The Amped Journal

Chevron, the US oil giant, confirmed it will expand its operations in Venezuela, according to the Associated Press, days after President Trump announced a deal to develop the country's oil reserves.

The confirmation is the first concrete sign a major American company is moving on the new arrangement, though full contract terms have not yet been made public.

Cursor, the AI coding tool, announced its cloud agents can now run on infrastructure a company manages itself, including pools of machines that automatically scale with demand. That gives agents access to internal services or specialized hardware that wouldn't otherwise be reachable, while orchestration still happens inside Cursor.

Supported options include self-managed machines and sandbox providers such as AWS Lambda, Coder, Cloudflare, Daytona, E2B, Modal, Namespace, and Vercel.

The move targets enterprises that want AI agents wired into existing infrastructure without giving up control of where code actually executes, a growing demand as coding agents move from personal tools to team infrastructure.

At least one person was killed and six others were injured in a shooting at an apartment building in downtown Minneapolis, according to the Associated Press. Three responding police officers were also injured, two of them by gunfire, according to Fox News.

Officers entered the building after multiple 911 callers reported gunfire, then followed the sound of shots to confront the situation, police said. Officials have not yet released the identities of the victims or a motive.

Major banks are demanding law firms rethink how they bill as AI increasingly handles legal research, document review and contract drafting faster than junior associates could. Average law firm rates have climbed to $798 an hour, up 33% since 2023, even as AI cuts the actual work involved.

Citigroup legal-operations executive Adam Meshel said he expects per-deal costs to drop, with the bank now requiring firms to detail their AI savings in bids. It's an early, concrete sign of AI compressing the traditional billable-hour model in a profession long insulated from productivity-driven pricing pressure.