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The World
U.S. jets shoot down fourth object in eight days, unprecedented in peacetime. (Los Angeles Times)
What’s Going On Up There? Theories but No Answers in Shootdowns of Mystery Craft. The U.S. and Canada are investigating three unidentified flying objects shot down over North America in the past three days. Militaries have adjusted radars to try to spot more incursions. Pentagon and intelligence officials are trying to make sense of three unidentified flying objects over Alaska, Canada and Michigan that U.S. fighter jets shot down with missiles on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The latest turn in the aerial show taking place in the skies above North America comes after a helter-skelter weekend involving what at times seemed like an invasion of unidentified flying objects. There are two big questions around the episodes: What were the craft? And why does the United States appear to be seeing more suddenly, and shooting down more? (New York Times)
US Hasn’t Ruled Out Alien Origins for Latest Objects Shot Down: The US general in charge of NORAD said he hasn’t ruled out any possibilities on the source of three objects shot from the skies over the US and Canada — including that they might be of extraterrestrial origins. General Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, made the comment when asked Sunday if the US had excluded the possibility that the objects shot down over Alaska, Canada and Michigan were “aliens or extraterrestrials.” “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out,” VanHerck told a briefing. “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” (Bloomberg)
Taiwan reveals Chinese military balloons fly ‘very frequently’ into its airspace: Taiwan has observed dozens of Chinese military balloon flights in its airspace in recent years, far more than previously known, adding to concerns that Beijing could be preparing for an attack on the country. “They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago,” said a senior Taiwanese official. Another person briefed on the matter said such incursions were happening on average once a month. Other countries in the region, including Japan and the Philippines, have observed balloon incursions into their airspace, but their governments have given little detail. (Financial Times)
Citing security risks, US states move to bar Chinese land purchases and projects with China ties. Virginia governor nixes a US$3.5 billion battery plant, and 2,500 new jobs for his state, because Ford Motors has a Chinese partner on the project. Legislative bans on Chinese land ownership, and in some cases even real estate, are pending in three states, and others have limited farmland purchases. (South China Morning Post)
Iran has used boats and a state-owned airline to smuggle new types of advanced long-range armed drones to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine, sources inside the Middle Eastern country have revealed. At least 18 of the drones were delivered to Vladimir Putin’s navy after Russian officers and technicians made a special visit to Tehran in November, where they were shown a full range of Iran’s technologies. The disclosures demonstrate the increasing closeness between Iran and Russia. (The Guardian)
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni didn’t paper over her contempt for the French President this past week – and Emmanuel Macron made clear that the feeling was mutual. The spat took place on Thursday after Volodymyr Zelenskiy met Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Ukrainian leader’s request for dinner at the presidential Elysée Palace. Meloni, who was not informed about the dinner ahead of time – or offered a seat at the table – characterized the meeting as “inappropriate,” prompting Macron to retort that France and Germany have a “special role” in supporting Ukraine. (Bloomberg)
Toll from Turkey-Syria quake tops 34,000; U.N. says it ‘failed’ Syria: Nearly a week after the Feb. 6 temblors, rescue efforts in several areas shifted to recovery missions. More than 1.1 million people were displaced in Turkey. An untold number lay buried under the rubble. In Syria, a scarcity of excavators left people desperately digging for loved ones on their own. Across quake-destroyed areas, the enormity of the needs was hard to comprehend. “We have not seen suffering and devastation of this scale in over a decade,” Johan Mooij, the response director for World Vision Syria, said in a statement. “The impact is so enormous … it could take a generation for survivors to recover.” (Washington Post)
Amnesty in Turkey for Construction Violations Is Scrutinized After Quake: Survivors and building experts say poor construction most likely exacerbated the scale of the earthquake’s destruction. (New York Times)
For Fear or Money, Consumer Giants Are Staying in Russia. It’s been nearly a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, but shoppers in Moscow can still get ahold of Activia yogurt and Oral-B electric toothbrushes and L’Oréal serums. Some products are left over from the days before President Vladimir Putin sent troops across the border, but many goods continue to be supplied by American and European companies with outposts in the pariah state. And should these companies change their mind about staying in the face of mounting legal and reputational risks, they now have another challenge: the Kremlin is making it more expensive to leave. (Bloomberg)
Health workers and their supporters rallied in central Madrid, accusing the right-wing regional government of trying to destroy the public health system in the Spanish capital. More than 250,000 people took part in the demonstration, the government said, while organizers put the turnout at close to a million. Demonstrators filled the downtown Plaza Cibeles area, chanting and waving flags. Many carried homemade signs with messages like "The right to health is a human right. Defend the health service." (Deutsche Welle)
Economy
Investors are betting on a longer period of higher interest rates as they begin to accept the message from US Fed officials that more time is needed to cool inflation in the face of a resilient labour market. Pricing in the futures market shows that investors expect rates to peak slightly above 5 per cent in July, with only one interest rate cut by year-end. As recently as last week, they had been expecting a peak of around 5 per cent in May, with two interest rate cuts by the end of 2023. The shift came after a blockbuster employment report which showed the labour market surged by half a million jobs in January. (Financial Times)
Goldman CEO tells partners he should have cut jobs earlier: David Solomon told a private gathering of Goldman Sachs’ top executives that he had erred by not cutting jobs earlier in 2022, according to people familiar with the remarks. Speaking to about 400 Goldman partners at a closed-door meeting in Miami this week, the chief executive said he took responsibility for being slow to reduce headcount and pare back investment in new projects when it became apparent a significant business slowdown would happen. (Financial Times)
Singapore revised its economic growth rate for 2022 to 3.6% on the year, down from the preliminary estimate of 3.8% amid weaker external demand. Last year's growth came in well below the 8.9% recorded for 2021. (Nikkei Asia Review)
The number of Americans back in offices has been steadily climbing since the height of the pandemic. But it's starting to fall back down, per LinkedIn data. The big picture: It's a sign that the balance between remote and in-person work will continue to oscillate with the times. What's happening: Americans who have the option of working from home might be doing so to avoid paying for public transit or gas as the economy tightens, says George Anders, senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. And the recent winter storms and cold snaps could be deterring people to trudge forward with daily commutes. There are also people who have recently been hired for fully in-person jobs who discovered upon joining that onsite attendance five days a week isn't necessary. So they've slipped into hybrid work, Anders says. (Axios)
Remote Work Is Costing Manhattan More Than $12 Billion a Year. (Bloomberg)
Technology
Amazon is slowly dismantling Tony Hsieh’s version of Zappos, more than two years after the famed entrepreneur’s death. Zappos laid off more than 300 employees last month, or about 20% of the Las Vegas-based company’s workforce, according to people familiar with the layoffs and a Zappos memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Zappos cuts came as part of broader layoffs at Amazon that are expected to eliminate more than 18,000 employees, which the Journal reported will affect roughly 5% of its corporate ranks. They are also the latest in a series of moves by Zappos’s longtime parent company that have largely unraveled Mr. Hsieh’s legacy, people familiar with the companies said. (Wall Street Journal)
Tonal, a celebrity-backed home fitness startup that saw its valuation balloon to $1.6 billion in 2021, has explored options including a sale, two people familiar with the matter said. Tonal—an even more upmarket alternative to Peloton—burned through cash last year after spending heavily on hiring, opening bricks-and-mortar showrooms and marketing, including an ad last year featuring tennis star Serena Williams. (The Information)
How GDPR Changed European Companies’ Tech Stacks. As companies adapt their IT infrastructure to deal with new privacy regulations, they are coming up against a tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency. Highly integrated technologies facilitate the exchange and use of customer data. The problem is that these very interdependencies are an obstacle on the path toward compliance. Their efficiency has become a liability. That raises an interesting paradox. Can companies achieve competitive advantage by deploying less integrated technologies? To explore this, the authors of this article conducted a large-scale empirical study of 400 e-commerce firms to understand the implications of the tension between efficiency and flexibility on firm performance in response to GDPR. They found that firms that had built their websites for efficiency, electing tightly integrated services from closely linked suppliers, suffered disproportionately when GDPR came into force. In contrast, companies that deployed new combinations of technologies not extensively used before performed much better. (Harvard Business Review)
Expanding into financial services is one of Apple Inc.’s biggest growth opportunities. But it’s also one of the most challenging. The company’s new initiatives have suffered engineering and technical setbacks that have led to slow progress and missed deadlines. Over the past eight months, the tech giant has announced at least two new features: a “buy now, pay later”-style service and a savings account program that will be tied to the Wallet app. The former, called Apple Pay Later, was introduced in June and was set to launch last September. The latter, meanwhile, was unveiled in October and was supposed to be delivered many weeks ago. (Bloomberg)
The number of new, original scripted series hit a record high in 2022, following a slower growth period during the pandemic, thanks to production delays. In total, 599 original scripted television series were produced last year, up 7% from 2021. That number has grown nearly 3x since 2010. (Axios)
Smart Links
Google Miscalculates Stock Severance, Apologizes to Laid-Off Workers (The Information)
BBC head under pressure over loan to ex-PM Boris Johnson (Deutsche Welle)
AI comes to expense reports (TechCrunch)
Keeping track of all the new AI chatbots from Google, Bing, Baidu, and others (Semafor)