Ana Swanson

The Commerce Department, under Secretary Gina Raimondo’s leadership, is now poised to begin distributing nearly $100 billion — roughly 10 times the department’s annual budget — to build up the U.S. chip industry and expand broadband access throughout the country. How Raimondo handles that task will have big implications for the United States economy going forward.

Trump-administration moves herald a new, more invasive American philosophy of tech regulation, one that hews closer to China’s protectionist one, though without the aims of censoring content and controlling the populace. The shift could hurt American internet giants like Facebook and Google, which have greatly benefited from the borderless digital terroir outside China, as well as Chinese internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba, which have tried to expand into the West.

The Trump administration has suspended fraught international tax negotiations with European countries and warned that it will retaliate if they move forward with plans to impose new taxes on American technology companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. The decision, conveyed in a letter from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to European finance ministers last week, comes as global talks have stalled over how to tax commerce that takes place online, particularly in countries where companies sell goods and services but have no physical presence.

The Trump administration is following through with plans to allow American companies to continue doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant, just weeks after placing the company on a Commerce Department blacklist. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the administration will issue licenses for American companies that want to do business with Huawei “where there is no threat to national security.” And another top official suggested the move would allow chip makers to continue selling certain technology to Huawei. 

Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., a former banker and investor who earned billions during decades of buying and selling industries and who President Trump has touted to lead his trade negotiations, was confirmed as secretary of commerce by the Senate in a 72-to-27 vote.

Dubbed the “king of bankruptcy” for his leveraged buyouts of battered companies in the steel, coal, textile and banking industries, Ross has generated a fortune of $2.5 billion, ranking him among the wealthiest 250 people in America. Ross worked for decades at the New York investment bank of Rothschild, during which time he represented Trump's failing Taj Mahal casino and helped forge a deal that allowed President Trump to retain ownership. In the early 2000s, Ross purchased some of America’s largest steel mills, including Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem Steel and Cleveland’s LTV Corp. He later sold his steel conglomerate to India’s Mittal Steel, helping to form what is now the world’s largest steel company.

On a sweltering day this summer, a handful of protesters gathered outside an AMC movie theater in Times Square, holding red signs proclaiming “AMC = American Movie Communists.” They were opposing the giant movie theater company AMC’s $1.2 billion purchase of a rival cinema chain, Carmike, that has theaters in 41 states. The deal, which is still subject to government approval, would make AMC the largest theater chain in the US. The protesters targeted AMC's Chinese owners — the sprawling Chinese real estate and entertainment company called Dalian Wanda that acquired the American movie chain in 2002, creating the world's largest theater empire. The protest suggested the Carmike acquisition would further extend Beijing’s hidden control over American mass media. But the protesters had not gathered on their own volition. They were being paid to be there by a Washington lobbying firm, Berman and Company, waging a war against Chinese acquisitions of American movie theaters.

On Nov 21, President-elect Donald Trump said that he would pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Barack Obama’s signature trade deal linking countries around the Pacific Rim, on his first day in office.

Immediately before, a gathering of international leaders in Peru gave early hints of what might happen next. The picture is one of China rushing forward to lead the world’s next trade agreement, with US allies such as Australia and Japan in tow. Without the United States, the TPP is effectively done. But international trade negotiations will not stay quiet for long. America’s largest trading partners are already looking toward the next agreement. That appears likely to put China, Russia and other countries — which the United States had pointedly excluded from the TPP, in hopes of encouraging them to improve their trade practices and join at a later date — in a more favorable position to negotiate a trade pact that works for their economies. At the summit in Peru this weekend, world leaders turned toward two agreements China has been negotiating in the TPP’s shadow. As the United States pushed ahead with the TPP in the past several years, China had been pushing for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a deal negotiated among 16 Asian countries that is now close to completion, as well as the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), which is open to 21 economies along the Pacific Rim, including China, Russia, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile and the United States.

Men were seen and heard about twice as much as women in the 200 highest-grossing films of 2015. The figures come from a new machine-learning technology developed by researchers at Google and the University of Southern California to analyze the role of women in film.

The software, created with backing from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Google’s philanthropic division, is the first to automatically measure how screen and speaking time in film and TV break down by gender. In the past, researchers fulfilled this task with time-intensive, manual hand-coding. The data shows that, when the film had a male lead, male characters appeared on screen and spoke about three times more often than female characters in 2015. In films with both male and female co-leads, men still had far more speaking and screen time. And even in films with female leads — about 17 percent of the top-grossing films in 2015 — men had a roughly equal amount of screen and speaking time as women.