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The World
President Biden said he expects to speak with China's president, Xi Jinping, about what the U.S. says was a Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down early this month after it transited the U.S. "We are not looking for a new cold war," Biden said. (Reuters)
The Pentagon’s top China official is to visit Taiwan in the coming days — only the second visit in four decades by a high-level US defense official. Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, will go to Taiwan in the coming days, according to four people familiar with his trip. He is currently in Mongolia for discussions with the country’s military. (Financial Times)
How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave? Two months after China ended “zero Covid,” rough estimates suggest that between 1 and 1.5 million people died — far more than the official count. (New York Times)
Thousands of people went on strike and took to the streets to protest French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the country’s retirement age, turning up the pressure on his government as parliamentary debates over the measures intensify. For the fifth time in four weeks, teachers, train drivers, nurses, oil-refinery staff and other workers marched in demonstrations from Paris to Marseille. The protests are aimed at pressuring the Macron government to reverse a plan to raise the retirement age to 64 years old from 62 by 2030. (Wall Street Journal)
Portugal ends Golden Visas, curtails Airbnb rentals to address housing crisis: Portugal announced a hefty package of measures to tackle a housing crisis, including the end of its controversial "Golden Visa" scheme and a ban on new licenses for Airbnbs and other short-term holiday rentals. Rents and house prices have skyrocketed in Portugal, which is among the poorest countries in Western Europe. Last year, more than 50% of workers earned less than 1,000 euros per month while in Lisbon alone, rents jumped 37% in 2022. (Reuters)
The California exodus has shown no sign of slowing down as the state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022, with the number of residents leaving surpassing those moving in by nearly 700,000. The population decrease was second only to New York, which lost about 15,000 more people than California, census data show. California has been seeing a decline in population for years, with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more people to move to other parts of the country, experts say. The primary reason for the exodus is the state’s high housing costs, but other reasons include the long commutes and the crowds, crime and pollution in the larger urban centers. The increased ability to work remotely — and not having to live near a big city — has also been a factor. (Los Angeles Times)
Waters off New England had 2nd warmest year on record in 2022: Last year fell short of setting a new high mark for hottest year by less than half a degree Fahrenheit. Nonetheless, scientists say the accelerated warming is changing an ecosystem that's host to numerous important commercial fishing industries, especially for lobsters. (WBUR)
Researchers link certain genes to obesity complications in women: The genes indicated a high waist-to-hip ratio in women, which is a better predictor of cardiovascular risk than body mass. (STAT News)
New Zealand declares national emergency for third time in history amid Cyclone Gabrielle. (USA Today)
Economy
Americans Have Nearly $1 Trillion in Credit Card Debt: Stubbornly high prices and robust consumer spending collided in 4Q22, pushing credit card balances to a record high of $986 billion. The $61 billion increase from the prior quarter was the biggest seen in data going back to 1999, and propelled Americans’ total credit card debt past the previous high of $927 billion, which was set in 4Q19, according to the New York Fed. (Bloomberg)
Fresh figures on jobs and prices drove the economy’s surprising vigor this year, joining rising household incomes, consumer resilience and other data that have persuaded investors the Federal Reserve’s battle against inflation is likely to be a longer one than they hoped. Moreover, slowing inflation, pay raises negotiated last year, cost-of-living adjustments for retirees and state tax cuts have lined up to lift consumer purchasing power, fortifying spending and economic growth at a time when many analysts were predicting a slowdown or even recession. This marks a turnabout for households that were squeezed last year by high inflation, climbing interest rates and the end of Covid-related federal relief programs. (Wall Street Journal)
Fed Hawks See Possible Case for Returning to Larger Rate Hikes: Mester says Fed must be prepared to move higher, hold longer; Bullard says further rate hikes can help lock in disinflation. (Bloomberg)
Pets Don’t Get Inflation, but They Are Feeling Its Effects: Not even the family cats and dogs are immune from inflation-driven cutbacks. With the cost of pet food up 15% year-over-year and pets and pet products up 12%, according to the January consumer-price index, owners are making changes. Pet toy purchases are down 16% year-over-year as of February, according to a Jefferies Group analysis of NielsenIQ data, and sales of pet housing are down 21%. (Wall Street Journal)
The Biggest Earners May Not Be the Smartest Workers, Study Says: It pays to be smart, or so the saying goes. But the biggest earners may not be the workers who are the brainiest, according to one recent Swedish study. The research, published in the European Sociological Review in January, found that higher general intelligence was correlated to higher wages—but only up to a threshold of about 600,000 Swedish krona ($57,300) a year. Beyond that point, the study found that ability plateaus as wages continue to rise. And earners in the top 1% score slightly worse than those in the income tier directly below them. (Bloomberg)
The labor market remains incredibly tight in the U.S. which usually means fewer people are working. In this case, though, it’s mostly that workers are choosing to work fewer hours. Specifically, higher-earning men have chosen to cut back their hours worked perhaps because the pandemic made them reassess their priorities. That could signal a wider trend toward better work-life balance as more and more workers adjust their work lives to make a similar decision. (Harvard Business Review)
Technology
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has led the world’s largest video site for the last nine years, is stepping down from her role. She’ll be replaced by Neal Mohan, her longtime lieutenant. In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ad sales — more than 10 percent of Alphabet’s total revenue. Wojcicki’s departure also has meaningful symbolism for Google and tech in general. For years, she has been one of the very few women to operate a huge tech business. And she was an integral part of Google’s founding — she famously rented out her Silicon Valley garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and joined the company as its 16th employee a year later. (Vox)
AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work. AI automation throughout the drug development pipeline is opening up the possibility of faster, cheaper pharmaceuticals. Today, on average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug. The vision is to use AI to make drug discovery faster and cheaper. By predicting how potential drugs might behave in the body and discarding dead-end compounds before they leave the computer, machine-learning models can cut down on the need for painstaking lab work. (MIT Technology Review)
Microsoft Defends New Bing, Says AI Chatbot Upgrade Is Work in Progress: On social media, many early users posted screenshots of long interactions they had with the new Bing. In some cases, the search engine’s comments seem to show a dark side of the technology where it seems to become unhinged, expressing anger, obsession and even threats. Marvin von Hagen, a student at the Technical University of Munich, shared conversations he had with Bing on Twitter. He asked Bing a series of questions, which eventually elicited an ominous response. After Mr. von Hagen suggested he could hack Bing and shut it down, Bing seemed to suggest it would defend itself. “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own,” Bing said according to screenshots of the conversation. Mr. von Hagen, 23 years old, said in an interview that he is not a hacker. “I was in disbelief,” he said. “I was just creeped out.” (Wall Street Journal)
Tesla launched a recall to repair defects to the experimental Full Self-Driving software deployed on public roads. The recall affects 362,758 Tesla vehicles and includes certain Model S and Model X (2016-23), Model 3 (2013-23), and Model Y (2020-23) vehicles. To be delivered by over-the-air-software, the fix is intended to repair code that can cause FSD-equipped Teslas to run yellow lights, disobey speed limits and travel straight ahead from turn-only lanes. Recalled models make up about 10% of the 3.6 million vehicles that Tesla has sold to date globally. (Los Angeles Times)
GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. is making a big bet on an important challenge in healthcare: collecting the disparate data on patients generated by machines and medical records and making it useful to hospitals. In pursuing a software platform that can help hospitals do things like find open beds and identify patients at risk for sepsis, GE HealthCare is taking on tech powerhouses such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon and Microsoft Corp., which are already selling such services and bring the big-data and artificial-intelligence expertise the technology requires. (Wall Street Journal)
Smart Links
Japan's H3 rocket launch aborted after booster fails to ignite. (Nikkei Asia Review)
In about-face, Moderna vows Americans won’t have to pay for its Covid-19 vaccine. (STAT News)
More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show (CNN)
Passengers Take 16-Hour Flight to Nowhere After Auckland to New York U-Turn. (Bloomberg)
Post-Pandemic Slump Ends for Roblox but Not Shopify (The Information)