🚨 Axios Sneak Peek, the weekly blockbuster from Jonathan Swan, will have a massive talker later today. Sign up here to get the goods.
🚨 Axios Sneak Peek, the weekly blockbuster from Jonathan Swan, will have a massive talker later today. Sign up here to get the goods.
Illustration: AĂŻda Amer/Axios
For the past century, the U.S. or its allies have held the upper hand in technology, whether it was the code cracking that helped win World War II, the atomic and space races, or the processing power that ushered in the digital age.
Now, that has changed. And America is paying too little attention.
And the race is even broader than that, Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon points out:
Dr. Graham Allison — a specialist in national security at Harvard, where he has taught for five decades — tells me: "The story beneath the story is the Great Rivalry between a meteorically rising China and a ruling U.S."
But that's exactly the danger. The lead story of last Sunday's New York Times ("U.S. Scrambles to Outrun China in New Arms Race") trumpets the contest over 5G cellular networks, which exponentially accelerate online speed and ubiquity.
Be smart, from Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried: Often forgotten is how much China and the U.S. still need one another.
Abandoned by every top official in the commonwealth, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said at a bizarre, 42-minute press conference in the Executive Mansion in Richmond yesterday that he will "continue to collect information to definitively prove, in addition to my word, that I'm not in the picture."
From the presser: "That same year [1984], I did participate in a dance contest in San Antonio in which I darkened my face as part of a Michael Jackson costume."
On why he didn't realize, as a grown adult, that blackface is offensive: "I'm not a person of color. And people of color experience different things — it affects them different ways."
In early 2016, with Donald Trump lending tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign, he sought a loan from Deutsche Bank, one of the few banks still willing to lend him money — and got turned down, the N.Y. Times' David Enrich, Jesse Drucker and Ben Protess scoop.
Be smart: We're going to start to see more and more leaks — especially of the follow-the-money sort — from the 17 known investigations of Trump and Russia.
Super Bowl 53 kicks off at 6:30 p.m. at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta as a "battle of ages ... clash of generations"
At 41, Tom Brady already is the oldest quarterback to start a Super Bowl.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), 49, would be the country's first self-described vegan president, the L.A. Times' Nardine Saad writes:
"Booker is a self-described 'junk-food vegan,'" per the L.A. Times:
To mark the start of Black History Month, today's New York Times includes a 16-page special section "which tells the stories of a dozen extraordinary black men and women who were left out of The Times’s obituary pages when they died."
See today's entries, including Elizabeth Jennings, who "sat down on a streetcar and stood up for civil rights" ... Scott Joplin, the "King of Ragtime" ... Granville T. Woods, an inventor who helpful revolutionize modern transit.
"The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras ... Police want to register — and even subsidize — private security cameras," WashPost tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler reports:
"You’ve got a legal right to film in public places, including your entryway."