🇭🇰 A pic I snapped this morning. ☔️
Categories
NN307: #IStandWithEvan
Sent as a newsletter April 5, 2023. Not on my list? Join here.
👋 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:
Today marks one week since my WSJ colleague Evan Gershkovich was detained in Russia.
He is accused of espionage. The Journal vehemently denies the charges. President Biden, news organizations, rights groups and more are demanding his release.
His lawyers have now met with him in prison, our editor in chief, Emma Tucker, said in a note to staff yesterday.
“Evan’s health is good, and he is grateful for the outpouring of support from around the world,” she wrote.
“We continue to call for his immediate release,” and beyond legal avenues we’re working with the White House, State Department and relevant U.S. government officials, she said.
Please take a moment to read this excellent profile of Evan by my colleagues Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw: Evan Gershkovich Loved Russia, the Country That Turned on Him.
That story, like all of our updates and his previous reporting, are free to read. And we’ve set up a landing page for all of our coverage.
If you post about his situation on social media, please use the hashtag #IStandWithEvan, as I – and many others – have been doing on Twitter.
Editor’s note:
Newley’s Notes will fall silent for few weeks. See you in May!
My WSJ latest:
🇮🇳 My latest, an exclusive out last Wednesday: YouTube Looking Into Gandhi’s Claim Political Videos in India Suppressed
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) ⚖️ Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to criminal charges for allegedly paying hush money during his 2016 campaign, marking the first time a former president has faced criminal charges.
2) 🏠 An unprecedented housing phenomenon is taking shape in the U.S.: home prices are falling in the West and rising in the East.
3) 🛍️ Alibaba news: the online shopping titan is splitting into six independent companies that could pursue individual IPOs. (Oh, and co-founder Jack Ma reappeared in China after about a year overseas.)
4) 📱 “The Case for Banning Children from Social Media.”
5) 🐶 Pets aren’t just great companions; they promote familial health, too: Children with dogs and cats in the house are less likely to develop food allergies.
6) 🐻 The latest vending machine offering in Japan: bear meat.
7) ✈️ Here’s a website that shows you random overhead photos of airports.
8) 🏖️ Variety reports that the next season of one of my favorite TV shows, “The White Lotus,” may be set in one of my favorite countries: Thailand.
9) 🪐 The trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, “Asteroid City,” starring Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and many more, is out.
10) 🎸 Video: the most popular song each month since January 1980.
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🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
“Good boy trying to steal food from TV”
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💡 Quote of the week:
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” – Unknown
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👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
That’s the headline on my latest story, an exclusive out Wednesday.
It begins:
YouTube’s chief executive said in an email that the company is looking into a claim by Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi that the Alphabet Inc. unit is suppressing his videos criticizing India’s ruling party and a billionaire who controls a conglomerate accused of wide-ranging fraud.
The March 25 email from YouTube’s Neal Mohan, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, came in response to a letter sent two weeks earlier from the leader of a group of overseas Indians who support Mr. Gandhi’s Congress party.
The letter, which was reviewed by the Journal, included data from Mr. Gandhi’s social-media team making the case that his videos related to “the issue of cronyism of the ruling government with one industrialist, Mr. Gautam Adani,” are receiving views that are significantly lower than YouTube analytics suggest they should be, and are being “suppressed, perhaps unwittingly and algorithmically.”
The data, which was reviewed by the Journal, showed that based on interactions such as likes on two videos alleging Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given special treatment to the company headed by Mr. Adani, the Adani Group, the videos should have received about 2.8 million views combined, but instead got less than a third of that.
The data also suggested Mr. Gandhi’s videos are receiving fewer views because they are now recommended less frequently to users via YouTube’s home page, the letter said.
“Thanks,” Mr. Mohan wrote in reply. “Team is taking a look,” he wrote, without elaborating.
Representatives for Alphabet Inc.’s Google and YouTube didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Representatives for the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Adani Group didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Click through to read the rest.
Categories
NN306: Pups Prancing on the Pitch
Sent as a newsletter March 26, 2023. Not on my list? Join here.
👋 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:
🏙 An apartment building here in Hong Kong. I love the textures.
My WSJ latest:
✏️ I’ve had three stories out since my last dispatch.
🇮🇳 From March 6, with my colleague Jeff Horwitz: YouTube, Facebook and Instagram Gave Platforms to Indian Cow-Protection Vigilante
✂️ From March 10, with Jeff and colleagues Salvador Rodriguez and Sam Schechner: Meta Plans New Layoffs That Could Match Last Year’s in Scope
💸 And from March 13, with my colleagues Raffaele Huang and Clarence Leong: Asian Startups’ Confidence in U.S. Banking Wanes After SVB Panic
Here are 10 items worth your time this week:
1) 📱 TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew was grilled by U.S. lawmakers over matters such as where data on users in the U.S. is stored, who can access it, and more.
2) 🧠 The AI revolution has begun, Bill Gates writes, arguing that new tools like ChatGPT could be as disruptive as mobile phones and the internet.
3) ⚖️ Following the guilty verdict in the Alex Murdaugh murder trial earlier this month, the New Yorker’s James Lasdun sums up what he calls a “fittingly theatrical spectacle.”
4) 📈 Gordon Moore, who co-founded Intel and posited that the number of transistors in a computer chip doubles about every two years, a theory known as Moore’s Law, died at the age of 94.
5) 💻 Related: For The Atlantic, Virginia Heffernan visits Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest semiconductor maker.
6) 🌎 Interview with tech visionary Kevin Kelly, who was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founding editor of Wired (and whose “Cool Tools” podcast I have listened to for years).
7) 🖌️ Artvee allows you to search for and download artwork that’s in the public domain.
8) 🔪 “Instagram face” as “an instrument of class distinction.”
9) 🏀 For the first time ever in March Madness, all the number one seeds lost before the Elite Eight, setting up a final four featuring Florida Atlantic, San Diego State, Miami and UConn.
10) 💪 Mental heath break: imagining U.S. presidents as professional wrestlers.
•••
🦴 Dog-related video of the week:
⚽ An excellent dog-on-the-pitch moment.
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💡 Quote of the week:
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
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🤗 What’s new with you? Hit reply to send me tips, queries, random comments, and videos of dogs who just wanna be part of the action.
•••
👊 Fist bump from Hong Kong,
Newley
That’s the headline on my latest story, out yesterday with my colleague Clarence Leong.
It begins:
Alphabet Inc.’s Google blocked downloads of e-commerce app Pinduoduo after versions of it not carried in its app store were found to contain malware, adding to security concerns about Chinese-developed apps.
The Pinduoduo app, which is owned by PDD Holdings Inc., has been suspended from Google Play over security concerns while it conducts an investigation, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday.
Google Play isn’t available to users in China, which is the biggest market for Pinduoduo, a popular e-commerce platform best known for offering deals for goods by banding consumers together. Android users in China can download apps from app stores operated by Chinese tech companies, such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. Pinduoduo had around 750 million monthly active users during the first quarter of last year—the most recent figure released by the company.
Temu, a popular shopping app in the U.S., also run by PDD, hasn’t been affected and is still available to download, according to Google.
Click through to read the rest.
That was the headline on a story I wrote last week with my colleagues Raffaele Huang and Clarence Leong.
SINGAPORE—The failure of Silicon Valley Bank reverberated through startups and venture-capital firms from China to Singapore and India during a roller coaster few days that shook confidence in Asia over reliance on U.S. tech financing.
After frantic efforts trying to secure their money, some startup executives said the incident served as a warning despite U.S. authorities stepping in Sunday to shore up the bank’s customers.
“The SVB problem is an episode that reminds us to review our reliance on investment from the U.S.,” said Wang Guanyan, an executive of a Guangzhou, China-based startup that develops virtual-reality games.
Click through to read the rest.
That was the headline on a March 10 scoop I wrote with my colleagues Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez, and Sam Schechner.
(Mark Zuckerberg announced the cuts a few days later.)
The story began:
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is planning additional layoffs to be announced in multiple rounds over the coming months that in total would be roughly the same magnitude as the 13% cut to its workforce last year, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new cuts, the first wave of which is expected to be announced next week, are likely to hit non-engineering roles especially hard, the people said. The company is also expected to shut down some projects and teams in conjunction with these cuts.
Click through to read the rest.
That was the headline on March 6 story I wrote with my colleague Jeff Horwitz. It began:
Monu Manesar, the alias of an Indian cow-protection influencer, has spent the past six years documenting his personal war against cattle smugglers on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
In openly violent posts that often clashed with the platforms’ stated content policies, his accounts livestreamed car chases of men suspected to be transporting beef or cows—an animal deeply revered in Hinduism. He and fellow vigilantes filmed themselves ramming vehicles, shooting out truck tires and trading gunfire with alleged smugglers. The posts included anti-Muslim slurs and trophy photos of captives bleeding from the head.
Human-rights organizations warned YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Meta Platforms Inc., parent of Facebook and Instagram, that the exploits posed a threat to human life and encouraged violence against Muslims. The Monu Manesar accounts stayed online and continued to rack up followers, however: 210,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly 150,000 across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
Now police in India are investigating Monu Manesar—whose real name is Mohit Yadav, according to police—and his associates in the deaths of two alleged cow smugglers whose charred bodies were found on Feb. 16 in their burned-out vehicle. The episode has sparked new debate over such vigilantism in India and what role social-media platforms play in fomenting religious violence.
Click through to read the rest.
Categories
NN305: Huskies Hangin’ Out
Sent as a newsletter Monday, February 27. Not on my email list? Join here.
👋 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
That’s the headline on my latest story, out last Tuesday with my colleague Raffaele Huang. It begins:
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.
Among issues that would need to be addressed are how user data would be handled, whether global macroeconomic conditions would be right for a partnership, and whether any deal between two of the biggest tech companies in the U.S. and China could draw scrutiny from Washington and Beijing, the people said. The two companies would also face China’s tight regulations on videogames.
Currently, the headset and its apps aren’t officially available in China. People there can buy devices from parallel importers on e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao and JD.com Inc., and set up the headsets and download apps with a virtual private network to bypass China’s internet firewall.
Click through to read the rest.