Category: 3. Business

SoftBank Group to Issue $2.61 Billion Hybrid Notes in Japan

By Kosaku Narioka

SoftBank Group plans to issue $2.61 billion of hybrid notes in Japan, primarily targeting retail investors.

The Japanese technology investment company said Monday that it would issue 418.0 billion yen of 35-year notes in Japan, to repay previously issued hybrid notes at their first optional redemption date in June.

SoftBank Group said the interest rate on the notes would be fixed for the initial five years and floating thereafter.

The Japanese company said it expected hybrid notes to be eligible for 50% equity treatment from rating companies. The notes are rated at BBB+ by Japan Credit Rating Agency.

The company said detailed terms and conditions are scheduled to be determined on April 10.

SoftBank Group shares were recently 8.4% lower amid broad market selloffs and following sharp declines in shares of chip-design unit Arm Holdings on Friday.


  Write to Kosaku Narioka at kosaku.narioka@wsj.com 

  (END) Dow Jones Newswires

  March 29, 2026 22:10 ET (02:10 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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March 30, 2026

RFID tech targets US$94B loss in retail industry

Avery Dennison reveals that meat waste is projected to cost global retailers US$94 billion this year, making it the single most expensive food waste category — ahead of fresh produce and bakery. The data comes ahead of the UN’s International Day of Zero Waste and coincides with growing pressure on retailers to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3 to halve food waste.

The materials science and digital identification solutions company points out that 62% of retailers report that they manage meat inventory manually, while 72% of retailers find meat-related food waste to be their single greatest challenge. Moreover, the company estimates that the total food waste bill is US$540 billion, globally.

“Modernizing inventory management is one of the most immediate levers retailers can pull to help reduce both financial losses and the environmental impact of food waste,” says Julie Vargas, VP and GM of enterprise intelligent labels growth at Avery Dennison.

“Consumer health trends like the boom in protein can put pressure on retailers to pivot assortments quickly, often without clear visibility of how long demand will last, resulting in over-ordering and preventable waste.”

Manual processes, mounting losses

According to Avery Dennison, the root cause of the problem is largely operational. Despite the scale of the financial exposure, two-thirds of retailers still manage food inventory through manual processes — systems that industry leaders widely acknowledge as labor-intensive and error-prone.

Three-quarters identify meat-related waste as their single biggest operational challenge, and 79% state that investment in inventory innovation is a necessary step to unlock savings.

Moreover, the report highlights that demand unpredictability is making the problem harder to manage. A quarter of retailers say they are struggling to keep pace with rising consumer appetite for meat. This is driven in part by the growth of high-protein diets, which is creating conditions where over-ordering is difficult to avoid.

Moreover, the company states a further 30% of retailers say shoppers’ reluctance to buy meat that is approaching its expiration date increases the waste accumulating at the shelf end of the chain. At the same time 74% of leaders reported that inflation is making demand forecasting harder. This means that the margin for error in ordering decisions is narrowing at the exact moment when forecasting accuracy matters most.Walmart recently integrated RFID-enabled labels across its meat, bakery, and deli departments.

The financial trajectory

Avery Dennison’s report also estimates that, if current trends continue, the cumulative food waste costs across the supply chain will reach US$3.4 trillion between 2025 and 2030. Additionally, more than a quarter of retail leaders admit they will not be able to meet the 2030 UN SDG deadline.

More alarming, the report shows that one in ten have paused waste reduction projects entirely.

“Amid growing volatility and higher consumer expectations, every inefficiency in the food supply chain — every wasted pallet, unsold shipment, or stockout — is felt more sharply than ever,” explains Luna Atamian Hahn-Petersen, the senior manager for sustainability strategy at Accenture.

“In this environment, retailers are uniquely placed to orchestrate a system that unlocks value for all involved. We are sitting on a US$540 billion opportunity to transform the grocery sector, and many of the answers already exist. By monitoring food products through every stage of the value chain, we can turn data into action and proactively prevent waste.”

Bridging the “visibility gap”

Avery Dennison highlights that the industry-wide push toward automation recently reached a milestone through a partnership between the company and Walmart. Walmart adopted Avery Dennison’s “first-of-its-kind sensor technology,” and integrated RFID-enabled labels directly into its meat, bakery, and deli departments.The global cost of food waste from 2025–2030 could total up to US$3.4 trillion.

The companies state that the move directly addresses the “visibility gap” which has long plagued the sector and moves the needle from “error-prone” manual counts toward real-time, item-level intelligence.

In essence, the technology gives every product a unique digital footprint, and provides a level of inventory precision that was previously impossible. With digital use-by dates accessible to retailers and managers, companies can oversee product rotation with surgical accuracy and make data-backed markdown decisions before a product reaches the point of no return.

Avery Dennison notes that this turns the reactive process into a proactive strategy, and helps to ensure that high-demand items stay stocked while cutting down on the volume of unsold food. As the industry faces increasingly strict global reduction targets, solutions like this could move from being a competitive advantage to an operational necessity for resilient food supply chains.

“By giving food items a digital footprint and supporting human decision-making with real-time item-level inventory intelligence, retailers can shift from reactive to proactive waste management,” adds Vargas. “Businesses will find it easier to reclaim value that would otherwise be lost.”

“Technology is able to turn uncertainty into actionable insight, enabling teams to anticipate demand, intervene earlier, and protect both margin and supply chain resilience.”

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March 30, 2026
Andrew Yang Says AI Boom Is Coming Faster Than Anyone Expects—What We’ll See In ‘Six Months Outstrips What We’ve Seen In The Last 10 Years’

Hiring disruptions from artificial intelligence are already starting to appear, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang said.

The Forward Party founder and former presidential candidate recently told CNBC that the technology is moving faster than most expect.

“I just came from an AI conference out west, and holy cow! They said to me that what we’re going to see in the next six months outstrips what we’ve seen in the last ten years.”

Yang said the pace of change is beginning to reshape how work gets done.

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Yang said the shift is raising questions about whether the tax system still fits an economy increasingly shaped by automation.

“You tend to tax things that you want to discourage, that you want less of,” he told CNBC. He said taxing labor becomes harder to defend as automation plays a bigger role in the economy.

That shift is already showing up in hiring. “The easiest people to fire are the people you haven’t hired yet,” Yang said. He linked the trend to weaker demand for recent graduates and said unemployment among college graduates now matches or exceeds that of non-college graduates.

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Recent moves across the tech sector reflect that shift. Enterprise software company Atlassian Corp. (NASDAQ:TEAM) cut about 1,600 jobs this month to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales.

He also pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has warned that up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be automated in the next several years and has supported taxing AI companies. Yang said he believes that forecast.

Yang pointed to an unidentified company selling autonomous coding tools to large enterprises, saying its revenue is “up 100 fold in the last 12 months.” If that pace continues, companies could begin directing more tech budgets toward AI tools instead of human engineers, he told CNBC.

“There is zero chance that this transition is not going to be rough for millions of people,” Yang said.

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He described the shift as part of a broader transition across the labor market.

Yang pointed to Amodei’s support for taxing AI companies. “Since when does the CEO of a major company raise his hand and say, ‘Hey, tax me and mine’?” he asked. He said it reflects growing concern about job losses and potential backlash.

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March 30, 2026
Villeroy says ECB ready to act, but too early to discuss timing of any rate hike – Reuters
1. Villeroy says ECB ready to act, but too early to discuss timing of any rate hike Reuters
2. Christine Lagarde’s sober tone on the Gulf war energy shock The Economist
3. ECB Should Not Rush Its Response to Iran Conflict, Says Schnabel WSJ
4. ECB’s Muller: Not sure we need to wait for fully visible second round effects to act TradingView
5. ECB Ready to Act on Inflation, Cautious on Rate Hike Timing – Villeroy Global Banking & Finance Review®
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March 29, 2026
Spatiotemporal patterns and typological differences in the development-protection nexus of resource-based cities in China
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Version 4.0 of the open source Kubernetes security platform Kubescape has been released, bringing runtime threat detection and a new set of AI-era security features. This is the first time the project has targeted the security of AI agents themselves, alongside its established scanning capabilities.

The announcement, published on the CNCF blog during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 and written by Ben Hirschberg, Kubescape Core Maintainer, explains that the headline change in 4.0 is the move of Runtime Threat Detection and Kubescape Storage to general availability.

Kubescape is an open-source Kubernetes security platform, maintained as a CNCF incubating project. It scans clusters, Helm charts, YAML manifests, and CI/CD pipelines for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and RBAC violations. It has runtime threat detection, which learns normal workload behaviour and alerts on deviations, cutting CVE noise by over 95%. Native integrations with tools such as VSCode and GitHub Actions allow teams to embed security checks early in the development process without disrupting their workflows.

The Runtime Threat Detection engine relies on detection rules (based on the Common Expression Language) that work directly against Kubescape’s Application Profiles. The engine monitors processes, Linux capabilities, system calls, network and HTTP events, and file system activity. Rules and RuleBindings are now managed as Kubernetes CRDs, and alerts can be forwarded to AlertManager, SIEM tools, Syslog, Stdout, or HTTP webhooks. Hirschberg writes that this engine has been rigorously tested and has proved stable at scale.

Kubescape Storage has also reached GA in this release. It uses the Kubernetes Aggregated API to store security metadata such as Application Profiles, SBOMs, and vulnerability manifests in a dedicated layer, keeping that data out of the standard etcd instance. Amir Malka, who is welcomed as a new maintainer in this release, presented the underlying approach at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025.

This architecture has been proven to handle the demands of large-scale, high-density clusters, providing the performance required for modern enterprise environments.

– Ben Hirschberg

The release also removes the host-sensor, a “pop-up” DaemonSet previously used for node scanning. Kubescape’s community had flagged the approach as intrusive and difficult to audit from a security standpoint. The host-agent has been similarly retired, with its capabilities folded into the node-agent via a direct API between the core Kubescape microservices. The result is a single agent per node, which Hirschberg argues makes the security posture “both more stable and easier to audit.”

There are also other AI-related additions, heading in two directions, which Hirschberg describes as “the two sides of the AI security coin.” The first is a KAgent-native plug-in that allows AI assistants to query Kubernetes security posture from within a cluster. Through this plug-in, an agent can inspect vulnerability manifests, review configuration scans for RBAC issues, find guidance on fixing problems, and look at container behaviour at runtime using ApplicationProfiles and NetworkNeighborhoods. The second element is security scanning specifically for KAgent itself, the CNCF Sandbox project for AI orchestration. KAgent was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in May 2025 as an open-source framework for building Kubernetes-native AI agents, with an architecture based on the Model Context Protocol. Because KAgent establishes pathways between AI models and enterprise infrastructure, the Kubescape team argues that its configuration needs the same level of scrutiny as any other workload.

We need robust security guardrails to stop agents from exploiting them for high-risk actions like unauthorized access or deleting production data.

– Ben Hirschberg

Kubescape 4.0 introduces 15 controls based on OPA’s Rego language, covering 42 security-critical configuration points in KAgent’s CRDs. These controls check for errors such as empty security contexts in default deployments, missing NetworkPolicies, and over-privileged controller-wide namespace watching. This approach builds on Kubescape’s existing Rego-based framework, which already supports compliance standards including the NSA-CISA and MITRE ATT&CK frameworks. The 4.0 release adds support for CIS Benchmark versions 1.12 for vanilla Kubernetes and 1.8 for EKS and AKS.

Many of the new features in Kubescape 4.0 are a reaction to the growing adoption of agentic AI in Kubernetes environments. Shakudo’s documentation on deploying production-grade AI agents on Kubernetes notes that kagent offers “tools, resources, and AI agents that help automate configuration, troubleshooting, observability, and network security.” As these agents gain more autonomy and deeper access to infrastructure, the attack surface they represent becomes a practical concern rather than a theoretical one. A LinkedIn post from Craine.io on KAgent’s CNCF sandbox graduation observed that “AI workload orchestration isn’t just about containers anymore. It’s about building resilient, scalable intelligence infrastructure.”

The Kubescape 4.0 release is one of the first systematic attempts to apply cloud native security tooling to the agents themselves, rather than only to the workloads they manage.Kubescape was accepted as a CNCF Incubating project in January 2025, having entered the CNCF Sandbox in 2022. The project is maintained by ARMO and accepts contributions from the wider community.

Category: 3. Business

SoftBank Group to Issue $2.61 Billion Hybrid Notes in Japan

Continue Reading

RFID tech targets US$94B loss in retail industry

Manual processes, mounting losses

The financial trajectory

Bridging the “visibility gap”

Continue Reading

Andrew Yang Says AI Boom Is Coming Faster Than Anyone Expects—What We’ll See In ‘Six Months Outstrips What We’ve Seen In The Last 10 Years’

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Villeroy says ECB ready to act, but too early to discuss timing of any rate hike – Reuters

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Spatiotemporal patterns and typological differences in the development-protection nexus of resource-based cities in China

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We don’t know how Trump wants the Iran war to end

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North American Regional Aircraft To See Declining Heavy Check Demand

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Kubescape 4.0 Brings Runtime Security and AI Agent Scanning to Kubernetes

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Smartee Advances “Mandibular Repositioning” Solutions in the UK with Specialized Clinical Conference in London

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PetroChina Successfully Concludes "the 14th Five-Year Plan", 2025 Operating Results Remain at Historical High Levels – PR Newswire

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