For a moment, Donald Trump finally seemed to be on the verge of real economic populism. The president announced last week that his administration would be instituting a 'most favored nation' policy that would peg drug costs in the United States to the much lower prices paid in other developed countries. 'Some prescription-drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90 percent,' he declared. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., picking up on the horseshoe-theory dynamic, observed, 'I have a couple of kids who are big Bernie Sanders fans. And when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes, because they thought this is never going to happen in our lifetime.' Those tears might have been premature. When the text of Trump's executive order became available, the actual policy turned out to be very different from what the president had claimed. In fact, it wasn't really a policy at all. If the president were serious about solving America's drug-cost crisis, he could choose from a long list of options. Instead, he seems content blaming foreign countries and hoping for the best....

The announcement, which was made at Microsoft's Build 2025 conference on Monday, comes as MCP gains steam in the AI industry. Earlier this year, both OpenAI and Google said they would support MCP in their respective AI products. MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments. The protocol enables developers to build two-way connections between data sources and AI-powered applications, such as chatbots. Microsoft and GitHub say that they'll deliver 'broad first-party support' for MCP across their platforms and services, including Microsoft Azure and Windows 11. For example, in the next few months, Windows will gain MCP integrations that allow developers to expose the functionality of apps to MCP-enabled models. 'Developers will be able to wrap desired features and capabilities in their apps as MCP servers and make them available ['] for Windows,' explains Microsoft in press materials provided to TechCrunch. 'This will include Windows system functionalities like File System, Windowing, and Windows Subsystem for Linux as MCP servers for [models] to interact with.'...