Bloomberg As Japan’s second female astronaut to fly up in the Space Shuttle Discovery, Naoko Yamazaki didn’t expect to spend a quarter of her time dusting, feeding mice and doing other menial jobs. It can cost more than $430 million a year to keep an astronaut in orbit, according to three-year-old startup called Gitai Inc. It’s only possible to keep …

Bloomberg Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp are in firing line as Europe’s leading privacy watchdog for US tech giants edges closer to delivering its first major sanctions under the region’s tough data-protection rules. The Irish Data Protection Commission said on May 22 that it finalized a draft decision linked to a data breach at Twitter and has asked its …

Bloomberg In recent months, Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon.com Inc., has been meeting with talent agencies and producers to discuss acquiring potential new podcast projects—or, in the terminology that Audible prefers, “Audible Originals.” Audible is offering anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per show, more than every competitor except Spotify Technology SA. …