On Wall Street, all three indexes pulled back from recent record highs with technology and financial shares driving losses while energy stocks were leading gains

International News via Reuters:

Global equity markets fell while oil prices rose on Wednesday as hopes of a quick end to the Middle East conflict faded as hostilities flared again.

On Wall Street, all three indexes pulled back from recent record highs with technology and financial shares driving losses while energy stocks were leading gains.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.75%, the S&P 500 fell 0.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.42%.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index fell 0.59%. MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe fell 0.32%.

Iranian attacks on Kuwait damaged its airport and injured dozens while the U.S. military carried out strikes near the Strait of Hormuz, with diplomacy to halt the war showing little sign of progress.

“The broad market and the tech sector have led this strong, strong rally for the past several sessions and today’s taking a breather,” said Wasif Latif, chief investment officer at Sarmaya Partners.

“The headline coming out of the Middle East with the Iran war continuing to escalate, deescalate, escalate, and then deescalate again. That’s the reason for the market selloff today.”

Oil prices crept back towards the $100 mark, with global benchmark Brent crude up 1.8% to $97.72 a barrel.

AI HALO

 Investor euphoria over artificial intelligence continues to underpin markets. In Asia, stock indexes climbed to record highs in Japan and Taiwan.

Shares in Marvell Technology were up 6%, extending gains from a record high in the prior session after Nvidia boss Jensen Huang called the chipmaker the next trillion-dollar company.

SpaceX – which is largely focused on AI – plans to raise $75 billion in a blockbuster initial public offering, according to a source familiar with the matter.    

“Our view continues to be that this strong run up in semiconductors and data center demand is a lot of pulling forward of future demand and consumption, and that’s helping the economy,” Latif added.

YEN INTERVENTION WORRIES

Currency traders were on edge, however, after the dollar rose against the Japanese yen to the 160 level at which the market tends to become nervous about intervention from authorities in Tokyo.

The Japanese yen weakened 0.07% against the greenback to 159.97 per dollar. 

The fall in the yen prompted warnings from the finance minister on Wednesday.

The euro down 0.31% against the greenback at $1.1596.

The dollar index, which tracks the currency against its peers, rose 0.21% to 99.50.

Markets, which had expected rate cuts before the Iran war, have priced in about 18 basis points of U.S. rate increases this year.

A hike in Europe next week is all but fully priced in following data showing inflation accelerated last month, while traders predict about a 75% chance of a June rise in Japan.

U.S. 10-year Treasury yields  rose 2.8 basis points to 4.483%. Data showed U.S. private payrolls increased more than expected in May. More comprehensive official jobs numbers are due on Friday.

Spot gold fell 0.81% to $4,449.44 an ounce. 

Reporting by Chibuike Oguh in New YorkEditing by Nick Zieminski

Announced at the company’s WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference in London, the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling “agentic” capabilities in which the assistant can take actions on businesses’ behalf

International News via Reuters:

Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, positioning the social media giant as a player in the enterprise AI market.

Announced at the company’s WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference in London, the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling “agentic” capabilities in which the assistant can take actions on businesses’ behalf, like booking calendar appointments and closing sales.

Meta said more than 1 million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of such agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will be added to Instagram as well and rolled out globally to businesses of all sizes.

The move hints at Meta’s ambitions to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google in the market for enterprise applications of its AI tools, leveraging the reach of its social media apps to try to convince companies to consolidate their ads and other workflows.

“This is definitely an enterprise play,” Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.

Shares of Meta rose more than 3% in morning trading.

The Business Agent can be customized to respond to queries on those apps, channeling a company’s tone and handling tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, qualifying leads and escalating complex queries to human staff when needed.

Businesses will initially be able to access the tool for free, with paid subscription options planned in the coming months.

“We actually want to take actions now. We actually want it to be able to complete the payment, to process the booking, to place the order,” going beyond “rule-based automations” for legacy bots, Gleit said.

Alongside the new Business Agent offerings inside Meta’s apps, the company is also launching a broader “Business Agent Platform” aimed at giving businesses tools to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere.

The platform is connected to hundreds of non-Meta systems like Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee, where those agents can be deployed, and provides larger businesses with enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and measurement, the company said.

NEW LINES OF BUSINESS

Gleit is spearheading the company’s efforts to expand into new lines of business around AI agents, including with a new team, Enterprise Solutions, announced as part of a recent companywide restructuring around AI.

The team will send squads of forward-deployed engineers to embed with enterprise customers, a model used by AI companies such as Anthropic that is aimed at navigating internal politics around AI adoption and writing custom code to help models deliver results.

Its scope is currently focused on new business agents, but it is also working to build and sell agentic AI products that businesses can use for additional internal functions.

Gleit is also working to consolidate the different AI agents Meta has built, including internal workflow-oriented tooling, a user-facing Meta AI support bot and a separate ads-focused “business assistant” launched globally last month, she said.

“The number one thing I hear, especially from small businesses, is ‘I just want to go to one place that can do all the things,'” she said.

“You want to make things modular, and you also need to be willing to evolve, because the technology is moving so quickly.”

LAPSES SHOW AI AGENT RISKS

Gleit acknowledged the risks associated with deeply integrating AI agents into a company’s systems and giving them permission to take action on its behalf.

Meta has already experienced several embarrassing lapses associated with its agents, including an incident earlier this week in which hackers convinced its AI support chatbot into handing over access to high-profile Instagram accounts.

Asked about the case, Gleit said the company was still investigating, but had determined that the problem involved a flawed “technical check” within the underlying support function.

“It wasn’t the agent. The agent actually exposed a technical check that wasn’t working,” she said. “There was sort of a separate system and technical check that had a bug, and because people were using the agent, they discovered it.”

Reporting by Katie Paul in London, additional reporting by Aditya Soni; Editing by Pooja Desai

Endemic to the island of Buru – meaning it is found nowhere else on Earth – the small bird was spotted in April during an expedition led by an Indonesian mountaineering group

International News via Reuters:

For the past century, the Blue-fronted Lorikeet was one of Indonesia’s most elusive birds, known only from a 2014 photographic record and a handful of museum specimens, with a lingering hope that it had not vanished. After days of climbing through sharp limestone, biting insects and difficult mountain terrain, a flash of green feathers high on Buru’s highest peak showed that this dazzlingly colourful parrot was still there.

Endemic to the island of Buru – meaning it is found nowhere else on Earth – the small bird was spotted in April during an expedition led by an Indonesian mountaineering group. The team photographed the bird for the first time in 12 years and captured the first sound recordings of its high-pitched calls – sounds birds often use to keep contact in the forest canopy.

The lorikeet’s bright green body, orange bill, blue hindcrown and pointed tail helped the team identify it. 

The team was looking specifically for this species, but the odds felt slim. 

“When you are looking for a bird that has only been documented once in the past century it feels like a long shot,” said John Mittermeier, director of the Search for Lost Birds at the American Bird Conservancy conservation group. 

First described from seven specimens collected in the 1920s, the Blue-fronted Lorikeet has been one of Indonesia’s avian mysteries. The bird went unrecorded for nearly 90 years despite searches in lowland and mid-elevation forests, before being photographed in 2014. 

There was a long-held suspicion that the parrot may not have been gone, but rather living higher up in the mountains than searchers had managed to look. The highlands landscape where the lorikeet was found had remained largely inaccessible until recently, when local climbers mapped a route into the mountains. 

Mittermeier said steep limestone terrain, cliffs, sharp boulders and no water make the area difficult to access. 

“There are no other birds on the island that look like the lorikeets, so when we saw them we knew immediately what they were,” Mittermeier said.

“We saw at least nine during the trip,” Mittermeier added.

James Eaton, a birder involved in the expedition, said the rain, jagged limestone, river torrents and lack of trails meant anyone trying to reach the peak needed “a strong – or crazy – reason to even attempt it.” 

“This bird was our reason for doing so,” Eaton said. 

After a gruelling week, “to actually photograph our holy grail suddenly made all the hardships disappear – it’s a feeling adrenaline junkies would know well,” Eaton said.

The sighting capped years of preparation for Eaton. 

“It makes all the researching, reading, plotting – some of which are years in the making, totally justified – it makes you feel alive, a justification for your dedication,” Eaton said.

The Blue-fronted Lorikeet was listed as Data Deficient by the IUCN Red List and recognised in 2024 as a lost species by the Search for Lost Birds, a global partnership between American Bird Conservancy, Re:wild and BirdLife International.

Mittermeier said further work is needed to learn the bird’s population size and possible threats. 

“A finding like this … is the first step to being able to protect it,” Mittermeier said.

For Eaton, the rediscovery was a reminder of the beauty and surprise still far from public view. 

Amid unrelenting negative news, Eaton said, “these moments of joy and discovery are a healthy reminder of what a beautiful world is there.”

“This small green parrot,” Eaton said, “it was here long before humans stepped foot on the island, just like birds living in your garden at home – they have more right to be there than you or I.”

Reporting by Marta Serafinko in Gdansk; Editing by Will Dunham