The New York Stock Exchange said on Wednesday it will delist three Chinese telecom companies, confirming its latest reversal on the matter a day after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the NYSE chief he disagreed with an earlier decision to reverse the delistings. From a report: The latest move, which is effective Jan. 11, marks the third time in less than a week the Big Board has ruled on the matter. The flip-flopping highlights the confusion over which firms were included in an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in November barring U.S. persons from investing in publicly traded companies Washington deems to be tied to the Chinese military. It also comes amid escalating tensions within Washington on China policy in the final days of the Trump administration. "There is a unique situation where there is an outgoing administration that is disengaged and (there are) orders sitting out there, so something has to be done, but noone wants to take on responsibility," said Leland Miller, the CEO of the U.S.-based consultancy China Beige Book. "I think in future that anyone getting these orders will say: 'Tell us exactly what you want us to do,' and force administrations to be more focused."

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New regulations for testing the next generation of ultra-fast jets were finalized by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, an attempt to streamline the development of supersonic flight. From a report: The FAA on Wednesday announced the regulations as several companies work on developing prototypes of aircraft capable of flying faster than the speed of sound, it said in a press release. The move is an attempt to make it easier to receive permission from FAA for conducting supersonic test flights. U.S. rules prohibit routine flights beyond the speed of sound -- about 660 miles (1062 kilometers) per hour at high altitudes -- over land. The agency is also working on setting broader new standards for such aircraft, it said. "Today's action is a significant step toward reintroducing civil supersonic flight and demonstrates the departmentâ(TM)s commitment to safe innovation," Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said in the press release. Companies including Aerion Corp. and Boom Technology are attempting to design aircraft capable of flying at speeds far faster than existing models, but concerns remain over sonic booms and other environmental issues.

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Britain's competition watchdog has launched an investigation into the $40 billion takeover of the UK-based chip designer Arm by the US company Nvidia. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has called for interested parties to submit views on the contentious deal before the launch of a formal investigation later this year. Arm Holdings, which employs 6,500 staff including 3,000 in the UK, is a global leader in designing chips for smartphones, computers and tablets. California-based Nvidia, a graphics chip specialist, announced its plan to buy the British tech group from Japan's SoftBank in September. SoftBank had acquired Arm for $32 billion in 2016, when the Japanese company took advantage of the fall in value of the pound after the Brexit vote. Arm is based in Cambridge but has operations in a number of UK towns and cities, including Manchester, Belfast and Warwick. Its chief executive, Simon Segars, acknowledged at the time of the Nvidia deal that it could take up to 18 months to win approval from regulators around the world.

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Hackers who tapped into government networks through SolarWinds software potentially accessed about 3% of the Justice Department's email accounts, but there's no indication they accessed classified systems, a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. From a report: The DOJ Office of the Chief Information Officer learned of the hack the day of Christmas Eve, according to the statement, where agents accessed the Department's Microsoft Office 365 email environment. "As part of the ongoing technical analysis, the department has determined that the activity constitutes a major incident under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, and is taking the steps consistent with that determination," the spokesperson said. "The department will continue to notify the appropriate federal agencies, Congress, and the public as warranted."

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I don't get why the DOJ is supposed to be demoralized. If I had stuck it out through Trump, and Barr and the other jerks, I would be pretty jazzed to see Merrick Garland show up to rebuild. Organizations rebound pretty quickly, I've found.

Elon Musk, the outspoken entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, kicked off the new year by homing in on a characteristically audacious title: the richest person on the planet. From a report: A 4.9% rally in the electric carmaker's share price Wednesday boosted Musk to within $3 billion of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who currently occupies the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the worldâ(TM)s 500 wealthiest people. The South Africa-born engineer's net worth was $184.5 billion at 11:40 a.m. in New York, just shy of Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017. As chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Musk is also a rival to Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, in the private space race. The milestone caps an extraordinary 12 months for Musk. Over the past year his net worth soared by more than $146 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history.

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2010: "An amazing scene in a Frontline episode in the Iraqi parliament while Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. It was time for a purge. Saddam had decided to execute the whole legislature. The doors were locked and they started taking out people one by one and shooting them. Saddam, sadist that he was, videotaped it. So you could see what these guys were doing as they figured out, one by one, what was happening. So what did the condemned legislators do while waiting to be shot? They gave speeches, denouncing each other as the real enemy of the state, and proclaiming their love for Saddam, the best friend he ever had. Didn't work, they were all killed." They used to have video on the PBS site, but it was a victim of the deprecation of Flash. If you know of another copy, please send me a pointer.

The machine learning company OpenAI is developing models that improve computer vision and can produce original images from a text prompt. From a report: The new models are the latest steps in ongoing efforts to create machine learning systems that exhibit elements of general intelligence, while performing tasks that are actually useful in the real world -- without breaking the bank on computing power. OpenAI this week is announcing two new systems that attempt to do for images what its landmark GPT-3 model did last year for text generation. DALL-E is a neural network that can "take any text and make an image out of it," says Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist. That includes concepts it would never have encountered in training, like the drawing of an anthropomorphic daikon radish walking a dog. DALL-E operates somewhat similarly to GPT-3, the huge transformer model that can generate original passages of text based on a short prompt. CLIP, the other new neural network, "can take any set of visual categories and instantly create very strong and reliable visually classifiable text descriptions," says Sutskever, improving on existing computer vision techniques with less training and expensive computational power.

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Facebook's planned smart glasses will arrive "sooner than later" in 2021, but won't feature the kind of digital overlay technology that is associated with augmented reality, according to hardware chief Andrew Bosworth. From a report: The glasses, which are being built in partnership with Ray-Ban and parent Luxottica Group SpA, will connect to a device -- though users won't be able to overlay digital objects onto their real-world view, a foundational element of AR. "These are certainly connected glasses, they are certainly providing a lot of functionality, [but] we're being quite coy about which functionality precisely we are providing," Bosworth said. "We're excited about it but we don't want to over-hype it. We're not even calling it augmented reality, we're just calling it 'smart glasses,'" he added.

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The government rejects holding an inquiry into plans for a coal mine, meaning it can progress.

There's a continuous heartbeat connecting back in time, through your mother, and her mother, and so on back to the first mother with a heart that beats.

Every day in the United States, 17 people die waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant. To address this crisis, one biotech company is turning to an unlikely source: pigs. Maryland-based United Therapeutics says it plans to begin transplanting organs from genetically modified pigs into people as soon as this year. From a report: "We're right on that cusp. We're looking to get into humans within the next year or two," said David Ayares, PhD, in an exclusive interview with Future Human. Ayares is the chief scientific officer of Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics that's developing the pigs. "We think we have the pig that is going to be what we bring forward into humans in 2021 or 2022." For decades, scientists have been hopeful that organs from other species could be used to replace faulty ones in humans, known as xenotransplantation. But animal organs trigger immediate and severe immune reactions when transplanted into humans.

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The thing to look out for now -- senators switching parties. With a 50-50 split and things in motion in red-vs-blue states, there should be some opportunities for that. and right now is the time of max leverage.

Today's song: Happy Days Are Here Again.