fortune--2020-01-21--How much further can stocks climb before markets encounter the dreaded ‘blow-off top’?

Markets continue driving upward to dizzying heights as investors bet the good times will keep on rolling. Maybe they will, but there’s also the possibility they could instead confront the converse—the “blow-off top.”
What’s that, you ask?
A blow-off top is nothing to shrug off. It’s defined as a rapid ascent followed by a series of slides, partial rebounds, and further drops, leading finally to a precipitous decline in market performance, like what happened in 2007 to 2009 or from 2000 to 2002. Like major storms of any type, they happen periodically—more than a dozen times since the 1950s according to some counts.
Time it right, and you can make a tidy profit. If you’re off, which is just as possible, you could face a big loss. And under the right—or wrong, if you will—conditions, a blow-off top could blow up your portfolio.
“A blow-off top is the final stage of a bullish move in the stock market,” said David Russell, vice president of market intelligence at TradeStation Securities. “It follows a long period of gains, and usually results from naysayers throwing in the towel and going [along for the ride],” pushing prices and volume upward.
“Blow-off tops are often only clear in retrospect, and it’s hard to judge when the big run higher is going to end,” Russell said.
However, a blow-off top is more complicated and extended than the description suggests. The easiest way to start understanding the phenomenon is to look at a picture of one. Below is a graph of the S&P 500, demonstrating large-cap activity, and the Russell 2000 for small- and medium-cap. The period from May 2007 into 2009 was a stomach-churning roller coaster that’s hard to forget for anyone who went through it.
As the graph shows, in a blow-off top, not all parts of the market move at the same time. “In 2007, the Russell 2000 completed a double top,” or a pair of peaks, on June, 4 and July, 13, said financial and tax adviser Steven Jon Kaplan. “The S&P 500 didn’t peak until October 9. From top to bottom the S&P 500 slid 57.7% while the Russell 2000 lost 60.0%.”
The whole event can take many months, from the initial highs and then multiple rounds of drops and rebounds. The subsequent peaks keep dropping in size, while the bottoms get deeper.
The pattern of one part of a market peaking earlier than others repeats in other ways. “For example, with commodities, it is almost always the case that the producers of the commodity reach their peaks ahead of the commodity itself,” Kaplan said. “When the commodity is peaking, the producers make lower highs.” That’s a sign a sector may be ready for a major decline.
Kaplan pointed to the example of gold mining funds peaking in April 2011. The price of gold itself hit a high in September 2011 and the funds saw a peak, but a lower one than in the Spring. “This was an early warning of a price drop, and sure enough the entire commodity sector, including precious metals, collapsed and didn’t bottom until January 20, 2016,” he said.
“Period of euphoria”
In any market, increased investment is what pushes shares higher. Additional money represents additional demand with a relatively fixed available supply of stocks at a given time. In a nod to classic economic theory, share prices respond by going up.
The economic explanation of a blow-off top is a “period of euphoria that causes the last of the bears to become bulls [and is] the process of the market sucking in the last of the sideline cash,” which means any available money not invested, said Robert Phipps, director and portfolio manager of Per Stirling Capital Management.
When the sideline cash is exhausted, there is a sudden reduction in the money people will invest into equities. Demand for high-priced stocks suddenly becomes weak and, as a result, prices drop. The dynamic is one that, to some experts, the markets may be playing out right now. Look at the progress of the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 from October 2017 through March 2018 in the following graph.
Kaplan argued that the markets are showing “exactly the same blow-off behavior”—like people putting more money into the markets and growing share valuations, and small- to medium-caps peaking—that previous such events have shown. For example, the Russell 2000 hit a peak at the end of August 2018 and then a secondary one in December 2019 that was down almost 4% from the previous one.
“Not many people pay attention to that, but that’s how many bear markets start, with the smaller and mid-sized companies,” Kaplan said. “Hardly anybody reports on a story how the Russell 2000 did on a particular day or week or year.”
Watch the bond market for clues
An additional concern is that investors may have largely lost their fear, and are increasingly pouring money without concern into markets, also fueled by low interest rates that push interest in stocks over many other investments.
One indicator is in the bond market, with a narrow difference in the yields offered by junk and investment-grade bonds. Investors see risk as systemically lower and so ask less of a premium for it.
Passive trading, which is a much bigger deal these days, can also exacerbate blow-off top conditions. Managers at many passive funds are restricted in the actions they can take. When money comes in, they may have to invest it rather than holding more cash because valuations seem too high. That pushes up share prices. When markets cool and people begin to take money out, the funds then sell shares to create liquidity, which increases the amount of selling and further depresses prices.
Stocks show the lack of fear, and a rush to greater return, as their moving averages are significantly below the current prices. Values are growing faster than usual and that concerns Phipps. “Right now, the S&P 500 is almost 8% of its 125-day moving average,” Phipps said. Had that been 2% or even 4% of the moving average, “it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.”
Prices have clearly seen the effect. “Right now, we’re at 18.5 times forward earnings, which is really, really expensive on the S&P 500,” Phipps said. The market breadth has been strong, with most stocks having ridden the surge and suggesting that investors are discriminating little between different stocks.
Still, it’s still extraordinarily difficult to tell when the market is about to have a blow-off top. On one hand, the volume of shares trading hands hasn’t been all that high, which would suggest less of a rush to invest mania gripping the markets. Then again, according to a regular survey by the American Association of Individual Investors, as of Jan. 15, 41.8% of respondents expect the market to be up in the next six months. This historical average is 38%.
Keep in mind, the prospect of a blow-off top cannot be adequately predicted—such is the nature of any phenomenon that can be observed only retroactively. Experts therefore advise investors to work with a financial adviser to consider some hedging actions to limit losses.
But whatever you do, don’t blow it off.
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fortune--2020-01-21--The Chief Justice and impeachment: John Roberts’ role in the Trump trial

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Start with trust

For only the third time in history, the Senate will hold a trial of a sitting President Tuesday afternoon. The process will give rise to the unusual spectacle of Chief Justice John Roberts leaving the Supreme Court to preside over the chamber of another branch of government.
How will Roberts, a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, influence the proceedings? Here is the Chief Justice’s role in the trial explained in plain English.
Why is the Chief Justice there in the first place?
It’s in the Constitution. Article I, Section 3 states “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice Shall Preside.”
Does this mean Roberts will suspend his duties at the Supreme Court?
Nope. Roberts will instead perform double-duty, attending to Supreme Court business in the morning, which will include hearing cases, and then heading to the Senate, where the impeachment trial will start at 1 p.m. every day.
In the unexpected event that Roberts must miss any Supreme Court proceedings, Justice Clarence Thomas, who is next in seniority, will act in his role, according to the court’s Public Information Officer.
Will Roberts’ conservative views shape the outcome of the trial?
Probably not. As law professor Michael Gerhardt explains, the Chief Justice’s role is to “preside”—a largely symbolic duty. Unlike at the Supreme Court, where his power is immense, Roberts will mostly be an onlooker over what is a political process more than a legal one. Even when it comes to the rules of the trial, the senators will be able to overrule him.
Although he will be wearing the same robes he does at the Supreme Court, his main role is to act as a figurehead and bring gravitas to the proceedings. While Roberts could try to flex his legal authority, Gerhardt says this is unlikely because the Chief Justice, who has described his job as that of an impartial umpire, does not to do anything that could lead the court to be perceived as political. Also, unlike hearings at the Supreme Court, this trial will be on TV.
How did the Chief Justices perform in previous impeachment trials?
In 1868, during the Senate trial of President Andrew Johnson, Supreme Court Justice took an active role in shaping the proceedings, reportedly ruling on questions of evidence and witness eligibility (issues that are hot button topics in Trump’s trial but which Roberts is unlikely to touch).
Roberts is more likely to follow the example of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who presided over President Clinton’s trial in 1996, and under whom Roberts served as a law clerk. Rehnquist played a minimal role in the Clinton trial, relying on Senate Parliamentarians for guidance when questions arose.
According to veteran Supreme Court watcher Nina Totenberg, Rehnquist became grumpy about the many unplanned interruptions and delays during the trial—events that did not happen at the Supreme Court—until the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms placated him with cookies and ice cream. The bored Rehnquist also resorted to playing poker with his law clerks until he was informed that was illegal. It remains to be seen what Roberts will do to stifle his frustration if the Senate hearings became tedious.
Correction, January 28, 2020: An earlier version of this story misstated President Andrew Johnson’s name.
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fortune--2020-01-21--Stationery retailer Papyrus is closing all stores

Why PayPal and American Express may be the next hot targets for low-level hackers

Stationery chain Papyrus, which once had over 450 stores throughout the U.S., is shutting the doors of its standalone stores.
The company that has operated the retail chain is reportedly closing all of its locations nationwide, citing “current challenges of the retail industry.” Liquidation sales are already underway at several stores. (The company’s cards and branded products will continue to be sold at other stores, but will no longer have standalone locations.)
Schurman Retail Group, which licensed the Papyrus brand from its owner American Greetings, has not issued a statement about the closings and calls to its customer support lines went to a voicemail. The Papyrus website, though, now clearly states that all sales are final and no returns or guarantees will be honored.
As of Tuesday morning, all merchandise online is 20% off.
Papyrus was founded in 1950, specializing in greeting cards, gift bags, paper products and writing accessories, and most recently had 260 stores, according to its Website. The chain focused on major markets in the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area, Tampa, Chicago, and Indianapolis. American Greetings Corporation acquired the Papyrus brand in 2009. Schurman then licensed the brand and ran the specialty retail locations. The shutdown of those stores will not impact sales of the company’s products at other retailers.
The closure of the Papyrus stores is the turn in the ongoing retail apocalypse, which has seen A.C. Moore shut its doors and both Barney’s and Forever 21 file for bankruptcy in the last several months. Pier 1 Imports, meanwhile, announced plans earlier this month to significantly increase the number of stores it was closing.
Clarification: While standalone Papyrus stores are closing, Papyrus-branded products will continue to be sold by other retailers.
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fortune--2020-01-21--A tale of two books: How app-makers hooked us, and how we might resist

This is the web version of Business x Design, a newsletter on the power of design. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
My son celebrated his 14th birthday this month by inviting friends to a trampoline park followed by dinner at a nearby pizza joint. We snapped the obligatory photos of cake and candles. But for me, the evening’s most memorable (and disturbing) image was of eight teenage boys seated shoulder-to-shoulder, each with a slice of pizza in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
I am always bugging my kids about spending too much time on screens, though I am guilty of the same addiction. And so one of the first books on my 2020 reading list was Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, by investor, entrepreneur, and product design consultant Nir Eyal.
Eyal spent much of his career in the video gaming and advertising industries and has become a popular lecturer at Stanford’s graduate schools of business and design. He’s best known for writing Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which catalogues the techniques employed by app developers and web designers to get us addicted to their products. Published in 2014, Hooked was a huge hit in Silicon Valley; the four steps of the “Hook Model” (trigger, action, variable rewards, commitment) are practically UX sutras.
Eyal says Hooked aimed to help startups and socially-conscious companies, “design new ways of helping people to build better habits”—to exercise more, to eat less, to live better lives. He now concedes spreading awareness of those techniques may have had a “dark side.” It turns out the features that make some products engaging, “can also make them distracting.”
In Indistractable, Eyal seems to offer remedies meant to break the design spells Hooked helped popularize. Some reviewers have found the new potions hard to swallow.
One complaint is that Eyal’s definition of distraction—anything that prevents us from taking actions that will move us closer to achieving professional and personal goals—is maddeningly circular.
A second is that Hooked and Indistractable advance contradictory arguments: The former asserts “it will be years, perhaps generations, before society develops the mental antibodies to control new habits”; the latter declares individuals “much more powerful than any of the tech giants” while assuring readers “the good news is we have the unique ability to adapt to such threats” and “can take the steps right now to retrain and regain our brains.”
A fundamental message of Indistractable is that it’s not enough to recognize the beeps, pings, and other external triggers that prompt us to check e-mail, look at a news alert, or re-open Candy Crush. We must also get to grips with the “root causes” of our distraction. Is your Instagram itch born of boredom? Or is it something deeper: fear, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy?
Eyal advocates “timeboxing” to map out in advance how you intend to achieve your goals, and then setting aside a specific time to do it; Kondo-izing your devices to eliminate the apps that you don’t need; communicating your goals and timeboxes to family and colleagues to align their expectations; and make anti-distraction pacts with others to help yourself to stick to your commitments.
As James Williams notes in The Guardian, there’s a self-help flavor to most of these coping strategies. They see the inability to resist the dark arts of addictive design as a matter of individual character weakness while letting purveyors of the Hooked Model—designers, behavioral engineers, and the big tech companies who employ them—off the hook.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
@ClayChandler
Clay.Chandler@Fortune.com
VISION, EMPATHY, SCALE
This edition of Business x Design was curated by Margaret Rhodes.
Gary Hershorn—Getty Images
Blue skies. Startups have tried to attract employees with beer taps, ping-pong tables, and unlimited trail mix, but according to a new survey, office workers really just want a view of the outside world. The survey—run by human resources consultancy Future Workplace and View Inc., a manufacturer of tech-enabled glass for buildings—asked 1,600 North American professionals about workplace perks. Over half said they would most value natural light and a view from their desk. A sliver of that corner-office feeling, in exchange for the rec room amenities. [Fast Company]
A new vision. This week, California company Mojo Vision shared a plan to release the first-ever smart contact lens. Mojo is still in its research and development phase, and a working demo contact lens does not yet exist. If it did, the connected silicone disc would respond to the flick of an eye, displaying notifications, calendar events, and other content against the user’s field of vision. Mojo is teasing some form-specific use cases that make the lens more than a discreet smartwatch, such as an app that displays a script for the user. That could prove to be both discomfiting and harmless: You don’t want stage actors reading from a script, but it might make wedding speeches more tolerable. [Wired]
Safe search. Pinterest has a bit of a reputation as the nicest company in Silicon Valley. As if to prove it, CEO Ben Silbermann shared background on a product called “Compassionate Search.” When the photo-pinning platform noticed users searching for sensitive topics like depression, anxiety, and vaccines, it took it upon itself to engineer results to surface accredited, responsible information. Medical experts and clinical psychologists weighed in, a sign that Pinterest rejected moving fast and breaking things in favor of moving deliberately and safely. [Recode]
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Understanding the 2020 Election as Brand Marketing by Geoff Colvin
Industry standouts: The companies most admired by the business world by Scott DeCarlo and Matthew Heimer
The certainty of Magic Leap’s augmented-reality future by Aaron Pressman
How Ganni used tech-world tricks to grow from a cult fashion label to a global brand by Nicole Gull McElroy
BlackRock arrives fashionably late to sustainable portfolios by Eamon Barrett
DISCUSSION
There’s a line in Uncanny Valley, the journalist Anna Wiener’s new debut memoir, that’s hard to shake. “It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists...they engaged with their new home by rating it,” she writes of those who moved to San Francisco in the wake of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, at the height of the Silicon Valley gold rush. It’s hardly the harshest indictment of the era, but it gets at an unnerving shift in human behavior that took hold. The sudden ability to geo-tag and share opinions and personal photos with strangers led quickly to the inability to simply wander in the world and see what you see. In a world of apps and services, spontaneous discovery gave way to an internet-enabled census on what’s “the best.”
No ratings system has proven as powerful as Instagram’s likes. Since launching in 2010, the metric has fundamentally changed the way users interface with their surroundings and how they view success, to the point of launching an entire new form of advertising.
Last fall, the photo-sharing app announced it would experiment with removing public likes, to make the platform less stressful for its users. This week, The New York Times profiled Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and the man spearheading that effort. Besides surveying Mosseri’s career, the article reveals the complexity of untangling likes from the app:
“ [Instagram] is carefully considering how this will happen, for months ‘dog-fooding’ (internal Insta-talk for testing) different variations of the new format. A post’s achievement of ‘thousands of likes’ or ‘tens of thousands of likes’ might still be public. Users might still be able to find others’ likes with a little more digging in the app. But the average teenager under pressure to be popular won’t need to suffer the indignity of only his mom liking his skateboarding post.”
Instagram gets design nips and tucks all the time, but Mosseri is proposing something more radical: a near-total overhaul on a system that, despite its short lifespan, is central to how many people experience being online. Imagine the ripple effect of unlearning the like. Without knowing who is watching (and caring), users may stop regarding personal life as a performance. The pressure could ease up; genuine delight in sharing could return.


fortune--2020-01-21--French-U.S. digital tax truce sets the stage for next week’s meeting on overhauling global corporate

French-U.S. digital tax truce sets the stage for next week’s meeting on overhauling global corporate taxes

“Excellent!” That was @realDonaldTrump’s tweet early Tuesday—brief by the U.S. President’s standards—in reference to a supposed truce pausing France’s tax on U.S. tech giants. That came after French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Monday evening that he and President Trump had had a “great discussion on digital tax. We will work together on a good agreement to avoid tariff escalation.”
Such are trade talks in 2020: Tweet, retweet, and trumpet a success.
Yet much was left unsaid, and a whole lot remains undone. “An agreement is something that 25 lawyers have agreed to, and eventually two guys in suits sign it,” one person in Europe, who has sat in on years of negotiations, told Fortune on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. Such a signing ceremony, he said, could be a long way off.
Trump and Macron’s telephone call was a last-ditch scramble to avoid a fresh U.S.-France trade war over digital taxes.
Last year, France imposed taxes on major tech companies, taxing 3% of revenues generated in the country. While the measure was aimed at all major companies, no matter where their headquarters were, the French immediately nicknamed it “la taxe GAFA,” for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. All four companies, as well as many others, have for decades used complex accounting acrobatics to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes in countries where they have huge dealings. Italy, Austria, and the U.K. have all announced that they plan to follow France’s example.
Trump, who saw Macron’s tech tax as as a direct hit on Silicon Valley, announced last month that he would retaliate with 100% tariffs on French goods like cheese, wine, and Champagne. “I’m a tariff man,” Trump tweeted last month. “It will always be the best way to max out our economic power.”
But Trump had not reckoned with the fury from American importers, who would be directly responsible for paying Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, at the risk of losing business. Thousands of American wine merchants and distributors flooded the U.S. Trade Representative’s inbox last month with pleas to halt the trade-war talk, and to avoid the threatened 100% tariffs. “It will pretty much mean the destruction of the modern wine industry as we know it,” Steve Melchiskey, president and owner of USA Wine West LLC, from his base in Portland, Maine, told me after I visited wineries in Burgundy.
For now, Macron and Trump seem to have stepped back from the brink. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire are due to meet on Wednesday to thrash out the details, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
But the challenge that inspired Macron’s tech tax in the first place shows no signs of fading: how to compel global companies to pay their fair share of taxes. That issue is sure to continue heating up, especially as protesters from Santiago to Paris storm the streets to rail against economic injustice.
The figures are indeed head-spinning. International Monetary Fund researchers estimate that countries lose more than $600 billion a year in revenues as a result of global corporations not paying taxes in the countries where they do business.
The problem extends far beyond Big Tech. Buy a Zara dress in Milan, for example, and the revenue is registered to the company’s entity in low-tax Luxembourg. Mine copper in Zambia, and the resulting revenue might accrue to a parent company in Switzerland, rather than that African country, where per capita income is $8,000 a year.
Such glaring disparities exploded into public consciousness after the 2008 financial crisis, when sweeping job losses and cuts to public services in the U.S. and Europe made corporate tax schemes far harder to ignore.
“By 2012, public anger was much greater,” says Alex Cobham, an economist and chief executive of the London-based Tax Justice Network, an international network of experts working against tax avoidance. “There was a global consensus that something had to be done.”
But Macron’s agreement with Trump not to tax tech giants—for now—hangs on governments agreeing jointly to a new global arrangement on corporate taxes: Instead of each country trying to impose its own taxes, countries would jointly agree to tax companies at a certain minimum rate, in an attempt to stop them from shopping around for tax havens, from the Caribbean to Singapore.
Next week top tax specialists from about 135 governments will meet in Paris at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for talks on how to overhaul global corporate taxes—an issue the OECD has grappled with for about eight years. The idea is to rework an international system that has lasted for nearly 100 years, and which has long allowed companies to set up separate entities in different parts of the world, thus shifting their profits from high-tax countries to low-tax ones, no matter where the money is made.
Now, even tech giants themselves are pushing for change, perhaps realizing that unless the OECD negotiates new global rules, they might face dozens of different new national taxes, along the lines of Macron’s GAFA measure.
“It is very complex to know how to tax a multinational,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Monday, in Cork, a port city in Ireland, a low-tax country where the company has located key parts of its business since 1980. “We desperately want it to be fair.” The EU fined Apple 13 billion euros (about $14.3 billion) in 2016 for its ultralow tax agreements with Ireland.
But what “fair” means is a matter of deep dispute among CEOs and government officials.
Cobham says he fears that the OECD talks—in which U.S. companies and officials will play a large role—could finally result in a global corporate minimum tax rate that is far below what his organization and other NGOs have long argued for. Trump’s 2017 tax reforms included a 12.5% corporate tax rate, which the OECD has mentioned as a possibility for its new global rules.
“We could end up with something that in terms of real revenue will not go very far,” Cobham says. Even so, he says it would be a good start. “The energy to do something more serious will not dissipate.”
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—Food-delivery services feeling pressure to finally turn a profit
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Subscribe to Fortune’s forthcoming Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-01-21--‘Parasite’ director Bong Joon Ho dissects his tale of two families

Family dysfunction inspired a multitude of this year’s Oscar nominees. Knives Out (Best Screenplay) pits a plucky housekeeper against a dead man’s murderously spiteful heirs. Marriage Story (six nominations including Best Picture) follows a once-happy couple and their son through a bitter divorce. Joker (11 nominations including Best Picture) traces its antihero’s misery to an awful childhood and mentally ill mother.
And then there’s Parasite. Writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s spellbinding tale of two families, which earned some notable wins at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards, became the first South Korean film to earn a Best Picture nod, along with Academy Award nominations for director, screenplay, editing, production design, and international film. A taut crowd-pleaser with around $140 million and counting at the worldwide box office, Parasite revisits the class warfare theme explored by Bong in his 2013 dystopian train-from-hell adventure, Snowpiercer.
The Kim family (from left: Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin, Park So Dam) as seen in Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite.” The film is about two Korean families and the class issues that result as they come into contact. Courtesy of Neon + CJ Entertainment
This time around, economic inequality dims the prospects for bright but impoverished twentysomething Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), his facile liar of a sister (Park So Dam), his unemployed dad (Song Kang Ho), and his formidable mother (Chang Hyae Jin). Together, the destitute Kim clan hatch a scheme to take over the wealthy Park family’s enormous home.
Through a translator, Bong spoke to Fortune via email about Parasite’s bittersweet family dynamics.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Bong Joon Ho directs a scene on the set of “Parasite.” Courtesy of Neon + CJ Entertainment
Parasite opens on the very lively Kim family crowded into this tiny sub-basement space with zero privacy. How did you get the idea for introducing these characters in this way?
More than anything else the inspiration was the space itself, a narrow semi-basement home with low ceilings. Because this family of four live in such a small space, they can’t be by themselves even if they want to, and they have no choice but to eat, chat, and hang out with each other. They even work together, folding pizza boxes, and share beers afterward to celebrate. I think the film shows a family naturally blending into their space.
Cho Yeo Jeong is the Park family’s gullible mother in “Parasite.” Courtesy of Neon + CJ Entertainment
Contrast that with the well-to-do Park family in their huge house, where the father, the mom, and their two kids barely communicate.
Because the Park family live in such a big home, they can separate themselves from each other, and it feels like they need to hop on the phone to talk to each other. What’s interesting is that I intentionally didn’t show any physical intimacy between the parents and children throughout the entire film. In particular, the mom, Yeongyo, is very fond of and almost obsessed with her son, but you don’t ever see her hugging or patting him. It’s actually the housekeeper, Moongwang, who takes him in her arms and plays with him, which you see repeatedly in the beginning. So when she’s fired and kicked out of the house at the halfway point of the film, we see a lonely shot of the boy where he feels even more solitude.
When the two families come together under one roof, deceit, envy, and class snobbery lead to a tragic third act. How does the Parasite story reflect your observations about the real world?
We currently live in this fantasy that people are equal, that the class system is obsolete, that we live in a free democratic society. I think the second half of this film shows the brutal truth that we still live in a cruel, classist society where these borderlines can never be eradicated. Jobs like tutoring, housekeeping, and driving create situations where people of different classes come so close to each other that they can smell one another, but they still can’t overcome the line that divides them.
The cast and crew of “Parasite” attend the 25th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on Jan. 12 in Santa Monica. Frazer Harrison—Getty Images
The driving force in Parasite, poor Ki-woo, dreams of a better life for himself and his family. How did you conceive of his character?
Ki-woo is not an angry young man. Despite his situation calling for complaints and rage, he doesn’t get angry, and you see him trying to be positive about everything. He also shows respect toward his father, who doesn’t have a lot to show for himself. I think that’s actually an honest portrayal of today’s youth. Instead of having a passion for revolution or being caught up in rage against the world, they seem to struggle to somehow adapt to this world which has been nothing but cruel to them. As someone who is part of a generation that experienced revolutions, I feel bad for them.
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fortune--2020-01-21--The ultimate guide to the state of today’s A.I.

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter on the news in artificial intelligence. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Fortune’s beautifully redesigned magazine hits newsstands this week. I urge you all to check it out, not least because the coverage package is devoted entirely to artificial intelligence. The issue serves as a concise field guide to the state of A.I. technology today.
Here’s a preview of what you’ll find inside.
Why are some of the world’s most valuable corporations putting big money into efforts to create artificial general intelligence (or AGI), the kind of human-like, super-capable A.I. that exists only in Hollywood flicks and sci fi paperbacks? I explore that question through the prism of Microsoft’s $1 billion investment into San Francisco-based OpenAI. The answer, it turns out, has as much to do with the quest’s ancillary benefits—improved algorithms, better cloud computing capabilities and, just as importantly, branding— as it does with a desire to actually achieve the moonshot’s ultimate aim, something most A.I. researchers think won’t happen for decades, if at all.
In a companion story, I examine recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and their impact on business. After years of A.I.’s language capabilities lagging progress in computer vision, the past eighteen months have seen a series of advances. What’s more, those new language models are making a faster leap out of the lab and into products used by billions than ever before. Could better language understanding be the key to unlocking more human-like A.I.? Some experts think so.
My colleague Maria Aspan delves into A.I.’s use in hiring and human resources management, one of the hottest areas for the technology. A desire to move beyond human biases and widen the talent pool is driving adoption of machine learning-driven technologies in hiring. But, as Maria reports, the opaque nature of many of the models used by HR algorithms is raising new concerns that companies have simply swapped one kind of bias for another, more insidious, kind.
Freelance reporter Jennifer Alsever looks at the crop of startups hoping to upend the pharmaceutical industry by using A.I. in drug discovery. In particular, Toronto-based Deep Genomics used machine learning to find a therapeutic candidate for the rare genetic disorder Wilson’s disease. There’s plenty of hope that companies like this will help slash drug development costs. But Eric Topol, the cardiologist and geneticist who has become an important voice of moderation amid all the hype surrounding A.I. in medicine, tells Jennifer the whole field right now is “long on promise and short on proof.”
Hong Kong-based Eamon Barrett examines China’s national ambitions to become a world leader in artificial intelligence. Beijing’s strategic aims and surging funding for the technology have set alarm bells ringing in Washington. China also has access to vast pools of data on its own citizens. However, Jeffrey Ding, a researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute who studies China’s A.I. strategy, tells Barrett that “the U.S. is still far ahead,” continuing to hold the lead in both algorithms and the specialized computing hardware needed to run A.I. systems.
Barrett’s story is well worth checking out for its discussion of ByteDance, the company behind the wildly popular TikTok. Machine learning-driven recommendations lie at the heart of TikTok’s success, Barrett writes, but Chinese officials haven’t exactly embraced ByteDance as a standard bearer for homegrown A.I. expertise. Why? Apparently, Chinese Communist Party officials might consider the video sharing service too frivolous. Given how important social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have become to political discourse globally, Beijing may be overlooking a potent strategic asset.
Read the full package here, and keep reading for a quick round-up of the week’s other A.I. news.
Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
A.I. in the news
Google wants A.I. regulation, but asks for U.S., E.U. coordination
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai called for government regulation of artificial intelligence in a speech before a think tank in Brussels on Monday and in an accompanying op-ed in The Financial Times. "There is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated," the CEO writes. "It is too important not to." In particular, the CEO said he favors a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology, at least until appropriate ethical standards and rules can be agreed. But Pichai wants European Union leaders, who are set to unveil plans for new A.I. regulations next month, and Washington to coordinate. He also wants regulators to take a "proportionate approach, balancing potential harms with social opportunities." Pichai reiterated these points in a talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today.
Clearview's massive facial dataset is helping police—and obliterating privacy
The A.I. startup Clearview has built perhaps the world's largest database of faces, including images of more than 3 billion people, and is using it to help law enforcement identify people, The New York Times reports in an investigation into the company. Clearview created its database largely by scraping photos from social media sites such as Facebook, in violation of those sites' terms and conditions. Clearview is accelerating concerns about facial recognition's impact on privacy and civil rights. "I don't see a future where we harness the benefits of facial recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it," Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, tells The Times.
Apple buys A.I. startup Xnor.ai for $200 million
The iPhone maker bought the Seattle-based company that specializes in making A.I. algorithms efficient enough to run on so-called "edge devices," such as mobile phones or even lower-powered electronics, such as security cameras. The company was spun-out of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the A.I. research lab set up by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "Apple would presumably have a special appreciation for the fact that Xnor.ai’s tools can keep AI data secure on mobile devices rather than sending it to the cloud," according to GeekWire, which first broke the news of the acquisition.
Huawei creates a cloud computing and A.I. division
The Chinese telecom equipment giant has announced the creation of a new business group focused on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, according to a report in Technode. The new division, which will be headed by Hou Jinlong, is Huawei's fourth business unit, joining its carrier, consumer and enterprise divisions. The move represents an attempt by the company, which is facing a U.S. campaign to restrict the sale of its products globally on security grounds, to diversify away from telecom equipment sales, according to the story.
FDA approves stroke-spotting A.I.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved A.I. software from Aidoc, a startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that can spot evidence of strokes during brain scans in near real-time, the Jerusalem Post reported. Computer vision pioneers—including Turing Award winner Geoff Hinton—have predicted such A.I. software would soon eliminate the need for radiologists. But Aidoc's system is evidence that such forecasts were, at best, premature. Aidoc's system is designed to help human doctors, not replace them. If the software detects the possibility of a blocked blood vessel in a CTA scan, it doesn't make a definitive diagnosis—instead it reorders the doctors' workflow so that the worrisome scans are brought to their attention for review first.
Aidoc's system joins a growing list of A.I. software gaining FDA approval—in fact, this is the fourth FDA approval that Aidoc alone has secured (it had previous approvals for systems for brain bleeds, spinal fractures, and pulmonary embolisms). But critics, such as Dr. Eric Topol, have raised concerns that the FDA is employing too lax a standard for approving this kind of software, especially when the manufacturers claim it is to be used only as a triage tool, not as a diagnostic aid. In the majority of cases, the FDA has approved the use of these algorithms without publicly available, peer-reviewed research into their effectiveness. Some fear there's little evidence on whether using these devices actually improves patient outcomes.
Eye on A.I. talent
Intel has appointed Archana Deskus as its senior vice president and chief information officer. Deskus is joining Intel from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise , where she held a similar role.
has appointed as its senior vice president and chief information officer. Deskus is joining Intel from , where she held a similar role. Former Goldman Sachs Chief Technology Officer Marty Chavez has joined the board of A.I. healthcare startup Paige, which was started by two doctors from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and applies machine learning to a large database of cancer pathology reports in the hopes of finding ways to detect and treat the disease earlier.
Chief Technology Officer has joined the board of A.I. healthcare startup which was started by two doctors from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and applies machine learning to a large database of cancer pathology reports in the hopes of finding ways to detect and treat the disease earlier. A.I. researcher Jeff Clune has joined OpenAI, the San Francisco-based A.I. research company, to lead a project on building A.I. that can generate other A.I. algorithms. Clune, who will also be an associate professor of computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, had been a researcher at Uber's A.I. lab.
Eye on A.I. research
Neural networks that do math. Facebook says it has developed a deep learning system capable of solving advanced mathematical equations faster and more accurately than traditional mathematics software. Previously, many computer scientists thought neural networks could not learn to solve these problems, which require symbolic reasoning and precision. Facebook succeeded by treating the equations as if they were a language and applying techniques from recent progress in machine translation. The result is further evidence of the power of new techniques in natural language processing. But these systems are still massively data hungry—to achieve this result, Facebook trained its network on 100 million pairs of problems and solutions.
Google says it's going to rain. Researchers at the search giant have built a machine learning model that can forecast rain up to six hours in advance in a specific location (down to one square kilometer) from radar imagery with better accuracy than any previous method. The "now-casting" technique may have uses in agriculture, insurance and disaster and emergency management.
If you thought BERT was a big deal, get a load of Google's "Reformer" Google A.I. research has unveiled a new sequence-learning architecture called "the Reformer," which is a more efficient version of its seminal 2017 neural network design, the transformer. Transformers have had a massive impact on all kinds of A.I., but most notably in natural language processing, where they underpin the language model called BERT, now used to build numerous commercial applications at companies from Facebook to LinkedIn to Microsoft. But transformers have a problem—if you want them to understand contextual information over a lot of text, say many thousands of words, they use up a lot of computing power. With Reformer, Google has created a system that can look at a context window of up to 1 million words but still do all that processing on a single A.I. accelerator chip using only 16 gigabytes of memory.
Danish researchers say DeepMind's AlphaZero can solve quantum problems. A team from Aarhus University in Denmark took the same algorithm that DeepMind developed to play games like Go and chess and used it to create novel solutions to the optimization problems that researchers hope to crack using quantum computers, according to a report in The Next Web. Optimization problems turn up in business all the time. For instance, the traveling salesman problem is used to figure out the optimal way to route delivery trucks given certain constraints.
DeepMind shows off its protein-folding prowess. The London-based A.I. research company, which is part of Google-parent Alphabet, published a paper in Nature detailing that it had made significant progress in training a deep learning system to predict how certain proteins would fold. The system learned to predict the distance between different amino acid residues. The system could have a big impact in identifying possible future pharmaceutical therapies. Look for more work in this area from DeepMind going forward.
Fortune on A.I.
In addition to our A.I. special package highlighted above, check out these Fortune stories on A.I.:
Facebook wants better A.I. tools. But superintelligent systems? Not so much.—by Jeremy Kahn
This startup is creating a massive health care map and just raised $50 million—by Sy Mukherjee
Could Fitbit be a flu warning tool?—by Sy Mukherjee
Brain food
In a second Nature paper published on the same day as its protein folding research, DeepMind demonstrated that dopamine-sensitive neurons (in the brains of mice and probably in humans too) don't all have the same reward expectations: Some are programmed to be more optimistic, some more pessimistic. Collectively, they allow the brain to form a more accurate estimate of the actual distribution of the world's rewards than if all the neurons had equal expectations.
DeepMind suspected this was the case. In its work on reinforcement learning, in which an A.I. model learns from experience to maximize some reward, having this diversity of sensitivity in the artificial neurons of a neural network is the most efficient way to accurately map the actual reward distribution. DeepMind says its work could eventually lead to new ways to treat motivation disorders in people—such as depression or impulsivity. It also says the results prove its A.I. work "is on the right track, since this algorithm is already being used in the most intelligent entity we're aware of: the brain."
What does A.I. mean for your company? Find out at Brainstorm A.I.
If you’re interested to learn how some of the biggest, most influential companies are strategizing about artificial intelligence, come to Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference in Boston on April 27-28, 2020. A.I. is a game-changing technology that promises to revolutionize business, but it can be confusing and mysterious to executives. The savviest leaders know how to cut through the deluge of A.I. buzzwords and reap the technology’s benefits.
Attendees of this invite-only confab can take part in cutting-edge conversations with top corporate execs, leading A.I. thinkers, and power players. Among them: United States Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios; Accenture CEO Julie Sweet; Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford; Siemens U.S. CEO Barbara Humpton; Royal Philips NV CEO Frans van Houten; Landing AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng; Robust.AI founder and CEO Gary Marcus; and top machine learning experts from Bank of America, Dow, Verizon, Slack, Zoom, Pinterest, Lyft, and MIT. You can request an invitation here.
The future of Fortune is here
In 1930, Fortune published its first-ever issue, featuring the goddess Fortuna and her wheel on the cover. This year, on our 90th anniversary, we’re celebrating with a new Fortune. Here’s what’s in store for you:


fortune--2020-01-21--How impeachment hearings in the Senate will work

The U.S. Senate, which includes four presidential candidates among its body of 100 lawmakers, will begin the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon. They are expected to move swiftly and in the direction of Trump’s full acquittal under the careful watch of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell released a four-page memo late Monday evening that laid out the way he expected the hearings to advance. Those proposed rules will be debated and voted on in the Senate this afternoon but should pass the united Republican-majority legislative body with little fanfare, despite loud protests by Democratic leadership.
The rules give the president’s attorneys and House impeachment managers just 24 hours over two days each to argue their sides. That means the majority of the trial could be over in just four days, well ahead of President Trump’s February 4th State of the Union Address to Congress.
The rules also mean that the trial will likely extend into the early hours of the morning, taking place in grueling, marathon sessions.
During President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, managers and attorneys were also given 24 hours to make their opening arguments, but those hours weren’t constricted to two calendar days.
“McConnell’s resolution stipulates that key facts be delivered in the wee hours of the night simply because he doesn’t want the American people to hear them,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement on Monday evening.
Opening arguments could begin as early as Wednesday at 1 p.m. E.T.
After arguments are heard, senators will have a 16-hour period in which they can submit questions to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the hearings. After that, the Senate will vote up or down on whether to allow any witness subpoenas.
Republicans will likely block the measure, but if they’re unable to do so, each side will be allowed to make motions for each new witness or evidence subpoena, which will also be subject to a vote.
That means Republicans will have to approve of every witness or piece of evidence Democrats wish to submit.
McConnell, who in the past said he would stick to the Clinton impeachment rules, also included another hurdle not seen in 1999. The Senate will not automatically include House evidence in its trial record. That will have to also be admitted by vote.
On Tuesday, Schumer told MSNBC that the no witnesses or documents clause was offensive to the “basic American sense of fairness,” and that it all but guaranteed a lopsided trial.
“Everything in these rules is rigged…They are so afraid, so afraid of the facts coming out that they want things to be presented at two, three in the morning. Give me a break,” he said.
Schumer said that the Democratic strategy relied heavily on the 2020 elections, and that his party would use Republicans going on the record to deny the entry of any evidence into the hearing against them, but that for now their hands were relatively tied in a “rigged game.”
President Trump will be represented in the trial by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, personal lawyer and conservative radio talk show host Jay Sekulow, former O.J. Simpson lawyer and Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, former President Bill Clinton investigator Ken Starr, former federal prosecutor and frequent Fox News guest Robert Ray, former attorney general of Florida Pam Bondi, former federal attorney Jane Raskin, and longtime personal lawyer Eric D. Herschmann.
The group is not expected to deny any allegations that the President put pressure on Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in exchange for critical aid, but will instead argue that the articles of impeachment presented by the House don’t allege that Trump actually broke the law.
The House will send seven Democrats, known as managers, to argue their case in Senate.
They include Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Representatives Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Val Demings (D-Fla.), Jason Crow (D-Colo.), and Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas). All of the Democrats are lawyers with the exception of Demings, who was previously the police chief of Florida.
Democrats are expected to rely heavily on a new report out by the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency, which found that Trump broke the law by withholding $400 million in aid to Ukraine “for a policy reason” this summer.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO wrote Thursday. “The withholding was not a programmatic delay.”
Meanwhile, a CNN poll out Monday found that the majority of Americans, 51%, would like to see the President impeached and removed from office. A slight minority, 45%, said they would like the President to remain in office. The numbers show that American voters are invested and involved in the impeachment process, with just 4% having no concrete opinion ahead of the Senate trials.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Donald Trump and the power of incumbency
—Why the U.K. is bailing out regional airline Flybe when it’s let others fail
—The wealthiest members of Congress—and how they made their millions
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
—2020 Crystal Ball: Predictions for the economy, politics, technology, and more
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fortune--2020-01-21--The History channel’s aliens and UFOs content continues to blossom as ‘Project Blue Book’ returns

David O’Leary and Sean Jablonski have been into UFOs since they were kids. Both grew up in New York City, where O’Leary saw the alien-abduction movie Communion at age 9 and Jablonski saw a UFO in the sky at age 10. Both events inspired an enduring fascination with the topic, which the two men are gleefully exploring by making Project Blue Book, a UFO-focused drama series for the History channel.
O’Leary, the show’s creator, describes Project Blue Book, which sees its second season debut Tuesday, as “a real-life X-Files set in the time of Mad Men, told through the eyes of J. Allen Hynek.”
Hynek, played by Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones) in the series, was a Ph.D. astrophysicist conscripted by the United States Air Force in the late 1940s to investigate UFO reports as part of an effort called Project Sign, which was later replaced by Project Blue Book.
Hired mainly to debunk sightings by providing scientific explanations, Hynek was a known UFO skeptic before spending a decade and a half investigating them with the Air Force. He left the experience convinced that such phenomena merited true scientific study—something the Air Force barely afforded him. As he said in a 1985 interview, “They wouldn’t give UFOs the chance of existing,” instead insisting that Hynek provide an alternative explanation for every case—rendering Project Blue Book a sort of public relations UFO cover-up.
The real J. Allen Hynek, seen here in 1972, is a character in the History channel’s “Project Blue Book.” David Cupp—The Denver Post via Getty Images
“The idea of someone who is a skeptic transforming into a believer is universal,” says Jablonski, Project Blue Book’s showrunner. Both he and O’Leary point to the current “fake news” climate and the public’s resultant skepticism as key to Project Blue Book’s resonating with viewers. “We always talk about how [the real Project Blue Book] was sort of the beginnings of fake news,” says O’Leary.
“Project Blue Book”creator David O’Leary, left, and showrunner, Sean Jablonski, have been fascinated with UFOs since childhood. Courtesy of History
The show started out as a spec pilot by O’Leary—and it was snapped up right away by History. “They told me this was the first and only spec pilot they’ve ever bought,” says O’Leary. With Robert Zemeckis, of Back to the Future and Contact fame, already signed on to executive-produce, it wasn’t the hardest sell.
On top of that, two years after the New York Times reported on the government’s secret program investigating unexplained aerial phenomena—the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP—UFOs, aliens, and government secrecy are “having a bit of a moment right now,” Jablonski says. “Alien” was the No. 2 search word that “defined 2019” on Pornhub, and over the summer, the Internet momentarily united under the rallying cry to “Storm Area 51,” a Nevada military base rumored to house extraterrestrials.
History’s … history with UFOs
However, UFOs’ presence on History is nothing new. With more than 150 episodes, Ancient Aliens, which started off as a two-hour special in 2009, is now one of the channel’s longest-running series, says History EVP and general manager Eli Lehrer. He notes that when those at History “saw the ratings results and the audience interest, they went back to the producer [Prometheus Entertainment] and said, ‘Okay, can you do more?’”
Ancient Aliens and Project Blue Book are part of a growing arsenal of shows that Lehrer calls History’s “historical mysteries and the unknown” content, which has always seemed to fascinate the channel’s viewers. “I think aliens and UFOs are really the most iconic story in that category,” Lehrer says.
Gillen as Dr. J. Allen Hynek encounters an alien subject in History’s drama series “Project Blue Book.” Eduardo Araquel—History
Since 2007, History has aired alien-related series like Hunting UFOs, In Search of Aliens, and UFO Hunters, as well as “historical mystery” series that delve into the alien question for an episode or two, like In Search Of, MysteryQuest, and The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved.
Then 2019 brought with it a flood of new UFO-related content. There was the UFOs series—each installment getting its own title, like UFOs: Secret Alien Technology—along with The UnXplained, in which William Shatner delves into mysteries such as the pyramids. Secrets in the Sky: The Untold Story of Skunk Works also debuted last year. The documentary focuses on advanced aircraft created through Lockheed Martin’s hush-hush Skunk Works program, which people believe could offer alternative explanations for some UFO sightings.
Nick Pope, an author and TV personality who used to investigate paranormal-seeming events for the U.K. Ministry of Defense, has contributed to so many History channel shows since 2009; he can barely remember which ones he’s appeared in. (UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens are the big ones.) He’s also appeared on sister channels Discovery, the Travel Channel, and Science, as well as other programs in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
“In the last two years, this subject has absolutely come out of the fringe and into the mainstream with revelations of the Pentagon’s AATIP program and U.S. Navy encounters,” says Pope. “Other networks are right across this, too.”
But as to whether History, Travel, or some other channel is the most appropriate home for UFO content, it’s hard to say. “Is this really history?” Pope asks. “Is this really travel? Maybe the old definitions and boundaries are breaking down a bit.”
Entertaining the ‘truth’ of UFOs
This is by no means the first wave of interest in UFOs. The X-Files in the 1990s brought with it a thirst for the unexplained, followed by the likes of sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun in 1996, and teen love story Roswell— rebooted last year— in 1999. Such interest is often cyclical. (Give it a few years and vampires will be all over TV again.)
But unlike other channels riding the current UFO wave, History has helped write the story. Its other 2019 series, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, helped break this May 2019 New York Times story in which a Navy pilot discusses a 2014 unexplained sighting. The pilot, Lt. Ryan Graves, spoke out publicly first in Unidentified to Luis Elizondo, the former head of AATIP who left the program in 2017 and served as the source for the Times’ original breaking story on the program. He’s now carrying out his own investigation into unidentified aircraft, which History is following in Unidentified.
This dirt road leads to Area 51 from the Extraterrestrial Highway, Highway 375, south of Rachel, Nev. MyLoupe/UIG Via Getty Images
Unidentified is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Ancient Aliens. While the latter relies on less substantiated claims and dramatic music, the former consists of eyewitness accounts and linear pathways to new information. It’s gotten traction on the channel, too. About 19.1 million people watched throughout the first season, according to History, warranting a second season’s debut later this year.
Project Blue Book strikes a sort of balance between the measured Unidentified and the more “out there” Ancient Aliens. It uses real historical events and witness accounts, but supplements that with ample fictional drama propelled by romance, spies, and firsthand sightings the real Hynek never had. His partner in the show, Captain Michael Quinn, played by Michael Malarkey, is a stand-in for the Blue Book director from 1952 to 1953, Edward Ruppelt.
To sort fact from fiction, every Project Blue Book episode is followed by a short documentary, which discusses the real-life case that inspired that week’s plot. Hynek’s sons, Paul and Joel, also serve as consultants on the show, sharing anecdotes about their parents to help keep their characters authentic. Hynek’s wife, Mimi (played by Laura Mennell), has a significant role in the series.
Intelligence officer Jesse Marcel initially investigated and recovered some of the debris from the Roswell UFO site in 1947. Following wide initial interest in the crashed “flying disc” at the site, the U.S. military stated that it was merely a conventional weather balloon. Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The new season of Project Blue Book will begin with UFO heavy hitters like the Roswell incident, in which a mysterious 1947 crash in the small New Mexico town sparked what many call a government cover-up (the government explained the incident as a fallen weather balloon). Though the real life Blue Book investigation didn’t look into Roswell, O’Leary is excited to get to “share details of those events.”
In making this show, O’Leary grapples regularly with packaging historical accounts as entertainment. It’s hard enough to find real information through the fog of conspiracies when it comes to unexplained aerial sightings. Yet recent disclosures about AATIP and from U.S. Navy pilots indicate that real unexplained events have taken place. (Note: The events are not to be confused with the existence of aliens or alien spacecraft—an unidentified object could be a drone or even a bird, as the real Project Blue Book sometimes suggested.)
Making a fictional show about a past alleged government cover-up on the topic of UFOs could certainly muddy the already dark waters. “We don’t want to be part of this ‘fake news’ or confusing the issue,” O’Leary says, but he still wants to entertain.
As for History’s overall thoughts on UFO programming, Lehrer says, “We work very hard on a show like Project Blue Book to maintain a certain degree of ambiguity.” Rather, he says, it’s the “dynamic between belief and skepticism” that makes the series, and others like it on the channel, so compelling for viewers who love a mystery.
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—Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fleabag cast reflect on love, religion, and saying goodbye
—These Oscar Best Picture nominees are “problematic,” but will that matter?
—The oral history of Laura Dern—in her own words
—World War I takes the pop culture spotlight after years of being the “neglected war”
—Disney is ready to roll out new Star Wars sagas as one story ends
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fortune--2020-01-21--Why investors are pouring capital into fertility startups

The business of getting pregnant is attracting big dollars.
My colleague Beth Kowitt has an incredibly interesting and deeply reported story on the driving forces behind the fertility sector’s growth. Investors poured $646 million into the fertility sector in 2018, according to PitchBook. Startups have launched to address egg freezing, ovulation tracking, IVF financing, at-home hormone testing, and more.
“Real dollars are starting to flow into this category,” Stephanie Palmeri, a partner with VC firm Uncork Capital, told Fortune. Last year, I noticed an uptick in venture capital funding for male fertility startups in particular. At the time, I noted that awareness is growing around male fertility, and startups and their deep-pocketed backers are here to capitalize on it.
For all its progress and momentum, the modern fertility industry remains relatively immature. While there’s no question that companies in the space are making fertility more accessible and affordable, they have been criticized for focusing on wooing customers who may not necessarily need the service. Kowitt notes that there are medical insiders who call it “the Wild West of medicine” — under-regulated and commercially driven, with certain players overpromising what treatment can do.
From the story:
While some cheer the sector’s focus on women’s health, others say it has reinforced stereotypes that equate women’s worth with their ability to reproduce. And it is women whom the industry targets: Despite the fact that men cause or contribute to infertility in about half of cases, companies have only recently turned their attention to male partners. There’s no denying that fertility is emotionally complicated in ways most other areas of the health care system are not. “There’s little we care about more than our children, which makes this a particularly fraught and charged area,” says Greely. “The stakes are just higher when you play for babies.”
Read the full feature here.
WORLD’S MOST ADMIRED: Fortune‘s ranking of the most admired companies is out today—and Apple tops the list for a 13th year in a row. See who else made the list here.
BRAINSTORM A.I: If you’re interested to learn how some of the biggest, most influential companies are strategizing about artificial intelligence, come to Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference in Boston on April 27-28, 2020. A.I. is a game-changing technology that promises to revolutionize business, but it can be confusing and mysterious to executives. The savviest leaders know how to cut through the deluge of A.I. buzzwords and reap the technology’s benefits.
Attendees of this invite-only confab can take part in cutting-edge conversations with top corporate execs, leading A.I. thinkers, and power players. Among them: United States Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios; Accenture CEO Julie Sweet; Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford; Siemens U.S. CEO Barbara Humpton; Royal Philips NV CEO Frans van Houten; Landing AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng; Robust.AI founder and CEO Gary Marcus; and top machine learning experts from Bank of America, Dow, Verizon, Slack, Zoom, Pinterest, Lyft, and MIT. You can request an invitation here.
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- GoPuff, a Philadelphia-based on-demand delivery startup, raised $750 million in funding from SoftBank in August, with an option to invest an additional $250 million in 2020, according to The Information. Read more.
- AvidXchange, a Charlotte, N.C.-based provider of accounts payable and payment automation solutions for the middle market, raised $260 million in funding. TPG Sixth Street Partners led the round.
- AppsFlyer, an Israel-based mobile ad attribution company, raised $210 million in Series D funding at a valuation of $1.6 billion. General Atlantic led the round, and was joined by investors including Qumra Capital, Goldman Sachs Growth, DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners), Pitango Venture Capital, and Magma Venture Partners.
- Snyk, a London-based security company, raised $150 million in funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Stripes led the round, and was joined by investors including Accel, Coatue, Tiger Global, BoldStart, GV, Canaan,Trend Forward, Amity and Salesforce Ventures.
- Qonto, a Paris-based challenger business bank, raised $115 million in Series C funding. Tencent and DST Global co-led the round.
- scoutbee Inc, a Germany-based supplier discovery platform, raised $60 million in Series B funding. Atomico led the round, and was joined by investors including Lakestar, Next47, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, 42CAP and Toba Capital.
- The Athletic, a San Francisco-based subscription-based digital sports media company, raised $50 million in Series D funding, according to Axios. Bedrock Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including Emerson Collective, Plus Capital, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Evolution Media and Powerhouse Capital. Read more.
- Flutterwave, a San Francisco-based payments technology company with operations in Africa, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Greycroft and eVentures co-led the round, and was joined by investors including CRE Ventures, FIS, VISA, and Green Visor.
- Soft Robotics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based robotics company. raised $23 million in Series B funding. Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact co-led the round, and was joined by investors including Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, and Yamaha.
- Home, a Berlin-based company aiming to reduce complexity in the housing experience, raised €11 million ($12.2 million) in Series A funding. Investors include Capnamic, the EQT Ventures fund, FJ Labs and Redalpine.
- Elder, a U.K.-based care home alternative, raised £8.2 million ($10.7 million) in funding. Investors includes Acton Capital and MMC Ventures.
- Mine, an Israel-based company that helps people manage their personal data online, raised $3 million in seed funding. Investors include Battery Ventures and Saban Ventures.
PRIVATE EQUITY DEALS
- Magna Legal Services, a portfolio company of CIVC Partners, acquired RecordTrak, Inc, a King of Prussia, Penn.-based provider of litigation support solutions for law firms, insurance companies, and corporations. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Ares Holdings, a portfolio company of Ares Management Corporation (NYSE: ARES) agreed to acquire a controlling interest in SSG Capital Holdings Limited, an Asia-based alternative asset management firm.
- Thompson Street Capital Partners and Sandbox Insurtech Ventures will acquire Data Dimensions, a Janesville, Wisc.-based provider of outsourced document handling and workflow solutions for the P&C insurance, financial services and government industries. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHER DEALS
- Horse & Country TV acquired EQ Sports Net, an equestrian streaming provider. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
IPOs
- Reynolds Consumer Products, the maker of Reynolds aluminum foil and Hefty trash bags, says it plans to raise $1.25 billion in an IPO of 47.17 million shares priced between $25 to $28 apiece. The firm posted revenue of $3 billion in 2018 and net income of $337 million. Rank Group backs the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “REYN.” Read more.
- 1Life Healthcare, a San Francisco-based chain of primary-care clinics known as One Medical, says it plans to raise $262.5 million in an IPO of 17.5 million shares priced between $14 to $16 apiece. The firm posted revenue of $212.7 million in 2018 and losses of $45.5 million. The Carlyle Group (26.8%), Benchmark (13%), and Oak Investment Partners (11.4%) back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “ONEM.” Read more.
- Black Diamond Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech developing small molecule, tumor-agnostic therapies, says it plans to raise $151.3 million in an IPO of 8.9 million shares priced between $16 to $18 apiece. The firm has yet to post a revenue and posted losses of $8.9 million in 2018. Versant Ventures (42%), New Enterprise Associates (11.2%), and RA Capital Management (6.7%) back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “BDTX.” Read more.
- Itsu, a New York-based Asian-inspired food chain backed by the co-founder of Pret A Manger, is seeking an IPO in the U.S., MarketWatch reports. Read more.
FIRMS + FUNDS
- Asterion Industrial Partners, a Spain-based investment management firm, raised €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) for its inaugural fund Asterion Industrial Infra Fund I, FCR.
- MassMutual Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital arm of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, raised $100 million for its second South Asia fund.
PEOPLE
- Amplify Partners promoted Lenny Pruss to general partner and Sarah Catanzaro to partner.
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fortune--2020-01-21--Google’s internal culture clash isn’t hurting its valuation–yet

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning. Fortune tech writer Danielle Abril filling in for Adam today.
Last week, Google’s parent Alphabet hit another big milestone. The company reached a market cap of $1 trillion just before the market closed on Thursday. Alphabet joins two other U.S. companies, Microsoft and Apple, in the exclusive club of the world’s most valuable companies. (Amazon was also once in the coveted group but has since dropped in value.)
But while Google, which raked in $136.8 billion in revenue in 2018, instills more and more confidence in investors, it’s plagued by rising dissent among its employees. With a new trillion-dollar feather in its cap, the burning question remains: How important is it for Alphabet to fix its internal culture clash?
If you ask Googlers, the answer is extremely. Employees have been outspoken about various issues including the company’s work on secret projects like a censored search engine for China and its reportedly poor handling of sexual harassment claims. In November, Google fired four activist employees, claiming that they broke company policies. The employees deny the allegations, saying the company was retaliating against their organizing work.
In the latest chapter of the culture war, on Jan. 2, Google’s former head of international relations Ross LaJeunesse wrote a Medium post detailing the company’s alleged dwindling concern for human rights and its mismanagement of diversity and inclusion issues.
“I’m not just telling a story of, ‘Gee, look at this shitty company that acts a different way,’” he told me a day after his post. “I’ve lived through the transformation. I didn’t change. Google changed.”
The situation got even stickier after Alphabet chief legal officer David Drummond recently stepped down following Alphabet’s investigation of the executive’s alleged inappropriate relationships with coworkers.
Meanwhile, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has spent the last several weeks transitioning from his former role as CEO of Google and will now ultimately be charged with resolving employees’ concerns.
I spoke to a few former Googlers following the announcement of the change in leadership. While they relayed confidence in Pichai’s technical prowess and business acumen, some worried he isn’t available to handle some of the more sensitive issues as it relates to the company’s culture. (“There is … no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future,” the letter announcing his new role read.)
I’ll be interested in whether Pichai addresses any of the company’s culture concerns when Alphabet announces its third-quarter earnings on Feb. 3. But my bet is he’ll likely stick to what investors want to know: the bottom line.
* * *
Speaking of Google and parent company Alphabet, they finished at number seven on Fortune’s 2020 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, which was released today. Tech dominated, as it has in recent years, with Apple topping the list, followed by Amazon and Microsoft.
Danielle Abril
Twitter: @DanielleDigest
Email: danielle.abril@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Leave the gun, take the cannolis. Some smaller tech companies, including speaker maker Sonos and phone accessory maker PopSocket, testified at a Congressional hearing on Friday about their difficulties working with larger tech companies. Apple, Amazon, and Google were criticized for alleged anticompetitive behavior.
Avoiding a HAL scenario. As some of tech's top leaders head to Davos for the World Economic Forum, IBM is asking them to consider how best to regulate artificial intelligence. The company says rules are needed to eliminate biased A.I. and that companies should appoint a chief A.I. ethics officer. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai agrees. He gave a speech in Brussels on Monday calling for "a proportionate approach, balancing potential harms with social opportunities.” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty will be on a panel on the sidelines of the forum on Wednesday to discuss the proposal.
The wheels of justice grind slowly. Speaking of international relations, Canada this week began extradition hearings to decide whether to send Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company's founder, to the United States to face fraud charges. Meng was arrested in Vancouver just over a year ago.
Clipping their wings. Worried that your TV is spying on you? Yes, that's a real thing now. But Samsung has your back, with a new app called Privacy Choices that allows customers to see and stop what data their TV is collecting.
On a diet. Now-public Uber is looking for ways to trim its losses, including by getting out of some businesses. On Monday, the company said it would sell its Uber Eats business in India to rival Zomato in exchange for an almost 10% stake in the startup, which was recently valued at $3.6 billion. Uber is also testing a feature in California to allow drivers to set their own prices, as the company moves to avoid having drivers classified as employees.
Over the transom. The new CEO of Best Buy, Corie Barry, is facing an investigation by the company's board into allegations of personal misconduct from an anonymous letter. The letter claims Barry had a relationship with another high-level Best Buy executive before she became CEO, the Wall Street Journal reports.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Beyond bitcoin and cannabis, one of the hottest sectors for startups last year was the fertility industry. As women have delayed having children until older ages, the challenges of getting pregnant have increased. Fortune's own Beth Kowitt reports on the $15 billion business of babymaking in a feature story called Fertility Inc. Reproductive endocrinologist David Sable has started a fund to invest in some of the new startups.
A prime example is the antiquated technology used to store frozen embryos and eggs. Historically, many embryologists started out in animal husbandry, and they brought their storage system with them when they began working with human embryos: glorified farm tanks full of liquid nitrogen, sometimes labeled by hand. One of Sable’s portfolio companies, TMRW, is attempting to bring that system into the 21st century with robotic cryostorage. Better freezing technology for eggs and embryos has resulted in a spike in usage, leaving the old infrastructure struggling to keep up. TMRW estimates that the number of U.S. patients storing eggs or embryos ballooned from 17,000 in 2005 to nearly 700,000 in 2017. By 2025, the company expects that number to hit 2.6 million.
ON THE MOVE
Uber VP and head of new mobility Rachel Holt is leaving the company to co-found a new venture capital firm with former New Enterprise Associates partner Dayna Grayson. Their new firm, Construct Capital, will be based in Washington, D.C....One of Fortune's Most Powerful Women, lawyer Lisa Ellman, is joining Apple as a lobbyist. It isn't yet known what Ellman, who worked in the Obama White House and later co-founded the Commercial Drone Alliance, will focus on for Apple...Google hired tech entrepreneur Jewel Burks Solomon for the newly created position of head of Google for startups for the U.S. She keeps her role as managing partner at the investment fund Collab Capital...Cloud monitoring firm New Relic hired Adobe and former Microsoft exec Bill Staples as chief product officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Facebook wants better A.I. tools. But superintelligent systems? Not so much. By Jeremy Kahn
A.I. is transforming the job interview—and everything after By Maria Aspan
Apple TV+ shows streaming-wars clout with renewals for series that haven’t yet debuted By Stacey Wilson Hunt
These new rules might end tech’s reliance on Chinese investors By Mira R. Ricardel
The free streaming option offered by NBC’s Peacock is a real threat to Hulu By Lance Lambert
5G’s side streets will be empty without fiber’s interstate By Jeff Storey
Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, is an on-ramp for child sexual imagery, experts say By David Z. Morris
BEFORE YOU GO
If you have never had the pleasure of experiencing the works of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama firsthand, you may want to make plans to visit Washington, D.C. starting in April. The Hirshhorn Museum is putting on an exhibit titled "One with Eternity" featuring much of her best art, including several of her iconic Infinity Rooms filled with mirrors. Smithsonian Magazine has a preview with some pictures, but it's really something best experienced in person.
Aaron Pressman
On Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com


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fortune--2020-01-21--Why microgrids are key to solving energy poverty worldwide

Imagine you are one of the 840 million people around the world who live without access to electricity: Basic machinery is powered manually, you rush to finish work before sundown, there are limited means for reading or studying at night, and you are locked out of the modern information economy. Yet imagine that suddenly, your situation changes with the arrival of microgrids.
Renewable energy microgrids, also referred to as mini-grids, are decentralized electrification systems, comprising local generation (solar, biomass, micro-hydro), battery storage, a small control room, and local distribution lines. These grids offer not only the potential of electricity, but also the power of data and technology.
This reversal of fortune is now possible for hundreds of millions of people. In fact, it is one of the critical Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, SDG7: the global goal of ensuring basic energy access for 100% of the world’s population by 2030. Yet as we look ahead to this new decade, at the current rate of progress, 650 million people will still be left behind and locked out of the modern economy, according to the report tracking progress on SDG7. The business, social, and public sectors must come together to do more.
When electricity enters a community, everything changes. Families can light their homes, charge their cell phones, and power appliances that save hours of household chores each day. Communities enjoy modern health care services and education, and streetlights increase safety for women and girls.
Farmers increase their crop yields with irrigation, protect their crop value with cold storage, or increase their returns through postharvest processing. Small businesses can grow and hire new workers, connecting into increasingly integrated supply chains and markets at home and around the world. Indeed, electricity is the foundation on which modern businesses run and thrive.
When such gains happen at scale, the economic benefits multiply and lift up communities, regions, and countries. This is what ending energy poverty means—and why we believe ending energy poverty is core to ending poverty itself in the 21st century.
We are now at a tipping point: Advances in science and technology have produced next generation, decentralized energy solutions transformational enough to quickly connect the unconnected and move people to a new level of economic potential. Today, advancements in energy management systems, smart meters, remote monitoring, and new energy storage technologies make microgrids the best possible solution to connect hundreds of millions of people more quickly and more sustainably. The World Bank recently released a flagship report assessing that over half of the world’s unelectrified population would be more cost effectively served via microgrids.
Extending the existing grid is of course another way to address energy poverty, although that expansion takes time and is often not cost effective, especially in rural areas where most of the world’s unelectrified population lives. A typical microgrid, on the other hand, can be up and running in as little as two months. It can power a small village or an entire town, and serve a wide range of customers, including households, businesses, and public institutions such as health care clinics and schools.
Today microgrids in rural areas across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are using control and data management systems as sophisticated as what utilities use in major cities, according to a report by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies. It is even possible to pair microgrids with traditional grid extension for faster, cheaper, and more impactful electrification.
This is why TP Renewable Microgrid Ltd., an initiative of Tata Power supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, has come up with a plan to provide clean, reliable, affordable power to 10,000 villages across India, directly impacting the lives of 25 million people over the next decade. (This projection is based on research conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation, Smart Power India, and the Institute for Transformative Technologies.) This partnership will unleash local economic opportunities, driving energy consumption and living standards in a manner that is consistent with our shared global climate goals.
There are other major players in this growing space. PowerGen, which one analyst calls the market leader in Africa, has rapidly scaled up from 60 microgrids at the end of 2018 to 193 sites currently. PowerCorner, the mini-grid arm of French multinational Engie, is operating nine microgrids with four more under construction, with the aim of continuing to expand in the coming years.
To end energy poverty on a global scale, the private and philanthropic sectors must work together to drive technology improvements so that systems get smarter, cheaper, and quicker to deploy. Philanthropy can reduce risk for businesses looking to scale up social impact through increased investment.
With highly efficient lithium-ion battery technology close to becoming the standard for microgrids, significant cost reductions for capital and operating expenditures will help deliver the cheapest microgrid power in the world. Continued innovation will further drive cost reductions, helping define a pathway for more affordable, low-carbon development strategies worldwide.
As we embark on a new decade, the need to end energy poverty—and the impact it will have—can’t be ignored. There is room for everyone to have a role—investors, technology companies, data scientists, and those in the energy industry.
Through collaboration and partnership across sectors, we can transform the lives of millions of people around the world. Providing reliable, renewable electricity to the communities that need it most is one of the best ways for us to end poverty, protect our planet, and unleash economic opportunity in our lifetimes.
Natarajan Chandrasekaran is chairman of the Tata Group.
Rajiv J. Shah is president of the Rockefeller Foundation.


fortune--2020-01-21--Trump claims credit for ‘spectacular’ U.S. economy in Davos speech to business leaders

President Donald Trump sought Tuesday to sell the United States to the global business community, telling an economic conference in the Swiss Alps that America’s economic turnaround has been “nothing short of spectacular.”
Trump addressed the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, hours before his historic impeachment trial was to reconvene in the U.S. Senate in Washington.
Trump reminded the audience that when he spoke here two years ago, early in his presidency, “I told you that we had launched the great American comeback.”
“Today I’m proud to declare the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before,” the president said.
Trump’s participation in the annual gathering of political and business elites in the Alpine ski resort will provide a conspicuous split-screen moment in a presidency familiar with them. The two-day Swiss visit will test Trump’s ability to balance his anger over being impeached with a desire to project leadership on the world stage.
Speculation had mounted that Trump would cancel the trip due to the Senate trial, but aides said he remains focused on producing results for the American people.
Climate issues were to be a main theme at the forum and “Act on Climate” was written in the snow at the landing zone where Trump’s Marine One helicopter set down in Davos.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg listens to the speech of U.S. President Donald Trump during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 21, 2020. FABRICE COFFRINI—AFP/Getty Images
Trump announced in a speech to the gathering that the U.S. will join the economic forum’s initiative to plant 1 trillion trees across the globe. The initiative aims to mobilize an online community to boost reforestation and grow trees that can help gobble up excess carbon dioxide — often caused by burning of fossil fuels — that many scientists fault for trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and raising global temperatures. The trees initiative aims to boost spending on reforestation from business, governments and philanthropists, according to its web site 1t.org.
But he spent the majority of his speech boosting that his presidency has been great for the U.S. economy.
“America is thriving. America is flourishing and yes, America is winning again like never before,” Trump said before talking about a newly signed trade deal with China and a pending trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.
Trump also spoke of record low unemployment, stock market gains and millions removed from unemployment.
Trump planned to meet with world leaders and business executives after the speech.
Swooping in for his second appearance at the conference, Trump was set to depart on Wednesday, jetting back to Washington, which is consumed by the impeachment trial.
The Democratic-controlled House impeached the Republican president last month for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after it was revealed that he had pressed Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat and a Trump political rival. Trump withheld foreign aid that Congress had approved for the Eastern European nation and dangled the prospect of an Oval Office meeting as leverage.
Trump denies any wrongdoing and argues that Democrats want to remove him from office because they know they can’t deny him reelection in November. Trump would be forced to leave office if convicted, but the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit him.
The White House has not named any of the business leaders Trump is set to meet with. But he is scheduled to hold talks Tuesday and Wednesday with the leaders of Iraq, Pakistan, Switzerland and Iraq’s self-governing Kurdish region, as well as the forum’s founder, the White House said.
Trump also will have his first meeting with the new European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman to hold the position.
That meeting could be the most significant, said analyst Matt Goodman, given Trump’s many disagreements with Europe over tax and trade policy, like a new digital levy by the French that will force American tech giants such as Amazon and Google to pay up.
“She’s new and she’s formidable,” said Goodman, who studies international economic policy as a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
He predicted a difficult year ahead for U.S.-EU relations.
Trump has smarted over the French tax, and his administration has announced plans to impose retaliatory tariffs of up to 100% on cheese, wine, lipstick and other French imports. France has threatened to fight back.
But after speaking to Trump on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that they had a “great discussion” about the digital tax and “will work together on a good agreement to avoid tariff escalation.” Trump later retweeted Macron, adding the word: ”Excellent!”
The U.S. has also threatened to impose retaliatory duties on $7.5 billion worth of European airplanes, cheese, wine and other goods in a separate dispute over subsidies for Airbus, a competitor to Chicago-based Boeing Co.
Trump has sought to wring trade concessions from the EU by threatening tariffs on German autos, including BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Trump is just the third American president, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, to face a Senate impeachment trial. Johnson and Clinton were acquitted by the Senate.
There is precedent for international travel by an impeached U.S. leader. During his impeachment over an affair with a White House intern, Clinton visited Japan, South Korea, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He traveled to Jordan for King Hussein’s funeral in February 1999, just a few days before he was acquitted.
Two days after acquittal, Clinton went to Mexico on a state visit.
Trump is planning to make his first visit to India at the end of February, probably after the conclusion of his impeachment trial. He also has talked about traveling soon to Beijing, although he has given no dates, to open a new round of trade talks with China.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Why the U.K. is bailing out regional airline Flybe when it’s let others fail
—The Carlos Ghosn affair: A look inside the motivations of a fugitive CEO
—Experts doubt China can fulfill its targets in “Phase One” of the U.S. trade deal
—Laws meant to close down tax havens and shut loopholes could have opposite effect
—7 M&As that defined a decade of dealmaking and reshaped the economy
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