In US papers - Pentagon, mergers, Macy's and Google

The New York Times has a lead article on collapsing US merger deals in 2016 so far. While last year set a record for the amount of money spent on corporate mergers -- 4.7 trillion -- this year is so far setting a very different record: the dollar amount of deals that have come undone, the famous paper writes. Since the beginning of January, 400 billion worth of corporate mergers have been withdrawn in the United States, almost three times the previous record for the same period, set in 2007, according to Dealogic, which analyzes such data. In the same paper, reporter John Markoff writes that the Pentagon is turning to Silicon Valley for the edge in Artificial Intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year.