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SUMMARY  08AMAZON WORKERS IN NYC REJECT UNION IN A REVERSAL OF FORTUNE  20ELON MUSK’S BIG PLANS FOR TWITTER: WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR  48ORKUT: THE COMEBACK OF THE CAPTIVATING SOCIAL NETWORK  78GEORGIA SETS $1.5B IN AID FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLE MAKER RIVIAN

APPLE DELIVERS STRONG QUARTER, BUT WARNS OF TROUBLE AHEAD   34 GOOGLE ADDS WAYS TO KEEP PERSONAL INFO PRIVATE IN SEARCHES   42 ENERGY CHIEF GRANHOLM TOUTS $3B PLAN TO BOOST EV BATTERIES   68 NEW FACTORY IN MOSES LAKE TO BRING HUNDREDS OF NEW JOBS   86 AIRBNB ALLOWS EMPLOYEES TO LIVE AND WORK FROM ANYWHERE   92 AIRBNB WILL REVIVE RULES AIMED AT CURBING SUMMER PARTIES   98 INTUIT TO PAY $141M SETTLEMENT OVER ‘FREE’ TURBOTAX ADS   102 A LOVED ONE OWES YOU MONEY NOW WHAT?   108 NEW ZEALAND ROCKET CAUGHT BUT THEN DROPPED BY HELICOPTER   116 FIFA BLOCKCHAIN DEAL IS FIRST NEW US WCUP SPONSOR SINCE 2011   122 CDC RESTATES RECOMMENDATION FOR MASKS ON PLANES, TRAINS   126 LIAM NEESON KILLS DOWN ‘MEMORY’ LANE   146 STELLANTIS POURS BILLIONS MORE INTO CANADA, ELECTRIC   166 ELON MUSK ASKED TO TESTIFY ON TWITTER BY UK PARLIAMENT   170 EUROPEAN UNION MOVES FORWARD IN ANTITRUST CASE AGAINST APPLE   174 MUSIC   130 MOVIES & TV SHOWS   138 TOP 10 ALBUMS   156 TOP 10 MUSIC VIDEOS   158 TOP 10 TV SHOWS   160 TOP 10 BOOKS   162 TOP 10 SONGS   164





AMAZON WORKERS IN NYC REJECT UNION IN A REVERSAL OF FORTUNE 08

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Amazon workers at a warehouse on Staten Island overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Monday, dealing a blow to organizers who last month pulled off the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the retail giant’s history. This time around, warehouse workers cast 618 votes — or about 62% — against the union, giving Amazon enough support to fend off a second labor win and raise questions as to whether the first victory was just a fluke. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the process, 380 workers — or 38% — voted in favor of the grassroots union. Turnout was 61%, with about 1,600 workers eligible to vote, according to a voter list provided by Amazon. The few ballots that were challenged by either the company or the nascent Amazon Labor Union, which led the organizing effort, were not enough to sway the outcome. Both parties have until next Monday to file objections to the election. The ALU is weighing whether to object, said Seth Goldstein, a union attorney who provides pro- bono legal assistance to group. Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement that the company was glad workers at the warehouse “were able to have their voices heard.” “We look forward to continuing to work directly together as we strive to make every day better for our employees,”Nantel said. A separate election held last month gave the ALU a surprise victory when workers at a different Staten Island facility voted in favor of unionizing. That was a first for Amazon in the U.S. 11

Monday’s defeat will surely sting. A second labor win was expected to fuel more organizing at the nation’s second largest employer, and cement the power and influence of the ALU. But despite the momentum after the first win, it was unclear whether the ALU would be able to replicate its success. Organizers said they had lost some support at the warehouse after filing for an election in February because they directed more energy to the nearby facility that voted to unionize last month. There were also fewer organizers working at the warehouse -- roughly 10 compared with the nearly 30 employed at the other warehouse. Some experts believed part-time workers, who organizers say the smaller facility relies on heavily, would potentially offer less union support because they might have other sources of income outside Amazon. Kate Andrias, professor of law at Columbia University and an expert in labor law, said part-time workers also “have less of a stake in improving the workplace and because they may be less likely to have strong relationships with co-workers.” Despite the loss, Chris Smalls, the fired Amazon worker who leads the ALU, wrote on Twitter he was proud of the organizers who participated, saying they had a tougher challenge after the group’s prior win. “Nothing changes we organize!”Smalls tweeted. “do not be discouraged or sad be upset and talk to your coworkers” The same obstacles that plagued the effort the first time, including Amazon’s aggressive anti- union tactics, were at play again. In the lead-up 12

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to the election, Amazon continued to hold mandatory meetings to persuade its workers to reject the union effort, posted anti-union flyers and launched a website urging workers to “vote NO.” Goldstein, the attorney working with the ALU, argues Amazon stepped up its“union-busting” campaign after the last election, disciplined organizers for engaging in union activities and barred them from displaying a pro-union sign in the breakroom. The union is also taking issue with the retailer’s use of mandatory anti-union meetings for its workers. The NLRB has allowed companies to mandate such meetings, but the labor board’s top prosecutor is currently trying to get them outlawed. Kent Wong, the director of the UCLA Labor Center, anticipated that there will be setbacks and victories in organizing Amazon. He contrasted it to Starbucks, where several stores have voted to unionize. Wong noted Amazon’s famously high turnover rate makes it hard to organize and unlike individual Starbucks locations, with 15 to 20 workers, there are far more workers at each Amazon warehouse who must be persuaded to form a union. “This one setback is not going to stall the momentum,”Wong said. “But if Amazon can block three or four or five in a row, it will be a message to other Amazon workers, it is going to be really hard.” John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, said he wasn’t entirely surprised by the union’s loss. He believed that the ALU was stretched thin. A second union victory would have solidified the 15

union’s position, he said, but the results in many ways were more important to Amazon than the fledgling labor group. “A second defeat could have proved fatal to the company’s efforts to stop the organizing from spreading like wildfire, just as it has done at Starbucks,”Logan said. But he noted there’s no question that“the ALU’s organizing campaign will continue and that labor activism at Amazon will continue to spread across the country.” Andrias said she believes the loss“highlights the fundamental problems with labor law and the extent to which employers are able to exercise coercive power over workers during the course of these union campaigns.” Even after a victory is secured, it’s still an uphill battle. Amazon has disputed the first election organized by the ALU, arguing in a filing with the NLRB that the vote was tainted by organizers and by the board’s regional office in Brooklyn that oversaw the election. The company says it wants a redo election, but pro-union experts believe it’s an effort to delay contract negotiations and potentially blunt some of the organizing momentum. A separate NLRB regional office in the Southwest will hold a hearing later this month over the company’s objections. Meanwhile, the final outcome of a separate union election in Bessemer, Alabama, is still up in the air with 416 outstanding challenged ballots hanging in the balance. Hearings to review those ballots are expected to begin in the coming weeks. 16

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ELON MUSK’S BIG PLANS FOR TWITTER: WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR 21

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has laid out some bold, if still vague, plans for transforming Twitter into a place of “maximum fun” once he buys the social media platform for $44 billion and takes it private. But enacting what at the moment are little more than a mix of vague principles and technical details could be considerably more complicated than he suggests. Here’s what might happen if Musk follows through on his ideas about free speech, fighting spam and opening up the “black box” of artificial intelligence tools that amplify social media trends. FREE SPEECH TOWN SQUARE Musk’s feistiest priority — but also the one with the vaguest roadmap — is to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital town square for the world’s discourse that allows as much free speech as each country’s laws allow. He’s acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter could anger the political left and mostly please the right. He hasn’t specified exactly what he’ll do about former President Donald Trump’s permanently banned account or other right- wing leaders whose tweets have run afoul of the company’s restrictions against hate speech, violent threats or harmful misinformation. Should Musk go this direction, it could mean bringing back not only Trump, but “many, many others that were removed as a result of QAnon conspiracies, targeted harassment of journalists and activists, and of course all of the accounts that were removed after Jan. 6,” said Joan Donovan, who studies misinformation at 22

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Harvard University. “That could potentially be hundreds of thousands of people.” Musk hasn’t ruled out suspending some accounts, but says such bans should be temporary. His latest criticism has centered around what he described as Twitter’s “incredibly inappropriate” 2020 blocking of a New York Post article on Hunter Biden, which the company has said was a mistake and corrected within 24 hours. OPEN-SOURCED ALGORITHMS Musk’s longstanding interest in AI is reflected in one of the most specific proposals he outlined in his merger announcement — the promise of “making the algorithms open source to increase trust.”He’s talking about the systems that rank content to decide what shows up on users’feeds. Partly driving the distrust, at least for Musk supporters, is lore among U.S. political conservatives about “shadow banning” on social media. This is a supposed invisible feature for reducing the reach of badly behaving users without disabling their accounts. There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. Musk has called for posting the underlying computer code powering Twitter’s news feed for public inspection on the coder hangout GitHub. But such “code-level transparency” gives users little insight into how Twitter is working for them without the data the algorithms are processing, said Nick Diakopoulos, a Northwestern University computer scientist. 25

Diakopoulos said there are good intentions in Musk’s broader goal to help people find out why their tweets get promoted or demoted and whether human moderators or automated systems are making those choices. But that’s no easy task. Too much transparency about how individual tweets are ranked, for instance, can make it easier for “disingenuous people” to game the system and manipulate an algorithm to get maximum exposure for their cause, Diakopoulos said. ‘DEFEATING THE SPAM BOTS’ “Spam bots” that mimic real people have been a personal nuisance to Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name — often to promote cryptocurrency scams that look as if they’re coming from the Tesla CEO. Sure, Twitter users, among them Musk, “don’t want spam,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But who defines what counts as a spam bot? “Do you mean all bots like, you know, if I follow a Twitter bot that just pulls up historic photos of fruits? I choose to follow that. Is that not allowed to exist?” he said. There are also plenty of spam-filled Twitter accounts at least partially run by real people that run the gamut from ones that hawk products to those promoting polarizing political content to meddle in other countries’ elections. ‘AUTHENTICATE ALL HUMANS’ Musk has repeatedly said he wants Twitter to “authenticate all humans,” an ambiguous 26

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proposal that could be related to his desire to rid the website of spam accounts. Ramping up mundane identity checks — such as two-factor authentication or popups that ask which of six photos shows a school bus — could discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of bogus accounts. Musk might also be considering offering more people a “blue check” — the verification checkmark sported on notable Twitter accounts — like Musk’s — to show they’re who they say they are. Musk has suggested users could buy the checkmarks as part of a premium service. But some digital rights activists are concerned these measures could lead to a “real-name” policy resembling Facebook’s approach of forcing people to validate their full names and use them in their profiles. That would seem to contradict Musk’s free speech focus by muzzling anonymous whistleblowers or people living under authoritarian regimes where it can be dangerous if a dissident message is attributable to a particular person. AD-FREE TWITTER? Musk has floated the idea of an ad-free Twitter, though it wasn’t one of the priorities outlined in the official merger announcement. That may be because cutting off the company’s chief way of making money would be a tall order, even for the world’s richest person. Advertisements accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue in the January-March fiscal quarter. The company did last year launch a premium subscription service — known as 29

Twitter Blue — but doesn’t appear to have made much headway in getting people to pay for it. Musk has made clear he favors a stronger subscription-based model for Twitter that gives more people an ad-free option. That would also fit into his push to relax Twitter’s content restrictions — which brands largely favor because they don’t want their ads surrounded by offensive and hate-filled tweets. WHAT ELSE? Musk has tweeted and voiced so many proposals for Twitter that it can be hard to know which ones he takes seriously. He’s joined the popular call for an “edit button” — which Twitter says it’s already working on — that would enable people to fix a tweet shortly after posting it. A less serious proposal from Musk suggested converting Twitter’s downtown San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter “since no one shows up anyway” — a comment taken more as a dig on Twitter’s pandemic- era workforce than an altruistic vision for the building. Musk didn’t return an emailed request to clarify his plans. 30

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APPLE DELIVERS STRONG QUARTER, BUT WARNS OF TROUBLE AHEAD Apple reported strong quarterly results despite supply shortages, but warned that its growth slowdown is likely to deepen. The company said it’s still struggling to get enough chips to meet demand and contending with COVID-related shutdowns at factories in China that make iPhones and other products. Although initial results for the January-March period topped analysts’projections, the good news was quickly eclipsed when management warned of trouble ahead during a conference call. 34

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The main takeaway: Apple’s sales will be squeezed by the supply problems much harder in the current April-June quarter than in its previous one. The company estimated it would take a hit to revenue of $4 billion to $8 billion as a result. “It will affect most of the product categories,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts. Apple’s stock price fell 4% in extended trading, reversing a positive response after the Apple report initially came out. Before the sobering forecast lowered the shares even further, Apple’s stock had fallen 10% from its peak in early January. “It was a solid quarter, but it looks like COVID has reared its ugly head,” said Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk. “It looks like it’s two steps forward, one step back.” Like a wide gamut of companies ranging from automakers to health care providers, Apple has been grappling with shortages of computer chips and other key technology components required in modern products. Apple had expected the crunch to ease as this year progressed, but recent COVIDs outbreaks are starting to curtail production in Chinese factories that the company relies on. Despite those headwinds, the results for the January-March period drew a picture of a still- expanding empire generating massive profits that have yielded the firm a $2.7 trillion market value -- the largest among U.S. companies. Apple announced a 5% increase in its quarterly dividend, which has been steadily rising since the company revived the payment a decade 36

Image: Mark Lennihan 37

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ago. Effective May 12, Apple’s new quarterly dividend will stand at 23 cents per share -- more than doubling from 10 years ago. Even without that supply issues, Apple would still be facing some of the same challenges confronting many other major technology companies. After enjoying a pandemic-driven boom, it’s becoming tougher to deliver the same levels of spectacular growth that drove tech- company stock prices to record highs. The crisis continues to fade away and growth on a year-to- year basis has become harder to maintain. Apple’s most recent quarter illustrated the high hurdles the Cupertino, California, company is now trying to clear. Revenue for the period totaled $97.3 billion, yet it was only 9% higher than the same time last year. It marked the first time in the past six quarters that Apple hasn’t produced double-digit gains in year-over-year revenue. That number, however, exceeded the average revenue estimate of $94 billion among analysts surveyed by FactSet Research, indicating that Apple’s growth slowdown hasn’t been quite as severe as investors were anticipating. Quarterly profit came in at $25 billion, or $1.52 per share, a 6% increase from the same time last year. Analysts had predicted earnings per share of $1.42. As usual, the iPhone remains Apple’s marquee product with sales of $50.6 billion in the past quarter -- a 5% uptick from the same time last year. Apple has been trying to keep its iPhones sales growing while chips remain in short supply by siphoning some components from the iPad, which saw its sales fall 2% from last year to $7.6 billion. 39





GOOGLE ADDS WAYS TO KEEP PERSONAL INFO PRIVATE IN SEARCHES Google has expanded options for keeping personal information private from online searches. The company said that it will let people request that more types of content such as personal contact information like phone numbers, email and physical addresses be removed from search results. The new policy also allows the removal of other information that may pose a risk for identity theft, such as confidential log-in credentials. 42

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The company said in a statement that open access to information is vital, “but so is empowering people with the tools they need to protect themselves and keep their sensitive, personally identifiable information private.” “Privacy and online safety go hand in hand. And when you’re using the internet, it’s important to have control over how your sensitive, personally identifiable information can be found,” it said. Google Search earlier had permitted people to request that highly personal content that could cause direct harm be removed. That includes information removed due to doxxing and personal details like bank account or credit card numbers that could be used for fraud. But information increasingly pops up in unexpected places and is used in new ways, so policies need to evolve, the company said. Having personal contact information openly available online also can pose a threat and Google said it had received requests for the option to remove that content, too. It said that when it receives such requests it will study all the content on the web page to avoid limiting availability of useful information or of content on the public record on government or other official websites. “It’s important to remember that removing content from Google Search won’t remove it from the internet, which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so,” it said. 45





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The comeback of the captivating social network 49

Orkut might not have been as popular as MySpace or Tumblr back in the day, but the social network, once owned by Google, boasted an impressive 300 million users at its peak, with more than half in Brazil. Eight years after the website was shuttered, its original founder has vowed to be “building something new” under the brand for a new generation of consumers. THE HISTORY OF ORKUT First launched 18 years ago in 2004, Orkut was a social networking website that was owned and powered by Google. The network, like Facebook, MySpace, and Tumblr, was designed to help users find their old friends, maintain relationships, and start new conversations with those who had similar interests. First developed by Orkut Büyükkökten under a workplace scheme where Google allowed employees to work on personal projects, the network went on to become one of the most visited websites in Brazil and India by 2008, and at its peak, had more than 300 million users. It was only in 2011 when Facebook overtook the company, demonstrating the serious growth modern platforms have had in recent years. In 2008, Google confirmed that Orkut would be managed by Google Brazil, and the site continued to expand and introduce new tools and features that would help users get closer to their friends and community groups. Perhaps one of the reasons why Orkut was so successful was that it listened to users and added new tools over time to meet changing 50