Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.

Hello from Washington, D.C., the hot seat of late for big Silicon Valley companies accused of being too powerful, undermining democracy and profiting off the personal details of our lives without our permission. I’m Cecilia Kang, The Times’s technology policy reporter covering tech’s reckoning and other policy issues that fall at the intersection of tech and government.

This past week, the nation’s capital was quiet as many lawmakers were back in their districts campaigning for the midterm elections. And the biggest stories for tech were overseas, with the technology industry’s response to claims of Saudi Arabia’s role in the possible killing of a dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

As The Times’s Mark Landler and Kate Kelly reported, several chief executives pulled out of a lofty Saudi business conference, known as “Davos in the Desert,” that is scheduled for this month in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the most dramatic withdrawal was Dara Khosrowshahi’s, they wrote.