ratios to the vaporizing meteors, other metals such as lithium, aluminium, copper, and lead exceeded the anticipated amounts. Particles from vaporized spacecraft were found in 10 per cent of stratospheric aerosols over a certain size while other common spacecraft metals such as niobium and hafnium were also present. Consequently, these traces of spacecraft particles could affect how water freezes into ice in the stratosphere, and stratospheric aerosol particles could change in size. Due to more space exploration planned in an "era of rapid growth" for the industry, the researchers predict "the percentage of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles that contain aluminum and other metals from satellite reentry will be comparable to the roughly 50 per cent that now contain meteoric metals." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Ajay Banga, the World Bank’s new president, said the lender must become bigger as well as better at

Will.i.am has hailed artificial intelligence (AI) as a “new renaissance” in music. The 48-year-old musician and member of the Black Eyed Peas expressed an optimistic view of new music software, which can be used to produce and create songs. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “People have to decide what types of songs they want to write because, although I wrote songs like Boom Boom Pow and I Gotta Feeling and Where Is the Love?, the machine is going to write amazing versions or original Boom Boom Pows.” He added that people “desire” songs which can be a “social commentary” on the news, something AI is “going to be able to do”. “It’s a very, very, very unique world that we’re entering into. It’s a new renaissance.” He said new technology does not just “mimic” what he does but creates something new. “It was a brand new song and it wrote it the way I would have written it.” He went on: “The concern is what we do as people and the regulation and guidelines that we put on folks that are building the models. “The fact that AI mimics, but at the same time we haven’t put in clauses for where people own their likeness in their essence… well, that’s one thing. AI’s not deciding that, people are.” However, other famous faces such as Dolly Parton and Charlie Brooker have raised concerns about AI. Black Mirror creator Brooker told Empire Magazine that using the ChatGPT tool had produced something which read plausibly “at first glance” but did not contain “any real original thought”. He also told the PA news agency that the AI advances explored in the latest episode of the Netflix series could be used in a “frankly terrifying way”. Brooker was referring to an episode of the dystopian anthology show in which a woman finds her life replicated by streaming platform Streamberry. Parton was asked at a press event last week about living on in an artificial form in the future. She said: “I think I’ve left a great body of work behind. “I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this Earth.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Heart transplant woman’s daughter twice saved her life using Alexa Dolly Parton on AI and not wanting to leave her soul ‘here on earth’ Glastonbury festival-goers use data equivalent to 400 HD film downloads an hour

By Savyata Mishra Most Wall Street brokerages, including J.P.Morgan and Piper Sandler, kicked off coverage on Instacart with

Rayanna Brock has been arrested at least 11 times for a number of offenses ranging from shoplifting in March 2018 to terrorism-related crimes in 2020

Meta is reportedly considering a new paid tier of Facebook and Instagram for users in