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The World
The U.S. and British militaries were bombing more than a dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, in a massive retaliatory strike using warship-launched Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets, the U.S. said. The military targets included logistical hubs, air defense systems and weapons storage locations, officials said. President Biden said the series of strikes were meant to demonstrate that the U.S. and its allies “will not tolerate” the militant group’s ceaseless attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. (Los Angeles Times)
Oil prices jump more than 2% as U.S., Britain strike Iran-backed Houthis. (CNBC)
China warned Taiwanese voters that a victory for current frontrunner Lai Ching-te on Saturday “would pose a ‘severe danger’ to cross-Strait relations.” China's Taiwan Affairs Office urged voters to “make the right choice.” (DW)
Beijing has warned Washington “that it will send the ‘wrong signals’ to supporters of Taiwan independence if an unofficial delegation” visits Taiwan following the Saturday vote. (South China Morning Post)
Blinken to meet senior Chinese official ahead of Taiwan elections. (Reuters)
Taiwan bombarded with cyberattacks ahead of election (Politico)
The Pentagon Inspector General says “more than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision devices” that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by the Defense Department. However, the IG report “offers no evidence that any of the weapons have been misused.” (New York Times)
Calls to delay Pakistan’s February 8 election “threaten what is left of the country's fragile democracy, experts say, though many expect the polls will go ahead in the end.” The country’s Senate passed a resolution Friday calling for a postponement due to security concerns in the wake of the killing of six policemen by the Pakistani Taliban and the assassination of a Sunni religious leader last week. (Nikkei Asia)
Renewable energy worldwide grew at its fastest rate in the past 25 years in 2023, with China alone adding “enough to power nearly 51 million homes for a year.” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol “said renewable energy is on course to increase by 2 1/2 times by 2030.” But that would still “fall short of the tripling that nations agreed on at last month’s annual United Nations climate talks in Dubai.” (Associated Press)
The Biden Administration will distribute $623 million in funding “to boost the number of electric vehicle charging points in the U.S., amid concerns that the transition to zero-carbon transportation isn’t keeping pace with goals to tackle the climate crisis.” The funding will go to programs in 22 states and add 7,500 new EV chargers nationwide. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said, “We are building the charging network to win the EV race.” (The Guardian)
Half of the new funding “will go toward community projects — like near schools, parks, and office buildings — that will deploy EV chargers and hydrogen fuel infrastructure,” while the remainder “will go towards creating dense networks of chargers” along highways. (Wired)
Hertz is selling 20,000 used EVs due to high repair costs (Ars Technica)
People with health insurance “may now represent the majority of debtors American hospitals struggle to collect from, according to medical billing analysts.” This would be a major change “from just a few years ago, when people with health insurance represented only about one in 10 bills hospitals considered ‘bad debt.’” (The Guardian)
A new CDC report finds that “reliable access to transportation can make a difference in getting health care, especially for people who are older, have lower income, and don’t have insurance.” In 2022, “5.7% of U.S. adults didn’t have reliable transportation for daily living, with women (6.1%) more likely than men (5.3%) to lack it.” There were differences by race and ethnicity, as well as by geography. (STAT)
Economy
The U.S. CPI rose 0.3% in December for an annual inflation rate of 3.4%, up from the annual 3.1% rate one month earlier. The numbers “Excluding volatile food and energy costs, though, so-called core prices rose just 0.3 percent month over month, unchanged from November’s increase.” (Associated Press)
All US Regions End 2023 With Inflation Below 4% (Bloomberg)
10-year Treasury yield rises after higher-than-expected December CPI (CNBC)
'Remarkable' surge in auto insurance costs fans US inflation. (Reuters)
The Biden Administration is focusing on the deal to sell U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel, “with the fate of the faded industrial icon pushed into an election-year debate over how to rebuild American manufacturing might.” Lawyers for both companies “have consulted several times with Treasury Department officials” amid concerns that President Biden might seek to classify the sale as a national security threat. (Wall Street Journal)
China exported 4.1 million cars in 2023, a 63.7% annual increase. The surge “may propel China past Japan as the world’s number one exporter of cars. Japan exported 3.6 million cars in the first 11 months of the year, with a final tally expected on Jan. 31.” (Associated Press)
Remote Workers Are Losing Out on Promotions: New data, though, shows fully remote workers are falling behind in one of the most-prized and important aspects of a career: getting promoted. Over the past year, remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than people who worked in an office, either full-time or on a hybrid basis, according to an analysis of two million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Remote workers also get less mentorship, a gap that’s especially pronounced for women, research shows. Of employees working full time in an office or on a hybrid basis, 5.6% received promotions at their organization in 2023, according to Live Data Technologies, versus 3.9% of those who worked remotely. (Wall Street Journal)
Technology
“The stock market has a new, but familiar, monarch.” Microsoft’s “AI-powered stock rally has made the software giant the largest U.S. company by market value, surpassing Apple for the first time since November 2021.” Microsoft’s market value grew to about $2.87 trillion on Thursday morning, while Apple fell “just below that threshold.” (Wall Street Journal)
China’s “near-monopoly on the solar-energy market has prompted the U.S. and allies to step up the search for workarounds,” and engineers think a “solar cell that looks and feels like camera film” could be their breakthrough. Perovskite solar cells, invented in Japan, do not use silicon and instead use minerals forming a crystal structure that “can be used in a device to turn the sun’s rays into electricity.” (Wall Street Journal)
The new World Economic Forum Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 report finds that “the number of organizations that maintain minimum viable cyber resilience is down 30% compared to last year.” Just 15% “of all organizations are optimistic about cyber skills and education significantly improving in the next two years.” (World Economic Forum)
While generative AI’s earliest applications in medicine “have largely focused on curing not patients, but the plague of productivity physicians lose to digital documentation,” new research suggests that “large language models like ChatGPT could benefit both patients and providers: by automatically extracting a patient’s social needs” like housing, transportation, financial stability, and community support “from reams of text in their clinical records.” (STAT)
“Google is laying off hundreds of people working on its voice-activated Google Assistant software and eliminating a similar number of roles on its knowledge and information product teams.” In October, Google said it was using generative AI to build a new version of Google Assistant. (Semafor)
“There may be more” job cuts to come, “and it’s possible that Google is attempting to spread out the bad news instead of having it hit all at once.” (The Verge)
“Netflix is seeing strong growth of its advertising-based plan, having recently eclipsed 23 million global monthly active users.” That is more than eight million active users more than “a little over two months ago.” In October, Netflix said ad-tier subscriptions “accounted for approximately 30% of all new signups in the 12 counties where it has launched the platform.” (Variety)
Smart Links
Covid kills nearly 10,000 in a month as holidays fuel spread, WHO says (Washington Post)
Bitcoin ETFs Take Wall Street by Storm With Historic Debut. (Bloomberg)
Chesapeake to become top US natural gas producer with $7.4 billion deal for Southwestern (Reuters)
Amazon’s cashierless checkout is coming to hospitals (CNBC)
State-backed hackers are exploiting new Ivanti VPN zero-days — but no patches yet (TechCrunch)
How AI Replaced the Metaverse as Zuckerberg’s Top Priority (Bloomberg)