Foxconn update.

Great news on Foxconn in Wisconsin after my conversation with Terry Gou! https://t.co/2wtuCdl7TX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2019

"Before the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn pledged to spend $10 billion and create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company made a similar promise in Brazil."

"At a news conference in Brazil, Foxconn officials unveiled plans to invest billions of dollars and build one of the world’s biggest manufacturing hubs in the state of São Paulo. The government had high expectations that the project would yield 100,000 jobs. Six years later, Brazil is still waiting for most of those jobs to materialize.... In China, Foxconn has built vast factories backed by large government subsidies.... But the model does not translate easily to other countries, where Foxconn must navigate different social, political and labor conditions...."

From the NYT, "Before Wisconsin, Foxconn Vowed Big Spending in Brazil. Few Jobs Have Come.."

"Foxconn Technology Group will announce at the White House on Wednesday its plans to build a massive plant in Wisconsin that would employ thousands."

"The project could reshape the economy of southeastern Wisconsin and involve not just a large factory but a virtual village, with housing, stores and service businesses — spread over as much as 2,300 acres, one source said. That acreage, an area totaling more than 3 square miles, potentially could be assembled from parcels that initially weren’t contiguous, he said."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

"I have difficult news," says Ira Glass.

Ira Glass, of the much-acclaimed Public Radio show "This American Life":

We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The NYT also must retract:

Some of Mr. Daisey’s stories about Foxconn were also included in an online-only Op-Ed article that he wrote for The New York Times last October. He wrote, “I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, ‘It’s a kind of magic.’ ”

According to Mr. Schmitz, the translator said that did not happen. On Friday afternoon, The Times added an editors’ note to the Op-Ed article that reads: “Questions have been raised about the truth of a paragraph in the original version of this article that purported to talk about conditions at Apple’s factory in China. That paragraph has been removed from this version of the article.”

Why Apple took its jobs overseas and — as Steve Jobs told Barack Obama — "Those jobs aren’t coming back."

A long article in the NYT.

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

They're hungrier... and you can fuel them with biscuits. And that's why we have iPhones with beautiful glass — not plastic — screens. Steve Jobs wanted them "perfect" and "in six weeks," and that meant: China.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day....

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”