Flagship

Biden losing patience with Bibi

The U.S.-Israel relationship is becoming increasingly strained due to the planned assault of a dense Gazan town and disagreements over post-war governance of the territory. The U.S. opposes Israel’s full-scale invasion of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering, and President Joe Biden has reportedly used expletives in private to refer to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel publicly rejected any possibility of a two-state solution Thursday, following reports that the U.S. is helping draft a proposal that would set a timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The disagreements may prompt the U.S. to shift its Israel strategy, but analysts broadly agree it’s unlikely that Israel’s relationship with its most important ally will fully fall apart.

Japan, UK slip into recession

Japan and the U.K. both fell into recessions at the end of 2023, according to new data. Consumers in both countries reduced spending, leading to two quarters of economic contraction. Japan’s slowdown caused it to fall behind Germany — now the world’s third-largest economy — while the U.K.’s drop in GDP poses a threat to the reelection hopes of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party. The figures also showed the growing chasm between two of the world’s largest economies and the U.S., which grew by 3% last year despite fears of a recession. The director of the White House National Economic Council said Thursday that infrastructure investment, coupled with a drop in inflation, would make the economic environment “quite benign” in 2024.

China turns to old real estate tactics

Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to revive socialist ideas about housing to address the country’s worsening real estate crisis. Over the last year, property prices have taken a nosedive across China and several major developers went bankrupt. Xi’s proposed solution to the mess would involve the Chinese Communist Party taking over large swaths of the property market, which has been dominated by the private sector for years, and converting the units into affordable rental homes, the Wall Street Journal reported. The strategy could take years to pull off and might not work at all, but improving affordable housing could represent the sort of wealth transfer to poor households “that China urgently needs,” a finance professor at Peking University said.

Hanging out on the decline

Americans are becoming less social as people spend more time looking at screens and less meeting in person, new survey data showed. Men, for example, reduced their hanging-out time by 30% between 2003 and 2022. An increase in phone usage, especially among teenagers, has contributed to the trend, which predates the pandemic, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote. But Americans also have less leisure time and engage in fewer “community-based routines” like going to church or the office. Many societal ills, Thompson wrote, “could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world.”

OpenAI goes after Google

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is working on its own search app, a move that would directly challenge Google, The Information reported. The artificial-intelligence startup’s partnership with Microsoft, which integrated OpenAI’s tech into its Bing search engine last year, has so far failed to dethrone Google as the No. 1 player in the lucrative web search sector. But the race to embrace AI as the new way to surf the web has just begun, and it’s not clear who the winners will be. Google recently rebranded its own AI chatbot and rolled out a new advanced model, while AI search startup Perplexity is already generating millions in revenue. Revolutionizing search threatens to upend industries beyond tech, and publishers are worried about a world where they get less traffic from search.

Temu courts former Shein suppliers

The battle for the U.S. market between two Chinese e-commerce platforms is growing even more intense. Temu, which made a splash during the Super Bowl by running six separate commercials, is scooping up manufacturers who once worked with Shein, a $60 billion app known for peddling cheap clothes to Gen Z. As Shein prepares for a planned initial public offering in the U.S. this year, it has begun cleaning up its supply chain in China, ditching factories the company finds don’t meet its certification standards, the Financial Times reported. Those suppliers are now selling their goods on Temu instead. “We all went to Temu,” said one handbag factory owner in Guangdong.

Modi’s rare political setback

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suffered a political setback Thursday when the country’s highest court outlawed a system that allowed candidates to collect unlimited anonymous campaign donations. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which is still widely expected to win this year’s national elections, was the biggest recipient of “electoral bonds.” Although people don’t attach their names to them, the donations could still lead to “quid pro quo” arrangements, the Supreme Court ruled, and they disincentivize contributions to opposition parties because people fear the government could access donor information from the state-owned bank. The case was “an important test of the Supreme Court’s independence,” which critics have questioned under Modi’s rule, The Economist wrote.

Journal pulls China studies

A U.S.-based genetics journal retracted 18 articles from Chinese researchers over concerns they relied on DNA samples collected from Uyghur and Tibetan minority groups. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine said it found “inconsistencies” in documents purporting to show that subjects gave their consent for their samples to be used. One retracted paper studied the DNA of Tibetans, while another used blood samples from Uyghurs living in Xinjiang, where human rights groups say an estimated 1 million Muslim minorities were put in detention camps. The decision is thought to represent the “biggest mass retraction of academic research due to concerns about human rights,” The Guardian wrote.

Inside the Depp-MBS ‘bromance’

Actor Johnny Depp and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have developed a “bromance like no other,” Vanity Fair reported. Depp has spent more than seven weeks of the past year in the Gulf nation, where he stayed in royal palaces and developed such a “genuine connection” with the crown prince that he is now considering a deal to promote Saudi Arabian culture, the magazine reported. They met through bin Salman’s cousin, the country’s culture minister, who invested millions in a movie Depp filmed in 2022. Saudi Arabia has poured billions into entertainment, spanning sports, gaming, and music festivals, but critics say it’s doing so to distract from its human rights record, including a crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights.

Tough time for lab meat startups

A leading lab-cultivated meat firm is pausing its plans to open a massive new factory and laying off employees as companies across the burgeoning sector face challenges. Upside Foods’ facility in Illinois, nicknamed “The Rubicon,” would have been “a major step toward the commercialization of cultivated meat” and could have generated more than 30 million pounds of the food per year, Wired reported. Venture capital funding for the sector dropped to $177 million last year, down from $807 million in 2022. “You can’t fault investors for being more cautious in this environment; there’s no playbook for what we’re doing,” said the head of another lab meat startup that shut down in 2023.

Fading hawker culture

Singapore-style hawker centers are now popping up in Western cities, but they often fail to capture the charm of the original experience, TW Lim writes in the food and culture publication Vittles. One New York “hawker center,” for example, spans 11,000 square feet and is decorated with designer furniture and neon lights. It’s a far cry from the humble, utilitarian vibe of Lim’s favorite Singapore center, which has tiny food stalls, “uncomfortable stools,” and where customers can expect “grumpy efficiency” from vendors who serve versions of the same dish, but with different textures, sauces, and compositions.

Even in Singapore, hawkers face cost pressures and competition from new private spaces, which are located away from the government-owned centers. There, the staff are employees, while the original hawkers work for themselves. The culture of the stalls “wasn’t built on standardisation and economies of scale. It was built on individual craft and infinite diversity.”

Shooting yourself in the foot

Former White House staffer and GitHub executive Kevin Xu makes the case that the U.S. government’s ban on selling advanced computer chips to China is “starting to become counterproductive.” Xu notes in his Interconnected newsletter that the regulations have inadvertently hurt American companies like Nvidia, whose revenues took a hit, and helped Chinese firms, particularly Huawei, a growing supplier of semiconductors to Chinese AI companies. The rules also made it harder for the U.S. to glean signs about how China’s AI ecosystem is faring, which could be inferred from looking at how many Nvidia GPUs they purchased. “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat,” Sun Tzu famously wrote in The Art of War.

Working overseas

Vietnam has one of the best education systems in the world, and its highly skilled graduates are increasingly going abroad to find jobs. But rather than worrying about brain drain, the government appears to be embracing the trend: Last month, for example, German and Vietnamese officials signed a migrant labor cooperation agreement to help Berlin address the country’s growing worker shortage.

But the biggest market for Vietnamese labor is East Asia, writes Ho Chi Minh City-based journalist Michael Tatarski in his newsletter Vietnam Weekly. Over 518,000 Vietnamese people are working in Japan — accounting for 25% of all foreign labor in the country — and tens of thousands of Vietnamese have gone to work in Taiwan and South Korea. “These growing figures have a real economic impact here in Vietnam,” Tatarski writes, noting that remittances to Ho Chi Minh City increased 43% last year to $9.5 billion.

Feb. 16

• Singapore unveils its annual budget for 2024.
• Russia’s central bank determines interest rates; economists expect it to maintain the current 16% figure.
• Government leaders from around the world gather at the Munich Security Conference.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are bringing their iconic ballpark hot dogs to Seoul next month when Major League Baseball hosts its first-ever regular season games in Korea. The Dodger Dog, a 10-inch pork sausage, will be available during the Dodgers’ season opener against the San Diego Padres, according to Korea JoongAng Daily. The Dodgers sell about 2.8 million of the dogs per season. Fans who travel to Seoul to watch the game can also try chimaek, the classic Korean pairing of chicken and beer. The Dodgers and Padres will also play exhibition games against Korean teams, part of the MLB’s push to expand its overseas reach.

• Democrats think they’ve found a winning border message.
• The wealthy Saudi family buying up the failing Children’s Place
• A little-known startup takes the AI weather prediction crown.