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The World
As government shutdown looms just days away, no agreement is in sight: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), faced with myriad demands from his hard-right flank, has been unable to unite his conference on a short-term path forward that would both appease the hard-liners and ensure he keeps his leadership position. Meanwhile, the Senate on Tuesday will begin moving ahead with its own short-term solution, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, by advancing a shell bill that can eventually house an expected bipartisan deal. That bill, however, is probably dead on arrival in the House, unless Democrats and moderate Republicans tack it onto a vehicle that wouldn’t need leadership’s explicit approval for a floor vote. But even that course of action could cause McCarthy significant headaches, underscoring the complexity of the debate over policy and procedure that has upended the House Republican Conference for several weeks. (Washington Post)
South Korea stages military parade and warns North of ‘overwhelming’ response: South Korea on Tuesday held its first large-scale military parade in downtown Seoul, displaying a range of weapons from ballistic missiles to home-grown fighter jets and drones in a show of force against North Korea’s military provocations. The full-day event to mark the country’s Armed Forces Day comes as President Yoon Suk Yeol warned of an “overwhelming response” by Seoul and Washington to end the North Korean regime in case of Pyongyang’s nuclear attack. (Financial Times)
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is expected to remain in power until at least 2030. Presidential elections will be held in December, and “a handful of politicians have already announced their bids to run for the country’s highest post, but none poses a serious challenge to el-Sissi, who has been in power since 2014 and has faced criticism from the West over his country’s human rights record.” (Associated Press)
Mali's military junta has postponed presidential elections that had been scheduled for February, citing “technical reasons.” No new date was announced. Mali “witnessed two military coups in August 2020 and May 2021. Since then, the transition back to democracy has been repeatedly delayed. A constitutional referendum planned for February 2023 was not held until June, while local elections planned for June have still not taken place.” (DW)
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Cuban Embassy in Washington on Sunday evening, but there was no significant damage and no one was injured. Embassy officials “reported that someone had thrown a ‘possible incendiary device’ at the building, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said on Monday.” (Associated Press)
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement, “The United States strongly condemns Sunday’s reported attack on the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C. Attacks against diplomatic facilities are unacceptable. We are in contact with Cuban embassy officials and law enforcement authorities to ensure an appropriate and timely investigation as well as to offer our support for future protective efforts.” (Politico)
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) refused to resign during a Monday news conference “responding to a federal indictment charging him and his wife with accepting bribes through a halal meat certifying company. Menendez said that the wads of cash investigators found stuffed in his clothes was money he had withdrawn from his personal savings account for ‘emergencies.’” (Semafor)
Economy
Moody's is warning that a federal government shutdown would be "credit negative" for the U.S. Moody's “is the last of the big three credit rating firms that still bestows the cherished ‘triple-A’ rating on the U.S., which indicates U.S. government bonds are among the safest investments on earth.” Fitch Ratings “stripped the U.S. of its AAA rating in August, citing the debt ceiling fight and governance issues,” while S&P Global downgraded the U.S. from AAA back in 2011 “after a similar debt ceiling fight.” (Axios)
Jamie Dimon Warns World May Not Be Prepared for Fed at 7%. (Bloomberg)
There is a growing consensus among economists “that elevated borrowing costs — at least compared to the 2010s — are here to stay.” The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield reached a 16-year high of 4.52% on Monday. “It was 3.35% as recently as early May. These long-term rates are not directly driven by the Fed's interest rate policy but rather by markets' expectations for how growth and inflation will evolve, how the Fed will react in the future and the supply of longer-term bonds from the U.S. government.” (Axios)
The end of the Writers’ strike “won’t resolve the underlying challenges facing the entertainment industry that prompted the guilds to take this action, including wrenching change brought about by streaming – one reason some referred to this as ‘the Netflix strike.’” (CNN)
“While late-night and daytime talk shows are expected to make a quick comeback, scripted shows that require actors could take longer to return.” (Axios)
The Biden Administration staved off rail and ports strikes over the past year, “employing a behind-the-scenes strategy that ended with gains for labor while mostly keeping the spotlight off of the White House. Now the United Auto Workers’ aggressive tactics are forcing the White House to rewrite its labor playbook.” (Politico)
“Most of the demands that the striking autoworkers are making look pretty typical — like better pay and benefits. But one stands out: The union is asking for a four-day workweek.” The four-day workweek “has gotten a lot of buzz over the past few years among the desk-jockey class, but the UAW's putting it on the map for hourly workers, too.” (Axios)
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced an economic stimulus plan including “tax breaks to spur domestic investment in such areas as semiconductors and batteries, along with measures to spur wage growth.” (Nikkei Asia)
To strike oil in America, “you need water. Plenty of it.” The amount of water consumed by the oil industry has soared. Fracking wells “have increased their water usage sevenfold since 2011.” Fracking a single oil or gas well can use more than 40 million gallons of water. (New York Times)
Technology
Nine months after President Biden stood at a groundbreaking ceremony for a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company chip fabrication facility in Phoenix, “the Arizona project – once hailed as the crown jewel of Biden’s Chips and Science Act meant to make the US self-reliant in chips manufacturing – has been marred by delays, criticism and mounting scepticism.” (South China Morning Post)
Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida says “the world ‘needs to move on’ from the internal combustion engine.” Uchida said Monday, “There’s no going back. The world needs to move on from internal combustion engines. We have a responsibility to be part of the solution and part of the ecosystem.” (Financial Times)
Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic to “help bolster development of Anthropic’s high-powered chatbot, Claude. Anthropic has said that it will need to spend about $1 billion over the next 18 months to build Claude 2, a bot the company believes will be 10 times more powerful than its competitors.” Amazon hopes that generative AI “will make Alexa, its virtual home assistant, more appealing to consumers.” (Semafor)
OpenAI has launched two new ways to interact with ChatGPT. The app “now has a voice. Choose from one of five lifelike synthetic voices and you can have a conversation with the chatbot as if you were making a call, getting responses to your spoken questions in real time.” In addition, “ChatGPT also now answers questions about images. OpenAI teased this feature in March with its reveal of GPT-4 (the model that powers ChatGPT), but it has not been available to the wider public before.” (MIT Technology Review)
“Just switching from typing to voice and hearing a response isn't super interesting in today's ChatGPT app and website, but could be a much bigger deal if, say, ChatGPT were built into a speaker or car system.” (Axios)
Blue Origin, the space company backed by Jeff Bezos, hired a new chief executive as it pushes to start flying to orbit and catch up with SpaceX. Dave Limp, a longtime executive at Amazon, will join Blue Origin as CEO in early December, according to an email Bezos sent to staff Monday. He will take over for the company’s current top leader, Bob Smith, who will leave in early January. (Wall Street Journal)
Though the first foldable laptop debuted back in 2020, “the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now.” LG just announced its Gram Fold foldable-screen laptop, “right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.” The Gram Fold will initially be available only in South Korea. (Ars Technica)
Smart Links
Only Richest 20% of Americans Still Have Excess Pandemic Savings. (Bloomberg)
Apple’s $59 Fake-Suede iPhone Case Is Its Biggest Dud of 2023. (Bloomberg)
Americans Finally Start to Feel the Sting From the Fed’s Rate Hikes. (WSJ)
Top-rated US companies turn to convertible bonds as rising interest rates bite. (Financial Times)
Greece “nearly broke the eurozone a decade ago. Today, it is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies.” (New York Times)
An expansion of Canada’s only pipeline connecting oil-rich Alberta to the Pacific Coast has received regulatory approval. (Bloomberg)
The central Chinese city of Zhengzhou offers warnings about why China may struggle to overcome economic stagnation. (Axios)