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👋 Hi friends,
Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
Image of the week, above:
🇺🇸 🇺🇦 From our Tuesday page one: I loved this photo of President Biden and Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kyiv. By Evan Vucci of the Associated Press.
My WSJ latest:
🥽 My newest story, out Tuesday with my colleague Raffaele Huang: Meta in Talks to Reboot China Business With VR Headsets
It began:
Tencent Holdings Ltd. is in talks to sell Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.’s popular virtual-reality headset in China, home to the world’s biggest pool of internet users.
Tencent, China’s biggest videogame company, has proposed to Meta that it become the exclusive seller of Meta’s Quest 2 headsets in China, people familiar with the discussion said. Tencent has also sought to publish Chinese versions of existing videogames for the device, they said.
The discussions, which began in recent months, are still at an early stage and a deal might not be reached, some of the people said.
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 🦠 In a new report, the U.S. Energy Department said it has determined that Covid began due to a lab leak, highlighting “how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin,” my colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel report.
2) 🌎 Friday marked one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Now it’s a war that the U.S. and allies are all-in on helping Ukraine win, writes my colleague Yaroslav Trofimov.
3) 👟 Excellent investigation by Reuters: how used sneakers that Dow Inc. and the Singapore government said were being recycled into playgrounds wound up being sold in Indonesia.
4) 💻 Author Neal Stephenson, who pioneered the concept of the metaverse, talks about the future virtual reality.
5) ✏️ Several news publishers in the U.S. dropped the “Dilbert” comic strip following creator Scott Adams’s comments about Black people.
6) 🤖 Sci-fi magazines are getting swamped with AI-generated submissions.
7) 🇻🇳 Why Ho Chi Minh City is Southeast Asia’s newest hotspot for startups.
8) 🗺 HistoryMaps uses maps, timelines, graphics and more to illuminate the past visually.
9) 😴 I have three words for you: Human Dog Bed.
10) 🐐 Goat-related video of the week: “Apparently goats love tomatoes.” Bonus link: metal music version.
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
“this husky was supposed to learn how to swim, but discovered that she could just float instead.”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley