Though Nintendo can technically claim it had the first big gaming news event of the year, at least Xbox’s Developer Direct actually showed off some games and let us know when we can play them. The showcase was anchored by deep dives into the biggest games coming down the green pipe like Doom: The Dark Ages and Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, with a couple of surprises to fill out the nearly one-hour-long runtime. Here are the highlights from the show.

Xbox kicked off the Direct with the surprise reveal of Ninja Gaiden 4. The game is being codeveloped by Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja and Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames. Ninja Gaiden 4 revives the series’ bloody, fast-paced combat and high-stakes (but often frustrating) platforming with a new face, the ninja Yakumo. Yakumo will use his unique fighting styles to defeat the Divine Dragon Order that’s turned Tokyo into a dystopian, crumbling mess. Gaiden’s former protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, will also make an appearance as a playable character and Yakumo’s rival.

Ninja Gaiden 4 will launch in the fall of this year, but if you don’t want to wait for your bloody ninja action, you don’t have to. Xbox stealth dropped Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, a remake of Ninja Gaiden II, and it’s available right now on Xbox and Game Pass.

The developers at Compulsion Games went into detail about South of Midnight’s gameplay and story. You play as Hazel who must use her powers as a Weaver, fighting monsters and traversing the haunted landscape, to rescue her mother who gets swept away in a hurricane. With this, everything I’ve seen about South of Midnight makes it seem like it’ll be one of my games of the year. It’s got a Black protagonist, features characters and tropes that harken to Southern gothic folklore, and its stop-motion art style makes it immediately stand out. I cannot wait to get my hands on this game when it releases on April 8th.

Sandfall Interactive was founded in Montpellier, France, in 2020 with a team led by former Ubisoft developers. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the studio’s first game — a turn-based RPG with a compelling narrative hook. The world has been ravaged by a being known as the Paintress. Every year, she writes down a number, and everyone older than that number disappears. Expeditions are sent out to stop the Paintress, and the game will follow Expedition 33 in their attempt to save humanity. In addition to an interesting Persona 5-style take on turn-based combat, Expedition 33 features some serious voice acting talent, starring Charlie Cox, Jennifer English, Ben Starr, and Andy Serkis. Can’t wait to hear them perform when Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launches on April 24th.

To close out the Direct, Xbox gave us another look at Doom: The Dark Ages, the prequel to id Software’s 2016 Doom reboot and Doom Eternal. It will, of course, feature all the ripping and tearing a Doom enjoyer could want, along with an interesting focus on narrative — something the series isn’t really known for. But I suspect folks are far more interested in piloting a 30-story Doomguy-shaped mech suit when the game releases on May 15th.

For three days Donald Trump dominated Davos from a distance.

On the fourth, he did it in person, albeit virtually, with a speech that took his threats of economic conflict with Europe directly to its political leaders.

Beamed from the White House to the World Economic Forum, he delivered a message of total confidence in American might, and a direct challenge to those that do not play along.

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Initially, he stuck to the inauguration script and his domestic program but, teed up by a question from his Mar-a-Lago neighbour and former adviser Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, he let rip.

Mr Schwarzman identified a theme of this week, frustration at EU regulation among businesses, and the president took full advantage.

He criticised taxes on American companies, and what he sees as a trade imbalance. “They don’t take our food, they don’t take our cars, but they send us cars by the million.”

EU demands for $15bn in back taxes from Apple, as well as investigations into Google and Facebook, were also slammed. “These companies, like them or not, these are American companies.

“Nobody’s happy with it and we are going to do something about it. I’m trying to be constructive, I love Europe, but they treat the US very unfairly.”

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His counter-offer to the businesses listening; corporation tax of just 15% for companies that shift their manufacturing to the US, and tariffs for those that don’t, a position that would inevitably bring retaliation.

In the audience, the heads of the European Central Bank, the World Trade Association, the International Money Fund and sundry cabinet ministers and central bankers, shifted in their seats.

As if to emphasise what Europe is up against, Mr Trump cited a $600bn investment promised by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and suggested “he round it up to a trillion”.

Having parked metaphorical tanks on chancellery lawns, he offered some hope, but not detail, on how he might address the real ones rolling across Ukraine.

Referring to “millions of dead bodies lying on the flat fields” he said efforts to secure peace “should be under way”. Asked when that might happen, he said the answer lay with Russia. “Ukraine is ready.”

Having started the week guessing what Trump 2.0 might mean, Davos’ delegates, that unique mix of money, power, civil society and celebrity, leave the Alps under no illusion of the disruption ahead.

JetBrains, the company behind coding tools like the IntelliJ IDE for Java and Kotlin (and, indeed, the Kotlin language itself), on Thursday launched Junie, a new AI coding agent. This agent, the company says, will be able to handle routine development tasks for when you want to create new applications — and understand the context of existing projects you may want to extend with new features.

Using the well-regarded SWEBench Verified benchmark of 500 common developer tasks, Junie is able to solve 53.6% of them on a single run. Not too long ago, that would have been the top score, but it’s worth noting that at this point, the top-performing models score more than 60%, with Weights & Biases “Programmer O1 crosscheck5” currently leading the pack with a score of 64.6%. JetBrains itself calls Junie’s score “promising.”

But even with a lower score, JetBrains’ service may have an advantage because of its tight integration with the rest of the JetBrains IDE. The company notes that even as Junie helps developers get their work done, the human is always in control, even when delegating tasks to the agent.

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Donald Trump says he was “saved by God to make America great again”. Yet the best rebuttal to his presidency so far has come from a priest — the Episcopal bishop of Washington.

The Rt Rev Mariann Budde’s sermon on Tuesday went where business leaders and even Democratic politicians have struggled to go. While Trump sat a few metres away in the congregation, she asked him to show mercy to gay, lesbian and transgender people and to immigrants who are “scared” by his policies.

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land,” Budde said at the service. It wasn’t a fleeting rebuke to Trumpism; it was an eloquent 15-minute argument for a different politics.

Trump sat there, fidgeting then fuming in the National Cathedral. His vice-president JD Vance, a Catholic, dissented by whispering to his wife. Perhaps they weren’t expecting it. Because at the inauguration the previous day, they were given a very different religious reception.

Preachers described Trump’s return as a “miracle”. One pastor, Lorenzo Sewell, invoked Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in his honour.

In 2023, the charismatic Sewell was locked out of his Detroit church because its constitution had been changed and he was able to disenfranchise rank-and-file members. Shortly after the inauguration, he launched a crypto token, telling X users: “I need you to go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin.” The currency’s price then quickly plunged more than 90 per cent.

Who represents the Christian view of Trump? Is it Sewell with his pro-Trump, pro-prosperity talk of self-reliance, or the liberal Budde, who wants to speak for the marginalised? And, if Christianity can encompass both outcomes, is it much use for understanding and confronting Trump?

Budde backed up her address with references in the Bible. She is in line with Pope Francis, who has criticised Trump’s planned mass deportations of immigrants as a “disgrace”.

In contrast, pro-Trump spirituality often seems to rely on taking words from their context. Sewell stripped King’s dream of its intended meaning. (As for Sewell’s oratory, let me just say: the phrase “Free at last” is not meant to sum up what the audience feels when you stop talking.)

Or take the conflation of Christianity and growth. Another conservative speaker at the inauguration, Rabbi Ari Berman, suggested that George Washington had called faith and morality indispensable to “American prosperity”. In fact, Washington said they were essential to “political prosperity”. The context, back in 1796, was an appeal for national unity, and a warning not to trust in “the absolute power of an individual”. Trump would have fidgeted through that speech, too.

But pro-Trump pastors are accepted as a valid part of the church like any other. And the pews are with the president, too. According to Michael Emerson, a researcher on religion, practising Christians are now heavily Republican, because liberal Protestants and Catholics have disproportionately stopped going to church.

Last year Trump won around 60 per cent of the Christian vote, and more than 80 per cent of white evangelicals. He paid hush money to a porn star, has pledged to veto any federal abortion ban and he did not seem to place his hand on the Bible at the inauguration. But some white evangelicals see him as a useful vessel, someone who will allow them to steer the conversation.

Ironically, having invoked God multiple times in his inaugural address, Trump complained that Budde’s sermon had mixed politics and religion. One thing Sewell and Budde agree on is that you can’t keep politics out of Christianity. If the church decides simply to bless whoever is in power, it ends up compromised.

The question becomes: is religion downstream from politics? Will Trump’s supporters simply retrofit their faith on to their preferred politics, and his opponents do the opposite? The answer is probably: mostly, but not always. Surely there’s no point in listening to a preacher if you don’t think they’ll ever change your mind.

“When we know what is true, it’s incumbent upon us to speak the truth even when, especially when, it costs us,” Budde said. Her achievement shouldn’t be measured in how many people attend her next service. It should be measured in how many other people feel a duty to speak out against what they know is wrong.

henry.mance@ft.com

TRUMP and MELANIA tokens generate buzz, but PEPETO, with strong utility and growth, is quickly gaining momentum in the meme coin market.

Trump and Melania enter crypto, but Pepeto captures growing momentum

The cryptocurrency world was electrified as President-elect Donald Trump introduced the TRUMP token ahead of his inauguration. Initially capped at 200 million tokens, with plans to expand to 1 billion over the next three years, TRUMP saw a staggering $36.15 billion in 24-hour trading volume. 

Not long after, First Lady-to-be Melania Trump unveiled her own token, MELANIA, built on the Solana blockchain. Early investors have already seen massive returns, with TRUMP’s market cap surpassing $9 billion. However, critics are questioning the longevity of these political meme coins due to their heavy centralization and lack of utility.

Meanwhile, a new contender is stealing the spotlight: PEPETO, the god of frogs. Unlike TRUMP and MELANIA, which rely heavily on branding and hype, PEPETO combines narrative-driven appeal with robust utility and a rapidly growing community. With over $3.7 million raised in its presale and a social media following exceeding 55,000 users, PEPETO is proving to be a force to reckon with in the meme coin space.

TRUMP & MELANIA: Hype vs. sustainability?

TRUMP and MELANIA have used their ties to the Trump name to create buzz. Early whales have already capitalized, with one investor reportedly turning $12 million into $23.8 million within hours of TRUMP’s launch. However, concerns about centralization loom large, as 80% of TRUMP tokens are controlled by affiliated organizations, leading to skepticism about its long-term potential.

Why PEPETO is winning over analysts and investors

In stark contrast, PEPETO is gaining traction for its emphasis on utility and sustainability. Here’s what sets it apart:

• High Staking Rewards: With annual returns of 387%, PEPETO provides an unmatched opportunity for passive income.
• Cross-Chain Bridge: Pepeto’s technology enables seamless 30-second transfers across blockchains, reducing fees and delays.
• PepetoSwap Exchange: A zero-fee platform designed to streamline meme coin trading, eliminating liquidity issues and high costs.
• Community Governance: Through its DAO model, PEPETO empowers its community with decision-making power, fostering transparency and trust.
• Low Entry Price: Currently priced at just $0.000000105 in presale, PEPETO offers an affordable opportunity for early investors to join a high-potential project.

A thriving community and growing hype

Unlike the centralized dynamics of TRUMP and MELANIA, PEPETO thrives on grassroots support. Its community has surpassed 55,000 across platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram, with daily growth reflecting its increasing popularity. This strong foundation not only boosts its credibility but also highlights its potential as a leader in the meme coin space.

Whales are betting big on PEPETO

Whale trackers have reported significant accumulation of PEPETO tokens, a strong indicator of confidence from high-net-worth investors. While TRUMP faces volatility due to its hype-driven nature, PEPETO’s utility-first approach offers a more sustainable path to growth. Analysts believe its upcoming exchange listings and groundbreaking features position PEPETO as a game-changer.

The next big meme coin?

As TRUMP and MELANIA dominate headlines, PEPETO quietly builds a foundation for long-term success. With its presale nearing conclusion and the launch of PepetoSwap and exchange listings imminent, PEPETO is not just a meme coin — it’s a movement.

How to join the PEPETO movement

Getting started with PEPETO is simple:

1. Set Up a Wallet: Use MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or any Ethereum-compatible wallet.
2. Fund a Wallet: Add ETH, USDT, or BNB.
3. Connect to the Presale: Visit pepeto.io to purchase tokens.
4. Stake Tokens: Start earning staking rewards right away.

About PEPETO

PEPETO combines the fun of meme coins with real-world utility, including a zero-fee exchange, cross-chain bridge, and lucrative staking rewards. As the god of frogs, PEPETO is redefining the meme coin space for 2025 and beyond.

For more information on PEPETO, visit their website, X, or Telegram.

The official X account of the global electronic marketplace Nasdaq was apparently hacked and used to promote a fake meme coin named STONKS.

Blockchain data shows that the bogus token’s market cap skyrocketed to $80 million before eventually collapsing.

How the Scam Unfolded

According to various reports, the attackers took control of the Nasdaq account and linked it to a fake X profile, @nasdaqmeme, complete with a gold verified badge marking it as an affiliate.

They then made a post promoting the fake STONKS coin and retweeted it with the Nasdaq account, which has over 133,000 followers. The retweet and the apparent connection between the two accounts created a facade of credibility, duping unsuspecting investors into buying the token.

Within hours, STONK’s value soared 390 times its original price, with data from DEXscreener showing that the token reached a market capitalization of $80 million and trading volumes in excess of $185 million.

However, the cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise ended abruptly as its value plummeted to zero, leaving investors with huge losses. Some accounts suggest that the scammers walked away with at least $4 million after rugging the coin.

Interestingly, the fraudulent profile used in the con was a copycat of an existing Solana meme coin, STNK, with the social media handle @STONKS_SOL.

The legitimate STONKS team has warned the crypto community about the rip-off and announced plans to sue the sham project.

STNK was launched in April 2021 as the first-ever joke token on the Solana network. It is based on the “Stonks” meme created in 2017 by Henry Hooper and made famous by the Gamestop short squeeze saga on r/wallstreetbets.

Social Accounts Under Threat

The hacking incident sparked widespread reactions across the community, with many expressing disbelief at its audacity and sophistication. Crypto trader CRG described it as the “best grift” they had ever seen, while other users pointed out the alarming ease with which the fraudsters secured a verified affiliate badge.

At the time of this writing, Nasdaq had not commented on the incident, although the offending post has been deleted, and the @nasdaqmeme account has been suspended.

Incidents of bad actors taking over social media accounts to promote phony cryptocurrencies have been on the rise lately. Towards the end of last year, blockchain investigator ZachXBT exposed an elaborate scheme where hackers compromised 15 X accounts and used them to promote fake coins. The criminals reportedly made away with at least $500,000 from the operation.

In another incident, a different group of scammers targeted the social media accounts of celebrities, including singer Usher, rapper Wiz Khalifa, and actor Dean Norris, to push a slew of counterfeit tokens on Pump.fun, stealing as much as $3.5 million in the process.