The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank caught some high-profile analysts off guard. The former 16th-largest bank in the nation may not have been a household name, but some household names banked there. The entire situation could have taken a toll on the tech sector, but thanks to U.S. regulators, depositors have already regained access to their uninsured funds with SVB.

Here are some of the biggest names that could have had huge financial holes from SVB’s failure in this week’s Five For Friday:

#5: Etsy

It’s unclear exactly how much money craft marketplace Etsy had with SVB. It must have been significant, though, because Etsy warned sellers of possible payment processing delays on Friday amid the collapse. It was all cleared up by Monday and Etsy said the issues only affected 0.5% of the platform’s 7.5 million sellers.

It’s a relief, too. How could anyone go without a wooden spoon featuring the face of actor Nicolas Cage?

#4: Vox Media

Silicon Valley Bank wasn’t just the home to traditional tech companies. Vox Media, which owns Vox, New York Magazine, The Verge and a whole host of other properties, used the defunct financial institution. Their publications have been covering the failure of SVB at length over the last week. Vox had a significant amount of cash with the bank but was quick to say it didn’t anticipate any major disruptions in its services. That said, company credit cards with the bank did stop working.

#3: Roblox

Roblox is that incredibly popular online game the 7-year-old in your life won’t stop talking about. The company is worth roughly $25 billion and it continues to grow with a revenue and users spike of 20% year-over-year in February. It’s doing so well that the $150 million it had with SVB was just 5% of its cash on hand. Before knowing it would be made whole, Roblox said the situation would “have no impact on the day-to-day operations of the company.”

#2: Roku

While it may be trendy to have a fancy Apple TV for streaming, at least 40% of people prefer the more economical Roku devices. Roku had around $487 million of their $1.9 billion in cash with SVB. In the wake of the collapse, Roku said it had enough working capital to operate for at least a year.

These are the kinds of assurances you want from the folks that brought you Weird: the Al Yankovic Story starring Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame.

#1: Circle

Payments processing firm Circle was holding $3.3 billion of its cryptocurrency USD coin reserves with SVB. During the initial uncertainty, Circle assured users everything would operate normally as it sorted through the fallout. In the days following the collapse, however, the token traded around $0.91. That’s not a great sign when it’s tethered to the U.S. dollar and is always meant to stay at $1.00. The value eventually rebounded back to its peg.

Tech companies are threatening to pull news articles from their websites in Canada as legislation advances that would force them to pay news publishers for their content. Bill C-18, called the Online News Act, would mandate revenue-sharing agreements between Google, Facebook-parent-company Meta, and established news organizations.

This week, Meta warned it would get out of the news game in the country if the act passes. The bill, which it says aims to address the “significant bargaining power imbalance” between media and tech, has broad support and passed the House of Commons with roughly two-thirds of the vote.

Big Tech fights back

“If the Online News Act passes in its current form, we will end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram for people in Canada,” Meta Canada spokesperson Lisa Laventure told Straight Arrow News. “A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable.”

“They’re a rational people and rational people behave in a rational fashion. And the rational thing to do is to get out of the news,” said Peter Menzies, former Calgary Herald publisher and former vice chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.

Laventure said it is the same position Meta took in the U.S. in 2022. At the end of the year, lawmakers failed to keep the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act included in the must-pass defense spending bill after fierce tech lobbying. But bill sponsor Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is not giving up on the act, saying, “We must get this done.”

Google, which heavily lobbied against the JCPA, also appears to be considering a news blockage in Canada. This past month, it ran a 5-week test blocking news content for 4% of Canadians in opposition to the act as it moves through Parliament.

“It really surprises me that Google has decided that they’d rather prevent Canadians from accessing news than actually paying journalists for the work they do,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.

Supporters of the legislation, introduced last year, say the act is about fairness and bolstering journalism in the country, which is steadily losing revenue to Big Tech.

“Free, independent, neutral, nonpartisan press is fundamental for democracy and it’s shrinking now,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said. “Four hundred and fifty news outlets closed their doors and the money is all going to the big platforms. So what we’re asking here is for them to sit down, negotiate, right? Strike a deal.”

How Canadians consume news

A recent Maru/Public Opinion survey shows mainstream media sources still dominate how Canadians get their news. Forty-five percent tune in to an evening broadcast, while 29% report getting their news from television news and newspaper websites and 24-hour television news stations.

About a quarter of respondents did report turning to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, while Twitter commanded 14%. Respondents could select multiple categories for news consumption.

But when isolating respondents to those aged 18-34, the largest share of news consumption, 35%, did come from social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta. Meanwhile, 23% said they got news from Twitter, 20% from TikTok, and only 21% from an evening television news broadcast.

But the internet’s economic blows to newsrooms started years before social media platforms, as Menzies explained.

“The amount of money that we used to make in classified revenue pretty much paid for the newsroom,” the former Calgary Herald publisher said. “And that wasn’t Big Tech, in a sense, taking it away. That was Craigslist and in Canada, largely a company called Kijiji. And they didn’t just steal, I mean, they gave it away for free. They took stuff that you were charging 25 cents a word for.”

Money matters

Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the ad-revenue-sharing legislation would give news publishers an additional $329 million per year. Just shy of $250 million would go to broadcasters. Menzies said the biggest share would go to Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, while the second biggest share would go to CTV News, owned by the very profitable Bell Media. About a quarter of the annual funds would go to newspapers and online media.

“The poor may eat but the wealthy will dine,” Menzies said.

Canada’s lawmakers are inspired by Australia, which passed similar legislation in 2021, pushed forward by Rupert Murdoch-owned NewsCorp. Despite initial pushback from Google and Meta – Facebook even briefly shut down its news feed in the country – Australia said the tech companies have now inked more than 30 deals with media outlets for content that generates ad dollars.

The Australian law says that government can appoint an arbitrator to decide a final price if the two parties fail to reach a commercial deal independently.

“The Australian model is a piece of government legislation which is sort of being held like a hammer behind your back that says, ‘Okay, you guys sort this out,’ and then you leave people free to sort it out and you say it’s working,” Menzies said.

Canada’s version, as it stands, is a lot more hands on. It includes mandatory regulation, unlike Australia.

“We want to make sure that news outlets receive fair compensation for their work,” Rodriguez said. “We want to make sure that local, independent news thrives.”

But Menzies said he worries the financial windfall newsrooms stand to gain could come at a hefty price.

“The two biggest things we have to worry about in our life, or that can control our lives, are government and Big Tech,” he said. “How are you going to trust your media to hold their two most important clients to account?”

Industry experts believe if C-18 is successful, versions will quickly be adopted in other countries around the world.

Days after two U.S. banks failed, a Swiss bank is now in crisis. Credit Suisse shares sank as much as 30% Wednesday, hitting a new record low and dragging down global markets already jittery from bank instability.

The fallout is not related to the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, but the timing likely caused a more visceral reaction to the Swiss bank’s troubles.

On Tuesday, Credit Suisse released its annual report, revealing “material weakness” that could lead to misstatements in its financial reporting. Then on Wednesday, the bank’s largest shareholder, Saudi National Bank, said it won’t buy more shares to help Credit Suisse, helping fuel the rout.

“We now own 9.8% of the bank. We go above 10%, all kinds of new rules kick in, whether it be by our regulator or European regulator or the Swiss regulator, and we’re not inclined to get into a new regulatory regime,” Saudi National Bank Chairman Ammar Al Khudairy said during a Bloomberg TV interview.

Economists argue that the survival of Credit Suisse is a much bigger deal for the global economy than the U.S. regional banks that have struggled in the past week. The investment bank has much broader exposure. It is Switzerland’s second largest bank and does substantial business around the world.

“It’s definitely a much bigger concern for the global financial sector. It’s partly because it’s bigger, its balance sheet is about 2.5 times as big as SVB,” Capital Economics Chief Europe Economist Andrew Kenningham told Reuters. “But the more important difference is that Credit Suisse has a lot of links to the financial sectors in other countries, so it has operations in the U.S., in other parts of Europe and more widely around the world and it will have a lot of creditors and subsidiaries elsewhere who potentially could get into difficulties if Credit Suisse in Switzerland were to have trouble.”

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the Federal Reserve is actively reviewing the U.S. financial sector’s exposure to Credit Suisse amid the turmoil.

The 51st Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is concluding during the week of Mar. 13, 2023 in Nome, Alaska. The 1,000-mile race began with a ceremonial start in Anchorage, Alaska, then a restart in Willow.

Straight Arrow News spoke with a number of mushers who participated, including the 2022 champion, Brent Sass.

“The sled dog was used hundreds of years ago for transportation and moving freight around,” Sass said. “And it comes from the Siberian Huskies and the Malamutes–all those big, northern dogs. But those dogs were good for hauling freight and surviving the weather and the winters, but they weren’t fast. And so over the years, as racing became something that started happening probably 50, 60 years ago, then we started breeding other sorts of dogs into them, like greyhounds and all kinds of different hound dogs and stuff like that to create what we all now consider the Alaskan husky and they say it’s just basically a mutt dog.”

This breeding is the reason why sled dogs do not necessarily look alike.

“A musher will look at the lineage of the dog, and this is all oral,” Iditarod Trail Committee Chief Operations Officer Chas St. George said. “Nothing’s written down. And this is so very much like the indigenous peoples. You know, they had oral histories of the dogs that were great and that continues today.”

Sass has more than 50 dogs in his own kennel.

“I think people need to understand that this is a year-round, 365-days-a-year, 24-hours-a-day thing for us,” Sass said. “We always have these dogs. These dogs are a part of our life. They’re our family and I feel like somehow along the way people don’t understand that we’re always caring for these dogs. It’s not like we go and we run these races and then they’re sitting on a chain the rest of the year.”

For years, the animal rights activist group PETA has protested the Iditarod.

“The dogs in the Iditarod are forced to race against their will,” PETA campaign manager Melanie Johnson said. “These are not super dogs, they are not indestructible pieces of sporting equipment. They’re just like any other dog who only wants to live and enjoy loving companionship. But the Iditarod continues to push them beyond their abilities, and as a result, dogs continue to suffer and die.”

At least 154 dogs have died in the race throughout its history, according to the Sled Dog Action Coalition.

“I think people worry sometimes about the dogs–that they’re not having fun or they’re not being cared for or they don’t like what they’re doing and I guess what I would say is just we’re all animal lovers–that’s why we’re running the Iditarod,” musher KattiJo Deeter said.

“The problem is that PETA’s smart with what they do and they go after the sponsors now more than they go after us because they figure they take the money away and then we’re going to be in trouble,” Sass said.

Several big name sponsors have pulled out in recent years, including ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo.

This year, Iditarod officials said the field of mushers was the smallest yet.

“33 mushers is a low end, but it’ll come back, it’ll bounce back,” musher Matthew Failor said. “We might not see 80 or 90 mushers like we used to. But dog mushing isn’t going to go anywhere.”

“If you look at our short-distance races that many of the young people love to do in communities all along the circumpolar and you look at the mid-distance races that are still really growing, we see a lot of possibility and promise,” Iditarod Trail Committee Chief Operations Officer Chas St. George said.

In early March, people from all over the world flocked to the pre-race events as well as the ceremonial start and restart.

“People rally around it—especially here in Alaska, but I mean I was signing autographs for people from New Zealand and Ireland and Switzerland and Ohio and Illinois and Iowa,” 2022 Iditarod champion Brent Sass said. “It was crazy, the amount of people that come from all over the world to see this event,” he said.

The race, which lasts more than a week, can be treacherous.

“I feel like I’ve seen a lot, but every time you do it, something else comes up, something else arises,” Failor said. “I’ve been through storms, open water, there was a moose on the trail that was trying to agitate the dogs last year.”

For some mushers, just completing the race without any assistance is an achievement.

“I’m running a puppy team—2-year-olds. My job is to make sure that those puppy teams have a good thousand-mile experience,” musher Gerhardt Thiart said.

For the winner, there’s a little more than $50,000 in prize money, which helps cover the cost of caring for the dogs.

“This is a labor of love—we don’t do this for the money,” Sass said. “If I was going to say that I raced for money, that would be a flat-out lie. I do this because I have a passion for sled dogs, I do this because I have a passion for my lifestyle. I do this because I love the dogs.”

Ryan Redington has won the 51st Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Redington’s father, Joe Redington Sr., was one of the founders of the race.

Alaska’s 1,000-mile race begins in Willow, Alaska, and ends in Nome. The 2023 event hosted the smallest field of mushers yet.

“33 mushers is a low end, but it’ll come back, it’ll bounce back,” musher Matthew Failor said. “We might not see 80 or 90 mushers like we used to. But dog mushing isn’t going to go anywhere.”

“If you look at our short-distance races that many of the young people love to do in communities all along the circumpolar and you look at the mid-distance races that are still really growing, we see a lot of possibility and promise,” Iditarod Trail Committee Chief Operations Officer Chas St. George said.

In the early March, people from all over the world flocked to the pre-race events as well as the ceremonial start and restart.

“People rally around it—especially here in Alaska, but I mean I was signing autographs for people from New Zealand and Ireland and Switzerland and Ohio and Illinois and Iowa,” 2022 Iditarod champion Brent Sass said. “It was crazy, the amount of people that come from all over the world to see this event,” he said.

The race, which lasts more than a week, can be treacherous.

“I feel like I’ve seen a lot, but every time you do it, something else comes up, something else arises,” Failor said. “I’ve been through storms, open water, there was a moose on the trail that was trying to agitate the dogs last year.”

For some mushers, just completing the race without any assistance is an achievement.

“I’m running a puppy team—2-year-olds. My job is to make sure that those puppy teams have a good thousand-mile experience,” musher Gerhardt Thiart said.

For the winner, there’s a little more than $50,000 in prize money, which helps cover the cost of caring for the dogs.

“This is a labor of love—we don’t do this for the money,” Sass said. “If I was going to say that I raced for money, that would be a flat-out lie. I do this because I have a passion for sled dogs, I do this because I have a passion for my lifestyle. I do this because I love the dogs.”

Related headlines:

• Iditarod racer brags on her ‘superstar’ dogs, shares her life as a musher
• Australian Iditarod musher Turner racing legend Mitch Seavey’s A-team
• ‘Carrying Lance with me’: Iditarod musher Mackey continues brother’s legacy

Excess inventory can be a real problem for large companies as they attempt to make room for new items in overflowing warehouses. Sometimes corporations conclude the best business solution (but questionable environmental decision) isn’t simply marking down prices. Here are five companies that sent their own merchandise to the dump to help the bottom line in this week’s Five For Friday.

#5: Funko

Funko, the brand behind those lovable pop figures, plans to send between $30 and $36 million worth of product to the landfill this year. Following a pandemic-induced collectables boom, Funko raked in more than $1 billion in revenue in 2021. But by the end of 2022, it had $246.4 million worth of inventory on hand. Funko had to rent extra warehouse space to handle the overflow and now plans to free up that space. The company has huge licensing deals producing tons of products featuring characters from Star Wars to Harry Potter. In the future, it may want to stick with those items and stay away from making figures featuring the bass player from U2.

#4: Abbott

During surges in COVID-19 cases, it could be pretty difficult to find a test. In 2021, The New York Times reported Abbott Laboratories, the maker of BinaxNow at-home test kits, had its employees throw away testing kits when cases slowed down. This happened shortly before mass layoffs. Abbott responded to the Times piece directly, saying it only destroyed testing cards which had exceeded the 7-month shelf life. The company said it was able to save other components of the test kits, which could be used when it ramped up production after the delta variant surged later that year. Unfortunately, again, it became hard to find a test.

#3: Amazon

Amazon has fulfillment centers across the globe packed with products to be shipped to waiting customers. A 2021 investigation by Britain’s ITV News found the e-commerce giant was marking loads of items for destruction at a Scottish facility. The network followed trucks that carried new and recently-returned jewelry and electronics to recycling centers and landfills. The report found Amazon tagged more than 100,000 items for destruction in a single week. Less than 30,000 items were set aside for donation. The situation isn’t isolated to that specific fulfillment center either, it reportedly happened in France and Germany too.

#2: Richemont

Cartier and Montblanc owner Richemont destroyed more than $500 million worth of unsold watches over two years starting in 2016. Sales had dwindled in Asian markets and the company claimed selling unsold watches at a discount and on the “gray market” would diminish the value of the brand. Luxury brands are some of the biggest offenders of destroying perfectly sellable goods. Coach previously admitted to destroying items that were returned in-store which the brand deemed damaged or “unsalable.” Coach later said it was committed to sustainability and stopped the practice.

#1: Atari

Atari’s game based on the Steven Spielberg classic E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is the stuff of legends but for all the wrong reasons. In the early 1980s Atari was on top of the video game industry, putting out classics like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. But in 1982 it rushed the release for E.T in order to maximize sales during the holiday season and make up its $20 million investment to secure the rights.

The game was panned as the worst in history, and legend has it, millions of copies were dumped at a landfill in New Mexico. Three decades later, a documentary crew excavated the site. They dug up copies of E.T. and a number of successful titles. In the end, it wasn’t E.T. that took down Atari, but a $500 million loss that caused the company to sell. In the documentary, a former manager said New Mexico was a warehouse dump and most of the E.T. cartridges were in a landfill near the California headquarters.

After shooting down China’s spy balloons in the sky, the government is now setting its sights on TikTok, the popular Chinese app. The White House is backing a new bipartisan bill introduced this week that would allow the federal government to regulate and ban foreign-produced technology deemed a national security risk.

“In terms of foreign technology coming into America, we’ve gotta have a systemic approach to make sure we can ban or prohibit it when necessary,” bill cosponsor Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said.

“I’m particularly concerned about TikTok’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which repeatedly, repeatedly spies on American citizens,” said Sen. John Thune of North Dakota, the Republican cosponsor.

Several politicians are behind multiple efforts to target TikTok in the U.S. More than 30 states have banned it on government devices, while the White House gave government agencies 30 days to make sure the app is not on any federal systems. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has proposed legislation that would ban the app nationwide, while this latest bipartisan effort by Warner and Thune would broaden that power to any foreign tech. But banning TikTok may face major legal challenges even if legislation prevails.

TikTok fears

Critics of the app warn that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.

“There is a thing called civil military fusion in China,” cybersecurity expert Morgan Wright explained. “Anything that’s developed information, that is in the hands of the Chinese company, they are required to share that information upon demand with China.”

Fears ramped up with a 2016 law that declared that any Chinese company or citizen must “support, assist, and cooperate” with Chinese intelligence.

ByteDance then tried to convince U.S. lawmakers that there was a firewall between China and U.S. data, claiming that Chinese staff could not access non-Chinese users. But that fell apart when ByteDance fired China-based employees for tracking the TikTok data of U.S. journalists.

In response, and due to U.S. government pressure that began under the Trump administration, ByteDance has poured $1.5 billion into “Project Texas,” which stores U.S. data with American company Oracle.

“They are bending over backwards, I think they are doing actually too much,” said Milton Mueller, director of Georgia Tech’s Internet Governance Project. “They’re literally spending a billion dollars to create some massive data localization initiative in which they essentially are forcing them to use Oracle as their data storage.”

Mueller said ByteDance isn’t the national security threat it’s made out to be, but is just another tech company trying to make a profit, involving plenty of American investors.

“We have to stop associating ownership with national military capabilities,” Mueller said. “If we do that, the whole global economy starts getting divided up into political territories.”

TikTok data

TikTok surpassed one billion active users worldwide back in 2021. It is one of the fastest-growing apps in history. In the U.S., where about 100 million people scroll the app, the average user spends about 90 minutes a day viewing videos.

While many politicians regularly dwell on the data TikTok collects, calling it a risk to national security, Mueller said it’s really no different from any other social media platform.

“I’ve asked this for the last two years, I said, ‘Give me a plausible scenario by which somebody uses TikTok to undermine the security of the U.S.’ I’ve never gotten an answer to that question,” Mueller said.

But for those who see TikTok as a threat, the data is just the start.

“They are taking data from Americans, not keeping it safe. But what worries me more with TikTok is that this could be a propaganda tool,” Warner said.

“It’s not about what they’re doing today, it’s about how they use this information to create the right kinds of algorithms to feed you the information that over time changed your view about something,” Wright said.

Constitutional conundrum

But cutting off Americans from the Chinese tech, as some legislation proposes, is a nonstarter and unconstitutional, according to groups like the ACLU.

They told Congress an outright ban would “limit Americans’ political discussion, artistic expression, free exchange of ideas – and even prevent people from posting cute animal videos and memes.”

And that’s something people from both perspectives have agreed on.

“I think a ban on the app nationwide would be unconstitutional, I think it would be very easy to challenge that on First Amendment grounds and that would not survive the test,” Mueller said.

“Google and Apple, if they said, ‘Hey TikTok, you’re gone,’ that’s probably more realistic, but I don’t know how probable a solution it is to the thing,” Wright said. “I don’t think the government is going to get to that point where they can actually ban it outright in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.”

There’s no timeline yet for when legislation may face a vote in the full House or Senate.

Lawmakers – under the microscope for their own stock trading practices – are questioning whether senior executive branch officials should be banned from owning and trading individual stocks. On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, plans to propose legislation that would bar them from the practice.

“Senior members of the executive branch – who have access to privileged information – shouldn’t be using it to get rich,” Hawley told the Wall Street Journal. “While prohibitions already exist in federal law to prevent conflicts of interest, these laws are difficult to enforce and frankly, insufficient.”

The spotlight on stock-trading government employees follows a Journal investigation from October that revealed more than 2,600 officials across the executive branch reported owning or trading stocks that are influenced by decisions their agencies make.

For instance, they profiled a Defense Department director who bought Lockheed Martin stock five times in the weeks leading up to the company securing a $1 billion contract from the Pentagon to deliver more F-35 combat jets. The employee said he wasn’t involved in and had no inside knowledge ahead of the contract and that ethics officials didn’t raise any concerns about his trades.

In January, the Journal revealed that in recent years, ethics officials have warned one-third of senior Energy Department employees about stocks they or their families hold, reminding them of conflict-of-interest rules. U.S. law already prohibits federal officials from working on matters where they or their immediate family members hold significant financial stake, and Republicans like Hawley aren’t the only ones raising the alarm over whether this is sufficient.

This past week, Democratic lawmakers Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal sent letters to investigators at eight different federal agencies, asking them to review whether their ethics rules are effective enough. Both have previously introduced bills to ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning and trading stock, as has Hawley. So far, those proposals have made little progress over two sessions.

Those against banning federal officials and lawmakers from trading stocks have argued it could deter people from going into public service.

The 51st Iditarod kicks off Saturday with a ceremonial start in Anchorage, Alaska, and the official restart happening at 2 p.m. in Willow, Alaska. The 1,000-mile Last Great Race on Earth tests the limits for the mushers and the dogs as they traverse the frozen landscape of the Last Frontier.

Before the trek begins, the racers are gearing up their sleds and spending time with their fans.

Of course, the Iditarod can’t happen without the dogs. These four-legged stars have a series of events of their own before race day. High on that list: mandatory vet checks.

According to Dr. Stu Nelson, the Iditarod’s chief veterinarian, vets will take blood samples from all of the dogs to get a look at their “overall body condition.” Those blood tests will be followed by ECGs and EKGs to check for any heart abnormalities.

Critics of the race view the race as abusive. PETA has accused mushers of abuse for years.

The group’s executive vice president, Tracy Neiman, said she believes that “as PETA alerts more people to the number of dogs who have died along this thousand-mile trail, the Iditarod will soon have no choice but to call its final race.”

Mushers, naturally, disagree and say they have a special bond with their Iditarod dogs.

“I think people just need to trust that this event is not put on by a bunch of animal abusers. That’s not what you’re seeing here,” Iditarod musher KattiJo Deeter told Straight Arrow News. “What you’re seeing is a bunch of people that love dogs and love spending time with them and being out in the wilderness. And you’re really seeing this awesome relationship of human and animal that we honestly don’t have a lot of anymore.”

The animal rights organization backs up its prediction by noting that the Iditarod has fewer sponsorships this year and low participation.

It’s true that the number of racers is down this year, with 33 mushers compared to least year’s 50. But participants don’t appear worried.

“33 mushers is a low end, but it’ll come back; it’ll bounce back,” musher Matthew Sailor said in interview with Straight Arrow News. “We may not see 80 or 90 mushers like we used to, but dog mushing isn’t going to go anywhere, it’s just some people retire … and maybe it’s just a low rookie class and lots of the mushers are having kids now and lots of their priorities are changing. But dog mushing will be strong no matter what.”

Stick with Straight Arrow News for more footage and interviews from the Last Great Race on Earth.

Antitrust regulators in the European Union are set to greenlight the $69 billion deal between Microsoft and gaming giant Activision Blizzard, according to a Reuters report. Officials have until April 25 to publicly announce their decision.

The deal has been in limbo since Microsoft made the bid more than a year ago, facing challenges by antitrust agencies in the U.S., EU and U.K. Activision Blizzard, which is home to brands like Call of Duty, Warcraft and Candy Crush, would be Microsoft’s biggest takeover to date.

Sony is the biggest challenger to the deal in the private sector. The company has argued Microsoft’s ability to make Call of Duty an exclusive Xbox game would damage Sony’s business. To allay those concerns, Microsoft has already offered long-term agreements to keep Call of Duty on other platforms. Last month, the company signed 10-year agreements with Nintendo and Nvidia. In December, Microsoft President Brad Smith said Microsoft also offered Sony a 10-year contract to make Call of Duty available on PlayStation the same day it comes out on Xbox.

The offer to license deals to rivals seems to have done the trick in the EU, where regulators are usually tougher on tech than those in the U.S. But Microsoft is facing a changing dynamic at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission with progressive antitrust enforcer Lina Khan at the helm.

The FTC has asked a judge to block the deal outright, while the U.K. has suggested Microsoft sell off Call of Duty to make it work, something Smith has said it’s not willing to do.

The FTC and Khan are coming off a high-profile loss against Meta, failing to block the Facebook-company’s deal to buy virtual reality startup Within. That deal closed last month after Meta’s victory. The FTC trial against Microsoft is set to begin Aug. 2.

For more: FTC swings big against Microsoft, Meta, but may have a losing strategy