Back in February, Uber announced ambitious plans to launch in seven new European markets in 2026 — but now the Financial Times reports that five of those launches are on hold. Country launches that have been paused include Austria, Norway, and Greece.

Uber seemed to confirm the decision to the FT, saying that recent launches in Finland and Denmark had been a “huge success,” so now it wants to “focus on continuing the momentum” in existing markets.

Another likely factor in the decision: Uber’s continuing efforts to acquire Delivery Hero, a European company that rejected Uber’s 10 billion euro takeover bid in May.

It seems Uber is still hoping to make the deal a reality. An industry source said that putting a pause on further expansion could help alleviate antitrust concerns around a potential acquisition, especially since Delivery Hero operates delivery services in several of the target countries.

Nearly 1 million people have lost a total of $3.8 billion after buying President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, according to cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen.

The New York Times reports that Nansen’s analysis is based on transactions that are publicly visible on the blockchain, showing that 988,905 accounts had lost money on the memecoin as of the end of June. That represents around two out of three $TRUMP buyers.

On Sunday, $TRUMP was trading at $1.69, down nearly 98% from its high of $75.35.

Trump announced the memecoin three days before his inauguration in 2025. He’d previously co-founded a crypto startup, World Liberty Financial, with his sons. The $WLFI coin has also declined significantly in value.

In a recent financial disclosure, the president revealed that he made $636 million from the $TRUMP memecoin, accounting for nearly half of the $1.4 billion that the president made from the crypto industry last year.

Under the Trump administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission has said it will not regulate memecoins as securities and has dropped a number of lawsuits against crypto companies. A White House spokesperson told the NYT, “President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world.”

These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding, “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is very much on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence.

In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor, and it even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

Beginning in 2018, Amazon also began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden enabler for companies taking a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as Ai are actually being performed by the Mechanical Turk workforce — all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models grew even more complicated. In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and also about whether humans needed to be in the loop at all.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, one Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted, “Someone at Amazon is going to decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.”