Nov. 19, 2021, 8:40 a.m. ET

Daily Business Briefing

Follow our latest coverage of business, markets and economy.

Uber lost $2.4 billion, thanks largely to its Didi investment.

China’s crackdown on its big tech companies continues to have reverberations around the world. On Thursday, Uber said it lost $2.4 billion in its most recent quarter, largely because of its investment in the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi.

The Didi investment weighed heavily on what was otherwise a fairly upbeat quarter for Uber, as both customers and drivers increasingly returned to the road. The loss was 123 percent more than the same quarter a year ago, when Uber’s business was reeling from the pandemic.

Since Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing company, went public in July, it has faced increasing pressure from Beijing on data security, privacy and worker protections. The crackdown caused Didi’s stock price to tumble and led to a $3.2 billion hit for Uber, which sold its Chinese business to Didi in 2016 in exchange for equity. That loss was offset by other investments.

Aside from its loss on Didi, Uber, whose headquarters are in San Francisco, said its business continued to recover from the pandemic. Its revenue was $4.8 billion, a 72 percent increase from the same period a year ago, which exceeded analyst expectations. Uber’s gross bookings, the total amount it brings in before fees and payments to drivers, increased 57 percent to $23.1 billion.

The company said that, excluding certain expenses like stock compensation and the Didi losses, it had reached its first profitable quarter.

Drivers steadily returned to the platform in the third quarter, Uber said, adding that the company had added nearly 640,000 new drivers and couriers to its platform since January.

“Our early and decisive investments in driver growth are still paying dividends, with drivers steadily returning to the platform, leading to further improvement in the consumer experience,” Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Riders were also returning to Uber, and beginning to take more trips than they had before the pandemic, Mr. Khosrowshahi added. “Mobility Gross Bookings are up 18 percent over just the last two months and this Halloween weekend surpassed 2019 levels,” he said.

In the third quarter, Uber said 109 million users were active on its platform, including riders and customers of Uber Eats, its food delivery business. The figure was up 40 percent from the same period a year ago.

On Tuesday, Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor in the United States, also said its drivers were returning. Lyft reported revenue of $864.4 million, a 73 percent increase from the same period last year, and a loss of $71.5 million, an 84 percent decrease.

Uber’s shares were up slightly in after-hours trading.

A retail trade group calls the Biden vaccine mandate ‘burdensome.’

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Macy’s flagship store in New York. The National Retail Federation has pushed back on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for private companies.Credit...Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

The National Retail Federation, an industry trade group that represents American retailers including major chains, said on Thursday that a vaccine mandate from the Biden administration for large private employers would “impose burdensome new requirements on retailers during the crucial holiday shopping season.”

The new guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will cover 84 million workers, who will be required by Jan. 4 to be fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. OSHA does not require employers to pay for or provide tests, which was a concern of the National Retail Federation.

The N.R.F. expressed concern in October that the emergency order tied to the vaccinations avoided the “normal review and comment process of rulemaking.”

“Retailers have consistently requested that the administration take public comment on this new vaccine mandate,” David French, the group’s senior vice president for government relations, said in a statement on Thursday. “It is critical that the rule not cause unnecessary disruption to the economy, exacerbate the pre-existing work force shortage or saddle retailers, who are already taking considerable steps to keep their employees and customers safe, with needless additional requirements and regulatory burdens.”

Retail is the second-biggest private employment sector in the United States, after health care, and the industry is concerned about a tight labor market, particularly as it heads into a holiday season that is expected to be much busier than it was in 2020. The group wrote a letter to Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, last month, saying that any emergency order around vaccines “could significantly diminish the labor pool, particularly in some geographic areas and amongst some demographics in which vaccine hesitancy is widespread.”

Several large employers — including Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer; Amazon, the second-largest; and Target — declined to comment. Gap, the owner of Banana Republic and Old Navy, said that it had nothing new to share and pointed to a September statement about incentives it was offering to encourage vaccinations among staff, including weekly drawings to win $1,000.

A representative for Macy’s said on Thursday that its staff was strongly encouraged to get vaccinated and that it was “studying the most recent government mandate and will implement it as required.”

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Why vaccinating children is good for employers.

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Young Children Receive First Dose of Covid-19 Vaccine

Across the country, parents and their young children lined up to receive Covid-19 vaccines after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Pfizer-BioNTech shot for children aged 5 through 11.

“Done deal, you did so well, Elizabeth.” “It didn’t hurt as much, so it wasn’t really as bad. I really wanted to go travelling, so I took the chance.” “We’ve been itching to get this vaccination for them, so I think it’s important with all the different strains going around.” “Now that I’m vaccinated, we can start going back to normal more.”

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Across the country, parents and their young children lined up to receive Covid-19 vaccines after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Pfizer-BioNTech shot for children aged 5 through 11.CreditCredit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Children 5 to 11 began getting coronavirus vaccine shots for the first time on Wednesday, shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the roughly 29 million children in that age group.

“For parents all over this country, this is a day of relief,” President Biden said. It may also come as a relief to employers, the DealBook newsletter writes.

Uncertainty over child care and school closures have kept some parents from returning to work, making it even harder for many businesses to find staff. “With the unknowns of Covid, I don’t know if my kid’s going to get pulled out of school for a quarantine or school’s going to stop,” one mother told The New York Times this summer.

About 2,500 schools are currently closed because of the coronavirus, according to a nationwide tracker by Burbio, and many child care centers remain understaffed. Some parents have also been reluctant to return to the workplace for fear of contracting the virus and exposing their unvaccinated children.

Immunizing children is expected to prevent about 600,000 new cases from now to March, and ease the anxiety of vaccinated parents with unvaccinated children. But making young children eligible for vaccines won’t necessarily solve the child care shortage or remove all risk because about a third of parents don’t plan to vaccinate their children (and those under 5 remain ineligible).

Google’s parent launches a company dedicated to drug discovery.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is launching an operation dedicated to drug discovery.

The new company, called Isomorphic Labs, will build on recent research from DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence lab also owned and operated by Alphabet.

Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, will also serve as chief executive of Isomorphic Labs as it maps out its technical strategy and hires its first employees.

Isomorphic and DeepMind announced the creation of the new company on Thursday, but declined to discuss the details of the operation.

Other Alphabet companies are already exploring various aspects of human health, including Verily, which has worked on everything from surgical robots to contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics; and Calico, which is dedicated to overcoming aging. Isomorphic Labs will be focused solely on drug discovery and new technologies that can help develop medicines.

Last year, DeepMind unveiled a system that automatically predicts the shapes of enzymes and other proteins, the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of all living things. The system, called AlphaFold, could make those predictions with an accuracy well beyond other technologies, according to independent tests, and it could play an important role in drug discovery.

The lab recently released predicted shapes of more than 350,000 proteins, a kind of map for biological processes in humans and other organisms. Independent researchers have used that data to accelerate a wide range of biological research, including efforts to understand the coronavirus.

Other prominent research labs, including a team at the University of Washington, are exploring similar technology. A wide range of start-ups, including the San Francisco-based Atomwise and Recursion Pharmaceuticals in Salt Lake City, are also working to apply new A.I. techniques to drug discovery.

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OPEC and Russia won’t expand oil output faster, in a rebuff to President Biden.

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An oil platform operated by Lukoil in the Baltic Sea in Russia. That country and other oil nations will meet by teleconference on Thursday to discuss oil production.Credit...Vitaly Nevar/Reuters

Officials from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other oil-producing nations shook off pressure from the Biden administration and decided on Thursday to stick with their previous plan to raise oil production by a modest 400,000 barrels a day next month.

President Biden and other world leaders have called on countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to increase production because oil prices, which collapsed during last year’s pandemic lockdowns, have now reached their highest levels in seven years. Gasoline prices, too, have jumped in the United States, Britain and elsewhere.

The jump in prices, Mr. Biden said Tuesday, “is a consequence of, thus far, the refusal of Russia or the OPEC nations to pump more oil.”

But on Thursday, there was no change of heart at the monthly meeting of OPEC Plus, the group of 23 oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The group said it was committed to ensuring “a stable and balanced oil market,” and officials stressed that they have been responsible stewards of the oil market, carefully matching output to rising demand.

And they pointed the finger at other energy markets — including natural gas and electricity, both of which have seen prices rocket in recent weeks — accusing them of “extreme volatility and instability.”

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi oil minister who led the meeting, displayed a chart showing that since the beginning of March the prices of natural gas in Europe have roughly quintupled while Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, is only up by around a third.

“Oil is not the problem,” he said.

The prince’s point, said Bhushan Bahree, an executive director at IHS Markit, a research firm, was that “OPEC Plus is managing oil better than other sources of energy are being managed, so don’t be critical of us.”

Mr. Bahree noted that although Saudi Arabia had returned its oil production to pre-pandemic levels, the output of the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, is still well below what it was before the virus hit.

Mr. Biden has raised the possibility of tapping the United States strategic petroleum reserve to modestly increase oil supplies as a means to control prices. Analysts, though, say that such a move would provide only temporary relief.

The strength of the demand for energy was also questioned. Alexander Novak, Russia’s deputy prime minister, said that there were signs of demand weakening in Europe, meaning that the effects of the pandemic are not over.

Oil futures fell toward the end of Thursday’s trading session, with Brent crude down 1.8 percent at about $80.50 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate 2.4 percent lower, at $78.85 a barrel.

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An Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia. President Biden and other world leaders are pressuring countries like Saudi Arabia to produce more oil.Credit...Amr Nabil/Associated Press

The oil producers, though, have several reasons for not wanting to change their plans. Their current agreement, calling for increases of 400,000 barrels a day each month, was the result of bruising negotiations in July. As the Saudi minister said Thursday, the group does not want to have meetings about “who gets what” on a monthly basis.

The meeting occurred at the same time as the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, which aims to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, including by phasing out consumption of oil and natural gas.

From the perspective of the big producers, Mr. Biden and other leaders are asking them to provide more oil so as to smooth the shift to a world where they may be out of business. There is probably “growing frustration” among the oil producers in OPEC Plus “at being asked to supply more barrels by Western leaders who are also calling for a rapid transition to renewables and an end to the age of oil,” Helima Croft, head of commodities research at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank, wrote in a note to clients.

The Saudi oil minister said that uncertainty about the future market for oil discourages investment in energy supplies.

“Who is going to invest for three years and four years?” he asked.

With climate pressures looming, the OPEC countries may prefer to reap higher revenue, build their financial reserves and raise funds for investments in solar and wind power and other businesses that may eventually replace oil.

OPEC and its allies may also have less room to increase production than is believed. The group is falling short of its overall target, and some members, like Angola and Nigeria, are thought to have already reached their maximum outputs, while others, like Russia, may not be far away. It is not in the interest of countries unable to increase output for the Saudis and others to increase production, bringing down prices and revenue.

In the coming months, demand for oil, still the world’s largest source of energy, appears likely to grow further, as the global economy continues to recover, according to forecasters. Supply, however, may not keep pace, partly because oil companies and investors are wary of investing in what may be a dying business.

The result could be a bumpy transition.

“If you cut off supply faster than demand moves away from fossil fuels, you are going to get high and volatile prices,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm based in London.

The Bank of England edges closer to raising interest rates, but holds steady.

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The Bank of England in London. Britain’s annual inflation rate reached 3.1 percent in September and is expected to rise further in coming months.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Bank of England held interest rates at record low levels on Thursday, defying market expectations for a rate increase to tackle rising inflation. But the central bank said inflation would likely peak at about 5 percent in April, “materially higher” than its previous expectations, and signaled that rate rises were likely to be necessary in the coming months.

If so, it would join other central banks pulling back on emergency levels of monetary stimulus as supply chain disruptions, higher energy prices and labor market shortages push up prices around the world.

The Bank of England is still expected to be the first major central bank to raise rates. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve said it would begin winding down its enormous bond-buying program this month as prices continue to rise, eventually putting it in a position to raise rates in the middle of next year.

Like other central banks, the Bank of England has insisted that the current bout of high inflation will be “transitory,” but it’s becoming increasingly unclear how long it will last.

“This period of higher inflation is likely to be temporary,” Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, told reporters on Thursday.

He added that there was “no fixed unit of time” that defines transitory, but said it was determined by people’s reactions to higher prices. The longer high inflation goes on, the greater the risk that it translates into higher inflation expectations and demands for higher wages, he said.

Monetary policy can’t be used to resolve the supply chain problems pushing inflation higher, he added. That said, to return inflation to the bank’s 2 percent target and keep expectations about the future of inflation stable, an interest rate increase will be required, he said.

Investors, pushing rates in financial markets higher, had bet on an increase of 15 basis points, or 0.15 percentage point, that would have taken the Bank of England’s interest rate to 0.25 percent from 0.1 percent. At the monetary policy meeting this week, two policymakers voted for such an increase, arguing that there was no sign that the end of Britain’s furlough program, which had supported wages during pandemic lockdowns, had eased constraints in the labor market — but they were outvoted by the seven other members.

Mr. Bailey added, however, that the decision was a “close call.” Three policymakers voted to halt the central bank’s bond-buying program immediately, instead of letting it run until its scheduled end next month.

The British pound dropped after the policy announcement as traders unwound their bets of a rate increase. The pound fell more than 1.3 percent against the U.S. dollar, while the yield on 10-year government bonds tumbled 13 basis points to under 1 percent for the first time since the end of September.

The central bank is caught between a worsening economic growth outlook and higher prices. It downgraded its forecasts for growth in economic output, predicting a rise of just 1 percent in the fourth quarter, half the amount forecast three months ago, and said higher prices were expected to squeeze household incomes for the next two years.

The economy now isn’t expected to return to its prepandemic levels until the first quarter of next year, a quarter later than previously expected. Echoing Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, the British central bank also expects supply chain disruptions to last longer than expected. Bottlenecks will weigh on the global economy until late 2022, the Bank of England said.

On the other hand, Britain’s annual inflation rate was 3.1 percent in September, substantially above the central bank’s 2 percent target, and policymakers expect it will peak around 5 percent next spring.

Price increases for goods and food are expected to keep inflation high throughout the winter. And the future of wholesale energy prices was “very uncertain,” having already increased for oil by 80 percent and for natural gas by 400 percent since the end of last year, the bank said.

But then inflation would fall back “materially” in the second half of next year, the central bank predicted.

The bank said it wanted to wait until there was official data on how the end of the furlough program was affecting the labor market before it made a decision on when to tighten monetary policy. Just over a million jobs were supported by the program when it ended in September, the bank estimated.

The bank is expecting only a small increase in unemployment in the current quarter, and by the time the central bank meets again in mid-December there will be updated labor market data for October, giving insight into what happened when the government stopped supporting wages up to 80 percent of the hours not worked.

The unemployment rate was at 4.5 percent in the three months through August. By the end of next year, the rate is forecast to be 4 percent.

“Provided the incoming data, particularly on the labor market, were broadly in line with the central projection” in this month’s monetary policy report, the central bank said, “it would be necessary over coming months to increase Bank Rate” to return inflation to its 2 percent target.

The Bank of England highlighted that markets were implying interest rates would climb to around 1 percent by the end of next year. And if interest rates followed that path, then inflation would recede below the bank’s target of 2 percent by the end of the forecast period in 2024. If interest rates were held at 0.1 percent, inflation would be 2.8 percent in two years’ time.

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The U.S. trade deficit rose as a surge of imports bogged down the supply chain.

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Demand for imported goods has climbed during the pandemic.Credit...Alan Devall/Reuters

The U.S. trade deficit hit a record $80.9 billion in September, reflecting a surge in imported goods that continued to outpace American exports, data released by the Commerce Department on Thursday showed.

The trade deficit climbed 11.2 percent from August. Imports rose slightly to $288.5 billion, also the highest monthly total on record, as American purchased more foreign-made computers, cellphones, machinery and industrial chemicals.

Exports fell 3 percent to $207.6 billion, as congestion in ports and warehouses helped to slow the movement of goods out of the country.

A surge in demand for imported goods during the pandemic has combined with factory closures and a shortage of truckers and warehouse workers to fracture the supply chain that ferries goods to American stores and households. The disruptions and delays in global shipping are resulting in product shortages and higher prices, and curbing economic growth.

In the first nine months of the year, the trade deficit in both goods and services hit a record $638.6 billion, up 33.1 percent from the same period in 2020, as imports outpaced exports.

The data showed that services exports, typically a bright spot for the American economy, have started to rebound as the pandemic subsides and travel resumes.

The United States shipped less gold, crude oil and some types of machinery in September than the prior month, but exports of consumer goods and pharmaceutical ingredients were strong. Imports of cars remained weak because of a global semiconductor shortage.

Deere says it won’t resume talks after striking workers reject an agreement.

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Workers picketing a John Deere plant in Waterloo, Iowa, in October. Many workers had complained that wage increases and retirement benefits included in an initial proposal were too weak.Credit...Chris Zoeller/The Courier, via Associated Press

One day after workers at the agriculture equipment maker Deere & Company voted down a second contract proposal, the company said Wednesday that the proposal was its best and final offer and that it had no plans to resume bargaining.

The rejection of the contract by roughly 10,000 workers extended a strike that began in mid-October, after workers based primarily in Iowa and Illinois voted down an earlier agreement negotiated by the United Automobile Workers union.

The company confirmed its position in an email after it was reported by Bloomberg. A U.A.W. spokesman said only that the union’s negotiating team was continuing “to discuss next steps.”

Marc A. Howze, a senior Deere official, said in a statement Tuesday night that the agreement would have included an investment of “an additional $3.5 billion in our employees, and by extension, our communities.”

“With the rejection of the agreement covering our Midwest facilities, we will execute the next phase of our Customer Service Continuation Plan,” the statement continued, alluding to Deere’s use of salaried employees to run facilities where workers are striking.

Many workers had complained that wage increases and retirement benefits included in the initial proposal were too weak given that the company — known for its distinctive green-and-yellow John Deere products — was on pace for a record of nearly $6 billion in annual profits.

According to a summary produced by the union, wage increases under the more recent proposal would have been 10 percent this year and 5 percent in the third and fifth years. During each of the even years of the six-year contract, employees would have received lump-sum payments equivalent to 3 percent of their annual pay.

That was up from earlier proposed wage increases of 5 or 6 percent this year, depending on a worker’s labor grade, and 3 percent in 2023 and 2025.

The more recent proposal also included traditional pension benefits for future employees and a post-retirement health care fund seeded by $2,000 per year of service, neither of which were included in the initial agreement.

Chris Laursen, a worker at a John Deere plant in Ottumwa, Iowa, who was president of his local there until recently, said he voted in favor of the new agreement after voting to reject the previous one.

“We have the support of the community, we have the support of workers all around the country,” Mr. Laursen said. “If we turned down a 20 percent increase over a six-year period, substantial gains to our pension plan, I’m afraid we would lose that.”

But Mr. Laursen said he still had concerns about the vagueness of the company’s commitment to improving its worker incentive plan, and such concerns appeared to weigh on his co-workers, 55 percent of whom voted to reject the newer contract.

Another Iowa-based worker, Matt Pickrell, said that some co-workers skeptical of the second proposal had expressed a desire for a larger initial increase than the 10 percent the company offered.

Mr. Pickrell said that he, too, had opposed the initial agreement but had voted in favor of the more recent one because of the improvements in retirement benefits.

Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communications Workers of America, said the second “no” vote could indicate that members felt that the strike was working and that further gains were possible, despite the company’s declaration that it was finished bargaining.

“They’re saying what they believe — their feelings are hurt,” Mr. Cohen said of Deere. “But what are they going to do about it? They’re not going to get the workers back.”

Mr. Cohen said that Deere employees were among the relatively rare group of workers in the United States able to bargain on a companywide scale and that that, along with their stature in the communities where plants are situated, gave them considerable leverage.

The work stoppage at Deere was part of an uptick in strikes around the country last month that also included more than 1,000 workers at Kellogg and more than 2,000 hospital workers in upstate New York.

Overall, more than 25,000 workers walked off the job in October, versus an average of about 10,000 in each of the previous three months, according to data collected by researchers at Cornell University.

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Workers are trying to figure out how much power they really have.

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Zella Roberts in her apartment in Asheville, N.C.Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

With the country’s labor force down by more than four million people and resignations at a high, employers are desperate to make hires, Emma Goldberg reports for The New York Times. The flood of people leaving their positions has kept rising. In August, one in 14 hospitality workers quit their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a quit rate more than 50 percent higher than before the pandemic.

“Workers are fed up and restaurants are desperate,” said Zella Roberts, a waitress at a Sonic drive-in in Asheville, N.C. “We’re scarce, we have higher standards and that gives us more power than we’ve had before.”

Today, job seekers find nearly 50 percent more openings than they had pre-Covid, and many can expand their search beyond their hometowns because of newly flexible workplace arrangements across industries.

Some workers are resigning. Others are flexing their muscles — requesting raises, or remote work options. Employers are noting the jump in demands, and in some cases catering to it, during a shift in power they realize may be long-lasting.

Businesses are scrambling to offer new benefits, including bonuses and family insurance plans. Workers, meanwhile, are taking the chance to make bolder requests of their bosses.

But for all the new assurance that workers feel in making demands, they know that the bosses still hold a fundamental kind of leverage: the jobs.

“There’s a lot of momentum right now, but there are some very serious obstacles toward workers actually acquiring sustained levels of power,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, noting that under 11 percent of American workers are represented by unions.

But if some of the power that workers feel right now is limited, or even illusory, the debates over remote work arrangements have given them some concrete victories. READ THE ARTICLE →

Catch up: Google is aggressively pursuing a contract to provide tech to the military, despite employee concerns.

  • Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military. The company’s plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force, who torpedoed a 2018 bid for a military program, and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands.

    As Google positions cloud computing as a key part of its future, the bid for the new Pentagon contract could test the boundaries of guidelines it created for ethical use of artificial intelligence, which have set it apart from other tech giants that routinely seek military and intelligence work. READ THE ARTICLE →

  • Smartmatic, an election technology firm that became a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential race, sued Newsmax and One America News Network on Wednesday for defamation, demanding that the conservative cable networks face jury trials for spreading falsehoods about the company.

    The new lawsuits add to a growing suite of litigation by Smartmatic and another election technology provider, Dominion, which found itself mired in the same conspiracy theories. In February, Smartmatic sued Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and several Fox anchors on similar grounds, as well as two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani. READ THE ARTICLE →

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Today in On Tech: America loves choices. Not in phones.

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CreditCredit...By Amir B Jahanbin

Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide explores why Apple and Samsung are the Coke and Pepsi of smartphones in the United States.

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