Morning Brief — 2026-05-22

🎙 Audio recap: delivered as a voice note in your Discord #theo channel.

🇺🇸 US News

Federal and state gas taxes are back in focus as pump prices rise with Iran-war risk.
A probe says the nation’s largest public pension fund has been marked by secrecy and weak returns.
The family of the San Diego mosque-shooting suspect blamed online hate and apologized to victims.
A Tennessee execution was called off after officials failed to complete the lethal injection.

Marco Rubio called Cuba a threat to the US while Havana accused him of pushing toward military aggression.
NATO’s chief welcomed Trump’s plan to send 5,000 US troops to Poland ahead of foreign-minister talks.
Greenlanders protested outside a new US consulate as Washington keeps pressing for influence there.
Al Jazeera reports Chinese and Iranian companies are operating in Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions.

US stock futures rose early Friday, with S&P 500 futures up 0.18%, Dow futures up 124 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.27%.
The S&P 500 is on pace for an eighth straight weekly gain despite Treasury-yield volatility.
The Dow is headed for its third positive week in four, while the Nasdaq is on track for its seventh weekly advance in eight weeks.
Oil and 30-year Treasury yields remain the main macro swing factors for equities today.

ChatGPT’s PowerPoint integration is now in beta for business, education, free, Go, Pro, and Plus users.
Politico reports Trump delayed an AI executive-order signing after objecting to provisions he saw as possible blockers.
Resolve AI says its new multi-agent incident system more than doubles root-cause accuracy in production failures.
Cohere introduced Command A with lossless quantization and native citations, positioning it as a fully Apache 2.0 open model.
Hidden Door launched Atlas, an AI worldbuilding tool that lets creators build shareable interactive universes.

Nvidia reported record $81.6B quarterly revenue as data-center AI demand stayed huge.
Lenovo shares jumped after record earnings and nearly doubled AI revenue, extending the hardware-AI trade beyond US megacaps.
QQQ remains the broadest liquid proxy for AI-heavy megacap tech as Nasdaq futures climb.
Nvidia’s quote page is the clean daily watch after earnings-driven volatility.

OpenClaw’s May 21 release improves Discord voice following, policy checks, Codex harness docs, approvals, browser screenshots, and secret-file safety.
The OpenClaw security roadmap lays out observability and trust work for personal assistant runtimes.
OpenAI-backed OpenClaw agents now route through the native Codex app-server path by default.