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Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen left for the US. China has threatened to retaliate if she has a stopover meeting with US lawmakers during her diplomatic trip to Central America.
The EU bolstered its arsenal of trade defenses. The bloc agreed to use an anti-coercion instrument, aimed at lessening economic pressure from other nations, including China.
Tech leaders called for a pause in the training of next-gen AI. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Tesla CEO Elon Musk are among hundreds of signatories to an open letter advocating for shared safety protocols.
Turkmenistan earmarked $5 billion to build a city. It’ll be named Arkadag, or “protector,” in honor of its former president of 16 years, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who doesn’t mind sharing the limelight—he wrote a song once about his favorite horse.
The right to a preference at Starbucks
“We want to treat everyone with respect and dignity. However, I have the right, and the company has the right, to have a preference. And our preference is to maintain the direct relationship we’ve had with our employees, who we call partners.”
—Howard Schultz, founder and three-time CEO of Starbucks, in a contentious US Senate labor committee hearing yesterday. Lawmakers asked him about the roughly 130 violations of labor laws—which he might just term “partner preferences”—submitted by the National Labor Relations Board in the last 18 months.
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Amsterdam is watching your online searches
Amsterdam kicked off its “Stay Away” ad campaign this week, targeting people who use very specific terms when searching online for things to do in the Dutch city. Plugging “pub crawl Amsterdam” into Google is just one of the phrases that’ll trigger ads telling you to keep your drugs and sex away from the city, thank you very much.
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Only 1.2% of people have a perfect credit score. Should we even strive for 850? Scott Nover and host Annalisa Merelli talk about why that might be unattainable in the last episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast, season four.
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Correction: Yesterday’s chart on firearm deaths was not a rate per 100,000. The numbers are the total number of deaths. Nationally, the rate of children killed by firearms in the US in 2020 was 5.38 per 100,000 or 4,368 deaths.