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The World
Russia offers mixed signals on Ukraine: Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had withdrawn some troops from the Ukrainian border and was open to renewed talks to end a standoff with the West, but President Biden said an invasion remained “distinctly possible.” Putin’s comments were part of a recent string of mixed messages from the Kremlin and capped a day of diplomacy and military maneuvering that left Western leaders unsure of his intentions. Roughly 130,000 heavily armed Russian soldiers remained positioned around Ukraine, and U.S. and European officials said they had seen no evidence of a significant drawdown of forces. (Wall Street Journal)
Ukrainian defense ministry websites went down due to what the government claimed was a massive cyberattack, as Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said the websites were down, and that it was likely being targeted by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. A separate Ukrainian agency, the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, said the website of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had also been attacked. (Politico)
L.A. County will lift its outdoor mask mandate today, as Coachella and Stagecoach festivals drop all vaccination and masking requirements for entry. Disneyland will lift its indoor mask mandate for vaccinated visitors starting tomorrow. (Los Angeles Times)
Coronavirus Hong Kong: Xi Jinping urged local government to take ‘main responsibility’ in containing fifth wave and placing top priority on stability and people’s lives. ‘Authorities must mobilize all forces and resources that can be mobilized, take all necessary measures and protect Hong Kong people’s lives and health,’ Xi was quoted as saying in pro-Beijing media. (South China Morning Post)
Éric Zemmour, the far-right pundit standing in the French presidential election, claims to have won the backing of Donald Trump after the two men spoke on the phone on Tuesday. Zemmour’s campaign said that the pair had a “long and friendly” conversation on migration, law and order and the economy. The announcement came as two polls showed Zemmour edging into third place in the election race ahead of Valérie Pécresse, 54, the mainstream centre-right Republicans candidate. (The Times)
Democrats hoping to resurrect the party’s economic agenda are facing a problem: Sen. Joe Manchin’s goal for raising tax rates clashes with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to doing so. In a 50-50 Senate with Republicans unanimously opposed to the effort, the party will have to try to reconcile the pair’s divergent positions to earn both their votes for a scaled-down version of President Biden’s economic agenda ahead of this year’s midterm elections. “Why can’t we just get a good solid tax plan that works?” Manchin said to The Wall Street Journal. (Wall Street Journal)
The U.S. shorelines are projected to face an additional foot of rising seas over the next three decades, intensifying the threat of flooding and erosion to coastal communities across the country, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report. Human-caused climate change, driven mostly by the burning of fossil fuels, has accelerated global sea level rise to the fastest rate in more than 3,000 years. The report by NOAA and other federal agencies — updating a study from 2017 — predicts that ocean levels along U.S. coasts will increase as much by 2050 as they did over the past century. (Washington Post)
A woman of mixed race appears to be the third person ever to be cured of H.I.V., using a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood that opens up the possibility of curing more people of diverse racial backgrounds than was previously possible. Cord blood is more widely available than the adult stem cells used in the bone marrow transplants that cured the previous two patients, and it does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient. Most donors in registries are of Caucasian origin, so allowing for only a partial match has the potential to cure dozens of Americans who have both H.I.V. and cancer each year. The woman, who also had leukemia, received cord blood to treat her cancer. It came from a partially matched donor, instead of the typical practice of finding a bone marrow donor of similar race and ethnicity to the patient’s. She also received blood from a close relative to give her body temporary immune defenses while the transplant took. (New York Times)
Economy
Inflation watch:
Rising prices for lumber are once again adding to worries of soaring home prices, as sawmills still can’t keep up with demand, wildfires wrecked inventory and tariffs doubled on Canadian lumber. Prices are 22% higher than in early December and they’ve risen 34% this month so far. At about $1,000 per thousand board feet of framing lumber, the price of an average new single-family home increases by more than $18,600. (Axios)
Aluminum hovers near a 13-year high as trade weighs Ukraine crisis, while the U.S. sits on the doorstep of $4-per-gallon gasoline for the first time in nearly 14 years. (Bloomberg, Axios)
China inflation: Cost of food falls, while factory-gate prices hit lowest in 6 months. China’s official CPI rose by 0.9% in January from a year earlier, down from 1.5% in December. China’s producer price index rose by 9.1% in January, down from a rise of 10.3% in December, and to the lowest level since July. (South China Morning Post)
With supply plunging, Twin Cities home sales declined last month and prices rose. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Burger King stripped its most famous sandwich, the Whopper, from discount menus and will raise menu prices again this year as to offset higher costs. (Reuters)
Supplier prices jumped last month as U.S. inflation surged. (Wall Street Journal)
Airbnb says surge in early summer bookings a sign of travel recovery: Airbnb expects bookings to rebound to pre-pandemic levels for the first time in 1Q22, as concerns over the Omicron coronavirus variant have “quickly dissipated” and travelers become more comfortable getting away. Bookings for the peak travel months were 25% higher than at the same point in 2019. “In the US and Europe in particular, we are seeing lead time for bookings made in Q1 2022 return to pre-pandemic levels,” CEO Brian Chesky wrote in a letter to investors. Latin America also had strong growth, though the Asia-Pacific region was still lagging behind. Airbnb’s optimistic outlook about the travel recovery follows similar sentiment from American Express, which last month said it had noted travel bookings in January rose 44% compared with the same period in 2019. (Financial Times)
The 4Q21 results also demonstrate how resilient Airbnb’s business has proved to be. In the spring of 2020, things looked dicey. Airbnb had to borrow money and lay people off, but it quickly bounced back. International travel may not have recovered to its pre-pandemic levels, but Airbnb’s business has grown steadily nonetheless. One reason for that is the rise of remote work, which has made it possible for people to go and stay somewhere far from their homes for a few weeks using Airbnb, as executives have highlighted. It turns out, then, that Airbnb is a better pandemic stock play than Zoom Video. It has also proved a better business than Uber, another member of the “sharing economy” generation of startups from a decade ago. (The Information)
The Great Resignation has widened the gap between the supply and demand of tech workers, and has made employers resort to extreme incentives to recruit as many of them as possible. In IT alone, 31% of workers actively sought out a new job between July and September last year. This is the highest among all industries, according to analysis from Gartner. Meanwhile, data from training company Global Knowledge found that 76% of global IT decisionmakers are dealing with critical skills gaps on their teams. Multiply that problem across other tech roles, and it’s clear that the skills shortage is likely to worsen before it gets better. (Wired)
Despite all the talk of the tech industry’s widening gap between job openings and talent, college graduates are still not securing jobs at the rate of their pre-pandemic predecessors. (Protocol)
In tech, job openings were up 34% at the end of 2021 from the beginning of the year, but this hasn’t translated into more positions for entry-level employees who are still working to gain experience.
The younger cohort is now taking over the number of job applicants in the market. By late 2021, job seekers ages 18-24 had surpassed job seekers ages 25-34.
One bright spot: 29% more new college grads were hired in 2021 than the year prior, though they are still not being hired at the same levels as the class of 2019.
Oil’s vault above $95 a barrel is tempting US shale energy executives to fire up drilling rigs in search of more crude, risking the wrath of Wall Street in the process. A sector once known for debt-fueled production binges that made the US the world’s biggest oil supplier has largely embraced financial discipline, with executives pledging never again to outspend cash flow and burn through capital on costly projects. But the rebound of oil markets to the highest levels since 2014 is challenging that resolve. (Financial Times)
Technology
Mark Zuckerberg wants his employees to be known as ‘Metamates’. (Wall Street Journal)
DoorDash negotiated new terms with McDonald’s restaurants to give priority to speed at the expense of commission rates. DoorDash agreed to lower its commission base for McDonald’s U.S. restaurants, but it will charge them higher commissions starting next year for orders that keep a delivery driver waiting. A time clock apparently will begin when a DoorDash courier is roughly 80 feet away from the restaurant. Commission rates start to rise after just over four minutes and climb further for each incremental minute up to over seven minutes. All told, those mere minutes will dictate commission fee swings of more than 6 percentage points for McDonald’s restaurants. (Wall Street Journal)
South Korea to allow delivery robots on public roads in 2023. Delivery app Woowa and 7-Eleven will start offering such services on trial basis. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Google rolls out Docs updates, including a pageless format announced in May 2021, AI-powered summaries, and Maps embedded previews. (9to5Google)
Got a computer collecting dust? Google’s new software could bring it back to life: Google announced early access to a new version of Chrome OS called Chrome OS Flex. The new version of Chrome OS, designed for businesses and schools, is designed to run on old PCs and Macs. The operating system can be installed “within minutes,” according to Google’s blog post. (Washington Post, The Verge)
Fake faces created by AI look more trustworthy than real people: Synthetic human faces are so convincing they can fool even trained observers, and they may be highly effective for use in scams. (New Scientist)
TSMC's first US chip plant is three to six months behind schedule due to labor shortages and difficulty obtaining licenses. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Akamai says it will acquire cloud hosting company Linode, which positions itself as an AWS alternative for SMBs and independent developers. (Venture Beat)
VW guns for Tesla with homegrown talent: German car giant Volkswagen is investing billions to boost its software prowess, where it lags Tesla. The strategy involves hiring the best minds, but software talent is hard to come by. VW believes it has a solution. (Deutsche Welle)
Nearly a quarter of Americans get news from podcasts: Younger adults are more likely than older adults to at least sometimes get news from podcasts. One-in-three adults ages 18 to 29 say they at least sometimes get news from podcasts, compared with 12% of adults 65 and older. 29% of adults ages 30 to 49 get news from podcasts at least sometimes; 18% of adults ages 50 to 64 (18%) say they do the same. Men and women get news from podcasts at similar rates (25% and 21%, respectively). Those with more formal education and higher incomes are more likely to get news at least sometimes from podcasts. U.S. adults with at least a college degree are more likely to get news at least sometimes from podcasts than those with a high school education or less (28% vs. 17%, respectively). (Pew Research Center)
Smart Links
Facebook rebrands News Feed to just Feed after more than 15 years. (The Verge)
ViacomCBS is renaming itself Paramount Global. (The Information)
Rising popularity of VR headsets sparks 31% rise in insurance claims. (The Guardian)
Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, Wanda Sykes to host Oscars. (Variety)
A new low for global democracy: More pandemic restrictions damaged democratic freedoms in 2021. (The Economist)