Axios Re:Cap

Yesterday was a historic day in the Middle East. The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, met the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed during the first ever official visit to the UAE from Israel. This took place 15 months after the Abraham Accords, the biggest breakthrough in Middle East Peace in a quarter century, normalized diplomatic relations between Israel, the UAE and three other Arab countries.

Guests: Axios' Barak Ravid and Sara Fischer.

Credits: Axios Today is produced in partnership with Pushkin Industries. The team includes Niala Boodhoo, Sara Kehaulani Goo, Julia Redpath, Alexandra Botti, Nuria Marquez Martinez, Alex Sugiura, Sabeena Singhani, Lydia McMullen-Laird, Jayk Cherry, and David Toledo. Music is composed by Evan Viola. You can reach us at [email protected]. You can text questions, comments and story ideas to Niala as a text or voice memo to 202-918-4893.

Axios Re:Cap is revisiting some of this year’s biggest stories and what they say about where technology, business, politics and more are headed in 2022. 

Sara Fischer, author of Axios Media Trends, joins Axios Re:Cap senior producer Naomi Shavin to discuss why the Facebook Papers' news cycle was so bad for Facebook — and where its parent company, Meta, goes from here.

It’s been 566 days since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. His death spurred millions of people across the globe to protest in support of Black lives. We examine the impact in three locations: United Kingdom, Mexico and Nigeria.

Guests: Aba Amoah, co-founder of Justice for Black Lives, Alice Krozer, professor at the Center for Sociological Research at the College of Mexico and Chika Okeke-Agulu, director of the African studies program at Princeton University and professor of art and archeology.

Credits: "Axios Today" is brought to you by Axios and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Nuria Marquez Martinez and edited by Alexandra Botti. Alex Sugiura is our sound engineer. Julia Redpath is our executive producer. Special thanks to editor-in-chief Sara Kehaulani Goo.

Online grocery delivery is a booming business thanks to the pandemic, but there are hidden costs to 10- to 15-minute grocery delivery, including a toll on how urban space is used.

Host Erica Pandey discusses what it takes to make these services possible with Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab.

Hedge fund billionaire and antiquities collector Michael Steinhardt will have to repatriate 80 objects in his collection, all collected illegally. This case shines a spotlight on the problem of looters who steal antiquities, the dealers who trade in them, and the collectors who hoard them.

Host Felix Salmon is joined by antiquities researcher Christos Tsirogiannis of Aarhus University in Denmark, who worked with law enforcement on the Michael Steinhardt case.

Editor's note: The original audio and web copy for this episode stated that Michael Steinhardt had to repatriate 80 stolen objects. The total is 180, not 80.

Amazon Web Services, which faced an outage yesterday, caused problems for streaming, gaming, and even security apps and devices. 

Host Erica Pandey is joined by Axios’ technology reporter Ashley Gold to discuss why this happened and what this outage could tell us about the future of cloud storage.

The New York Times, Buzzfeed and Gannett all find themselves embroiled in union fights with their employees that are playing out publicly.

Host Felix Salmon is joined by Sara Fischer to discuss what we know about the union fights at these three companies and what they tell us about broader tensions between employees and management in the workforce.

The Omicron COVID variant shattered any expectations that a busy holiday season could bring a rebound to pre-pandemic levels of international travel. 

Host Felix Salmon is joined by Axios What’s Next reporter Joann Muller to discuss travel bans, border closures and new testing requirements that are impacting international air travel.

Two storylines have emerged from the latest jobs numbers. Far fewer jobs were added to the U.S. economy in November than economists expected, yet the unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%.Erica Pandey is joined by Washington Post economic columnist Catherine Rampell to dig into these numbers and how two very different economic indicators can coexist — and how they could influence Federal Reserve officials.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that offers a rare opportunity for the majority-conservative court to strike down the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

Host Erica Pandey is joined by MSNBC columnist Chris Geidner to understand why those in favor of abortion access are concerned by what they heard in court and where this case could be headed.