Hashtag Trending – U.S. commits to extradite Meng Wanzhou, Luis Vuitton’s $1,000 earbuds, Oscars VFX nominees

The United States says it plans to go through with extraditing Huawei’s chief financial officer; a fashion icon wants to sell you overpriced headphones; and we now know what films are in contention for the Oscars – including the visual effects category.

Trending on LinkedIn, an update on the case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. says that the United States plans to proceed with the extradition. Wanzhou was arrested at the Vancouver airport last month at the request of the U.S. China’s government isn’t happy about the situation, saying she is being unjustifiably detained. Since her arrest, China has detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor on accusations of “endangering national security.” It also ordered the death penalty for Canadian Robert Schellenberg, who previously had been sentenced to a 15-year jail term.

Trending on Google, Would you spend $1,000 on a pair of earbuds? Yeah, and you thought AirPods were expensive. French fashion brand Louis Vuitton announced a new pair of wireless earbuds for $995 – and that’s U.S. dollars. But according to Tech Radar, the headphones are nothing new. They’re just Master & Dynamic’s wireless earbuds launched last year, with the Luis Vuitton logo slapped on them. So just like in the fashion world, this inflated price tag is all about the brand.

Trending on Twitter, the 2019 Oscar nominations are out. So to make this a tech story, I’m here to tell you about the pictures nominated for visual effects. We have five titles here: Avengers: Infinity War, Christopher Robin, First Man, Ready Player One, and Solo: A Star Wars Story. My bet’s on Infinity War to win this one. Why? Because of the amount of work that went into rendering Thanos, the evil space alien that’s the main antagonist in this film. Most of the Thanos work was done by special effects studio Digital Domain, who used Autodesk Maya and their own custom tool for transferring motion capture data to the animated character.