Snake eyes

With Russia’s semi-stagnant economy, international sanctions and small-scale wars in Ukraine and Syria, liberal opposition that once existed only in big urban centers has begun to spread to smaller cities and towns considered government strongholds. President Vladimir Putin is 65; if he’s reelected in March, as seems inevitable, he could be entering his last term. And opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s followers foresee, a bit optimistically, a Russian spring.

Expect Lachlan Murdoch to do things his way at the new Fox. Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son has never independently run anything as big as 21st Century Fox, the News Corp. spinoff that owns Fox’s TV network, cable channel and movie studio. But he’s been groomed to take it over and seems all but certain to take the helm after his brother sees through a $52.4 billion asset sale to Walt Disney Co. The question, for the global media and investors alike, is what will happen then?

The dollar’s worst January in decades may get a lot worse. Whether or not President Donald Trump wants a strong dollar, this week’s plunge is breaching technical barriers that had been proverbial last lines of defense. One of the more remarkable things about this selloff is how broad-based it is. The dollar is weaker in 2018 against all major currencies. But some of the downward momentum might slow—at least for now.

Dutch government hackers discovered Russia's DNC attacks and alerted the FBI, a Dutch newspaper reported Friday. Back in 2014, the Dutch intelligence service hacked into the network of the Russian hacking group known as Cozy Bear and learned of its attacks on the Democratic Party, according to the report. And based on pictures taken of visitors to the Moscow-based hacking center, the Dutch figured out Cozy Bear was led by Russia’s external intelligence agency.

Trump played America’s salesman in Davos, giving a speech—“America is open for business”—that made for a jarring transition from his more blustery moments. It was a measured and thoroughly scripted pitch to an unfamiliar audience of global elites, even if he couldn’t resist some digs at the press. (They drew boos.) But it was a pitch all the same.

How do you lose $400 million in cryptocurrency? That's a good question that one of Japan’s biggest crypto exchanges is trying to answer. Coincheck’s co-founder said the coins were sent “illicitly” outside the venue. The news spooked investors in a country still wary of digital-token exchanges four years after the Mt. Gox collapse. This new loss is one of the biggest of investor assets since Bitcoin’s launch.

The online retailer is scheduled to unveil the spheres Monday morning following seven years of planning and construction. The glass orbs were built to let Amazon workers escape from emails, meetings, reports and deadlines to walk along stone paths beside waterfalls, let ferns from South America brush their shoulders and feel the moist, tropical air fill their lungs.