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The World
President Biden invited to a White House meeting a group of Republican senators who are seeking a bipartisan deal on coronavirus relief. The group of Republican senators asked Biden to work with them on a $600 billion bipartisan coronavirus relief effort as Democrats prepared to move forward on a $1.9 trillion package without GOP support. Republicans said they would retain the $160 billion the Biden package includes to increase vaccinations and take other efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus, but strip or scale back other measures. (Axios, Wall Street Journal, GOP Letter)
Myanmar’s military has seized power in a coup, detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior members of the country’s ruling party after several days of rising tensions over the results of a recent election. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s 75-year-old state counsellor, President Win Myint and other members of the ruling National League for Democracy party were arrested at their residences in the capital Naypyidaw early on Monday. Later in the morning, Myanmar’s military said that it had taken control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year, handing power to Min Aung Hlaing, the military’s powerful commander-in-chief. The military’s power grab came hours before Myanmar’s newly elected parliament was due to meet for the first time since a November 8 election, the results of which the military has contested. (Financial Times)
Police have dispersed or detained hundreds of protesters against Covid-19 lockdowns in Hungary, Austria and Belgium as continuing quarantine regimes across Europe chafed against the economic and social toll of nearly a year of restrictions on business, travel and community life. The Israeli cabinet voted to extend the nationwide lockdown until Friday morning and keep the airport closed until Sunday. In the UK, a cabinet minister said the government can “absolutely guarantee” the flow of Pfizer-Biontech vaccines into Britain after Brussels backed down in an extraordinary row over supplies. Separately, Captain Sir Tom Moore, the 100-year-old Brit who raised almost £33m for the National Health Service, has been admitted to hospital with coronavirus. (The Guardian, Times of Israel, The Times, BBC News)
Thousands of Russians took part in unauthorized protests to demand the release of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. More than 5,100 people have been detained, a monitoring group says. In Moscow police closed metro stations and blocked off the city centre. (BBC News)
Taiwan said six Chinese fighter aircraft and a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, in an unusual admission of U.S. military activity. Tensions have spiked over the last week or so after Taiwan reported multiple Chinese fighters and bombers flying into the zone last weekend, in an area close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the northern part of the South China Sea. Meanwhile, greater cooperation to restrain China and North Korea should be the top priority for Japan's relations with the U.S. under President Joe Biden, according to a weekend Nikkei/TV Tokyo opinion poll. (Reuters, Nikkei Asian Review)
The Getty Foundation announced that 45 Southern California cultural and educational institutions will collectively receive more than $5 million in grants for dozens of exhibitions exploring the intersection of art and science. (Los Angeles Times)
25% of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job, a 10-percentage-point increase from December and the highest congressional approval rating since early in the pandemic. Approval of Congress has increased the most among Democrats, moving from 11% in December to 30% in January. Independents also rate Congress better -- showing an increase of nine points, from 16% to 25% -- while Republicans' level of support is essentially flat at 17%. (Gallup)
Economy
Large international corporations doing deals in Asia are considering excluding Hong Kong from legal contracts over concerns China’s tightening grip may impact rule of law in the territory, according to interviews with corporate advisers across the region. Senior lawyers at 10 large law firms in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore told the Financial Times they had seen a surge in queries from clients, mostly headquartered in the US and Japan, about whether to write Hong Kong out of governing law and arbitration clauses when conducting business in the financial hub or entering into joint ventures with Chinese and other Asian counterparties. (Financial Times)
Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that was wrongfooted by retail traders who drove up shares in GameStop and other companies it had bet against, lost 53% in January, according to people familiar with the firm’s results. The New York-based hedge fund sustained a $4.5bn fall in its assets from the end of last year to $8bn, even after a $2.75bn cash injection from Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel. (Financial Times)
A blank-cheque company backed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is in talks to merge with 23andMe, in a deal that would vault the genetics testing start-up on to public markets. The merger with Branson’s special purpose acquisition company, VG Acquisition, could value 23andMe at about $4bn. (Financial Times)
The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz: Benedict Evans, Andreessen Horowitz’s former in-house analyst, has mused over the years that “A16Z is a media company that monetizes through VC.” That observation becomes truer by the day. While there’s a lot of loose talk on Twitter about cutting out the media and “going direct” – publishing your own story to the world without the press as an intermediary – Andreessen Horowitz is really doing it, consciously and methodically. The firm’s strategy has dramatic implications for the future of media and the venture capital industry. This is the story of how Andreessen Horowitz disrupted the world of venture capital by cozying up to the media and then, how they purposefully threw that relationship away. (Newcomer)
Inside A16z’s Media Operations: Andreessen-Horowitz firm has developed a sophisticated podcast system. Its mission: becoming the go-to place to understand the future. The secret: great programming and a carefully crafted production process. (Monday Note)
Technology
Amazon’s Ring camera system partnered with more than 2,000 police and fire departments in the U.S., doubling the size of the controversial surveillance network in the past year. Figures published by Amazon showed that 1,189 departments in the US were added to the programme in 2020, with the total — including 305 fire departments — now at 2,014, with 62 having been added so far in 2021. (Financial Times)
Twitter and Facebook experiment with offloading content moderation, as Birdwatch and the Oversight Board bring new approaches to the same idea: shifting responsibility away from the platforms themselves. (OneZero)
Chromebooks just had their best year ever: Four times as many Chromebooks were sold in 2020 than in 2019. (The Verge)
How technologists originally got video to fit and and work on a device that fits in your pocket: The first iPhone was several years away, and “the whole idea of being able to watch video on a device that can sit in your pocket was super exciting,” Vivienne Sze recalls. Yet obstacles remained—most significantly, figuring out how to compress the video so that it was high quality, yet didn’t drain the device’s battery. To overcome this obstacle, Sze realized that she needed to cross the boundary between hardware and software, simultaneously developing more energy-efficient circuits and designing better algorithms to support those circuits. “If you do the two together, taking into consideration how you make the algorithm friendly for the hardware and how the hardware might affect the algorithm, you can do much better than each on its own,” Sze explains. Ultimately, this approach enabled her to build a system for low-power video compression. Now Sze is finding and teaching advanced ways to deploy the technology “in the real world,” including improving evaluation of patients with neurodegenerative diseases. (Slice of MIT)
Smart Links
Sports stocks outpace market in January as betting holds Investor Optimism. (Sportico)
Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi earns up to £123m a season. (BBC News)
Anonymous cell phone data can quantify behavioral changes for flu-like illnesses. (Emory Health Sciences)
Lab-grown wood could grow furniture in a lab — and in a desired shape — instead of in a forest. (Fast Company, Journal of Cleaner Production)
Which red wines are ready to drink now? (Financial Times)
2020 saw an unprecedented murder spike in major U.S. cities. (Statista)