Daily Pulse: Yahoo on the Auction Block, Another Hit for Valeant, Questions Left in the Wake of the FBI iPhone Case

Yahoo suitors have two weeks to speak up. The company set a deadline of April 11 for buyers to submit preliminary bids for its core Web business or Asian assets, the WSJ reports. CEO Marissa Mayer has said the company's open to both sales. About 40 firms were said to be interested and Yahoo is hoping to whittle it down to a few serious suitors. That's not an easy offer to value since at Yahoo, the whole is actually worth less than the sum of the parts. 

Now what? US authorities' decision to drop their case against Apple over that iPhone (see our previous Daily Pulse) only kicks the can down the road. Apple doesn't win: Its tech is not hack-proof. The FBI doesn't win: It went in for the fight and forfeited halfway through. Next time, courts are going to be extra skeptical. Privacy-minded consumers don't win: Their phones are clearly not all that safe. Dropping the case raises more questions than it answers. 

It's important we ask these questions, because if we don't we run the risk of setting our own precedent, normalising dishonesty, vexatious use of the court system, wasting of taxpayer funds, leaving of the general public unsafe, and the utterance of wild claims, all in the name of national security.

Kade Morton, in The end of the iPhone encryption case and the questions we must ask

Valeant is just not having a good year. The stock dropped 7% Monday after CEO Michael Pearson was ordered to testify about drug pricing to a Senate committee. "Pharma bro" Martin Skhreli got everyone's attention and now a whole industry is under a microscope. Investors are losing trust in Valeant because it appears to be more interested in acquiring drugs and raising their prices than coming up with new therapies. That and questions about its accounting. 

The Great Firewall gets higher every day. Chinese authorities are now proposing rules that would force ISPs to block access to any domain registered outside China. It's unclear how much the rules would be enforced, but authorities have tightened their control on media lately, leaving very little to watch on TV. Like a taunt, Google mysteriously became available again on the mainland for a few hours on Sunday. Not a sign of things to come. 

Californians should make at least $15 an hour by 2022. As Katie Carroll surmised yesterday, Gov. Jerry Brown announced a deal with state lawmakers that will progressively raise the minimum wage, now at $10. California would have the highest minimum wage in the country, higher even than at its (inflation-adjusted) peak in the 1960s or than in generous France and Australia, The Washington Post calculated. California has the biggest GDP of any US state, on par with Brazil or Italy, so when it experiments with economic policy, everyone's watching. Here's what some of you have been writing: 

• Lee Weinberg on the need for a tipped wage alongside the minimum wage
• James J. McDonald on how changes reverberate up the economic food chain
• Joshua Rivera on how this plays against young workers

***

Cover art: Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer delivers a keynote during the Yahoo Mobile Developers Conference on February 18, 2016 at The Masonic in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Stephen Lam/Getty Images)

You can also keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook.