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Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with top allies in Liverpool, England Saturday to solidify their united front against any Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Gertrude Chavez-dreyfuss / Reuters : Assembly, a new blockchain under the IOTA network focused on DeFi, NFTs, and crypto game development, raises $100M and plans to launch its token next year   —  Some of the largest Asian venture capital firms and crypto hedge funds will invest $100 million to further develop applications …

"The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" star Jen Shah just suffered a setback in court.

Bob Dole made a final journey back to the prairie state that shaped him for memorials in his western Kansas hometown and at the Statehouse to honor the military service that left him severely wounded and the distinguished political career that followed his recovery.

Dax Shepard can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

China continues to rely on its connections with dozens of U.S. universities to collect what it deems is sensitive information in a collaborative effort to build up its military modernization, a report found this week.

New York Times : Investigation finds that a site providing directions on how to die is linked to ~45 suicides, as Google deflects responsibility for steering users to the site   —  It has the trappings of popular social media, a young audience and explicit content on suicide that other sites don't allow.

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google : TCL pulls its entire Google TV lineup from Best Buy over software and performance issues   —  Google TV's plans to expand in the smart TV market are taking a hit this week, as TCL's entire Google TV lineup has been pulled from Best Buy over performance-related issues.

Jonathan Bell / Wallpaper* : A look at the working processes at Apple's design team, led by VP of industrial design Evans Hankey and VP of human interface design Alan Dye   —  Global exclusive!  Led by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, the Apple Design Team holds enormous sway over our evolving relationship with technology.

Many Republican senators were frustrated with Mitch McConnell's debt limit deal this week.

Alex Heath / The Verge : Meta opens its VR social platform Horizon Worlds to all adult users in the US and Canada   —  Facebook's first stab at the metaverse is Roblox meets the OASIS  —  More than two years and a company rebrand later, Meta is finally opening up access to its VR social platform Horizon Worlds.

The jury in the trial of reality star Josh Duggar has begun deliberations. Duggar has been accused of receiving and possessing child pornography.

Lawmakers are divided on how to best handle ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as geopolitical tensions continue to escalate, leaving senators torn over President Biden’s pick to lead the government's official export credit agency.

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch : Twitter tests turning its in-app explore page into a TikTok-like feed with For You and Trending tabs, amid similar experiments from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit   —  Twitter posted today that its testing a feature that would turn its in-app explore page into a TikTok-like video feed, complete with even a “For You” tab.

Colin Farrell donned mini purple running shorts as he exercised in Coldwater Canyon Park.

Conservative Supreme Court justices raised challenges to a Maine program that provides tuition for private schools, but excludes religious schools.

Sen. Ted Cruz is accusing the Biden Justice Department of launching political attacks against the state of Texas.

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg : Stan Chudnovsky, Meta's Messenger chief who is also leading the integration of Meta's messaging services, will leave the company, plans to stay until Q2 2022   —  The executive has been overseeing efforts to integrate the company's messaging services  —  Stan Chudnovsky, the Meta Platforms …

Andrew Hayward / Decrypt : Ubisoft will add NFT items into its games, starting with Ghost Recon Breakpoint on the Tezos blockchain, becoming the first major gaming company to do so   —  In brief  — Major game publisher Ubisoft will implement in-game NFT items into its games, starting with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint.

Jane Seymour reunited with “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” castmates William Shockley, Jason Leland Adams and Joe Lando.

Maryland and Illinois do nearly the same thing with their congressional maps that the DOJ is suing Texas for.

Jamie Tarabay / Bloomberg : Alphabet sues two Russians it claims help run a botnet that's infected 1M+ devices and has command-and-control server addresses stored on Bitcoin's blockchain   —  - Complaint says the two created a sophisticated ‘botnet’  — Glupteba sells stolen logins, credit cards, Google says

TV personality and medical professional Dr. Mehmet Oz's previous statements on gun control have raised eyebrows after his entry into the 2022 Senate race in Pennsylvania as a Republican candidate.

Danny Nelson / CoinDesk : Blockchain analysis startup TRM Labs raises a $60M Series B with Visa, Citi, Block, and PayPal among investors, following Mastercard's CipherTrace acquisition   —  After Mastercard bought CipherTrace in September, American Express and Visa are throwing their weight behind TRM.

Jordan Novet / CNBC : MongoDB reports Q3 revenue of $227M, up 50% YoY, a net loss of $81.3M, up from $72.7M YoY, and Atlas cloud database revenue up 84%; stock up 17%+   —  - Revenue growth accelerated, including in the fast-growing Atlas cloud service category.  — Sales and marketing expenses continue to mount.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton blasted the Biden administration's recently announced voting rights lawsuit, alleging that the suit was a "preposterous attempt to sway democracy."

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is going to retire from Congress

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole will lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol later this week, congressional leadership said Monday.

Chappelle’s disparaging remarks about the transgender community raised protests within Netflix and from outside activists.

The White House is warning that the art world is fertile ground for money laundering and other financial crimes at the same time that the president's son, Hunter Biden, is raising eyebrows by selling paintings for up to half a million dollars despite lacking any formal art experience.

Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch : Platzi, which offers classes to LatAm professionals on marketing, coding, business, and design, raises a $62M Series B, says 60% of its students spend $300/year   —  When it comes to scaling online communities, Platzi CEO Freddy Vega thinks that edtech can take a few notes from the video game industry.

The president’s primary spokesperson was asked by a reporter during the daily press briefing if the White House would promise transparency regarding the younger Biden’s sale of Chinese assets.

The Markup : Sources: Life360, a family safety app used by 33M people, has sold users' precise location since 2016 and is one of the data broker industry's top sources   —  The app is a major source of raw location data for a multibillion-dollar industry that buys, packages, and sells people's movements

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat : Facebook Gaming announces a Play with Streamer feature that lets creators invite audience members to join a game, debuting alongside Pac-Man Community's launch   —  Mark Zuckerberg unveiled that Pac-Man Community is debuting on Facebook Gaming as one of the first games where audiences can play together while spectating.

Lucas Matney / TechCrunch : Lyft CFO Brian Roberts, who joined the company in 2014 and took it public, leaves to become CFO at NFT marketplace OpenSea   —  Lyft's long-time CFO Brian Roberts, who took the company public, announced Monday that he was departing the ride share company that he joined in 2014 to take the same role at NFT marketplace OpenSea.

Close family friend, Bobye Holt, took the stand for the prosecution and claimed Josh confessed to molesting multiple young girls during a conversation back in 2003.

Prince William began working with the East Anglian Air Ambulance in 2015 and left the role in 2017 to focus on royal duties.

Khloe Kardashian responded to rumors that her sister Kylie Jenner is not actually dating Travis Scott.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas over its newly drawn maps for Congress and the state House.

Nearly 600 STEM professionals have signed an open letter expressing "urgent concern" over the California Department of Education’s efforts to reform mathematics education in the name of equity.

The Biden administration will not send any “diplomatic or official representation” to Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Monday, amid the People’s Republic of China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.

President Biden is set to speak with key European allies to "coordinate his message" ahead of his private video conference call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, a senior administration official said, as the president plans to "make clear" that there will be "very real costs" should Russia choose to proceed with a potential invasion of Ukraine.

Republican Reps. Vern Buchanan of Florida and Larry Bucshon of Indiana called on CMS to scrap their plans pursuing the vaccine mandate for millions of health care workers in the US.

Robert Lee Hotz / Wall Street Journal : A look at efforts to manage climate data, gathered from satellites, aircraft, and ocean buoys, as US archives are expected to reach 650+ PB over the next decade   —  As earth-observing satellites, aircraft and ocean buoys churn out ever-rising amounts of information about our planet …

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch : Hometap, which lets homeowners get cash by taking on an investor in their house, raises $60M led by American Family Ventures, bringing its total funding to $95M   —  Hometap, a startup that offers people a way to borrow against the equity in their homes without taking out loans, has raised $60 million in new funding.

It was 2013 when Prince William was led to the stage by Taylor Swift during a Centrepoint charity event at Kensington Palace for a rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer” alongside Jon Bon Jovi.

“Scandal” actor Joshua Malina declared that cancel culture does not exist as long as Mel Gibson can continue to have a career.

Benedict Evans / Benedict Evans/Presentations : Overview of macro tech trends, with a focus on Web3, metaverse, and the move to the cloud, which is just beginning as on-prem IT spend still dwarfs cloud spend   —  The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse... and then everything else.

Financial Times : SenseTime seeks to raise between $750M and $767M in its Hong Kong IPO, at a valuation of between $16.5B and $17B; the company previously hoped to raise $2B   —  Chinese AI group's downsized share offer comes as Beijing seeks to rein in sector  —  SenseTime, the Chinese artificial intelligence …

Satellite imagery indicates that Russian forces have gathered on the Ukraine border ahead of a planned a video call between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

China appears to be eyeing its first permanent military base on the shores of Africa's Atlantic coast, and Washington – not keen on the idea – has already started a diplomatic effort to put the kibosh on any plans, a report said.

Anita Ramaswamy / TechCrunch : Stacked, which provides investment tools for retail crypto investors, raises a $35M Series A co-led by Alameda Research and Mirana Ventures   —  Stacked, a web-based platform that provides passive investment tools for retail investors interested in crypto, just announced it raised …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg : Many customers complain that T-Mobile and Verizon have failed to deliver promised rebates for promoted Apple products in a straightforward manner   —  Some customers are finding that wireless carriers are denying rebates used to promote Apple Inc.'s newest iPhones, iPads and watches.

Issie Lapowsky / Protocol : Behind the scramble to revamp the White House's plans for the Alliance for the Future of the Internet, meant to rally countries behind a vision for an open web   —  The White House is set to announce plans this week for its much-anticipated Alliance for the Future of the Internet …

Reuters : Alibaba says it will appoint a new CFO and reorganize its e-commerce businesses under two new divisions, one domestic and one international   —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (9988.HK) said Toby Xu, will succeed Maggie Wu as the company's chief financial officer from April, a move it described …

David Streitfeld / New York Times : Some Amazon sellers are backdating books to fool Amazon's algorithms into changing where they appear, often allowing the sellers to charge exorbitant prices   —  A 2011 thriller was supposed to cost $15.  One merchant listed it at $987, with a 17th-century publication date.

Manish Singh / TechCrunch : Sense, whose HR software helps recruit blue-collar workers, raises a $50M Series D led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2; source says Sense is now valued at $500M   —  Sense, an HR tech startup that helps some of the world's largest staffing and recruitment agencies timely find and hire talent …