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The World
Biden’s big agenda is imperiled as his priorities stall in Congress and a debt fight looms: The burst of legislating that characterized the first few months of the Biden administration has slowed dramatically. The White House’s hopes for meaningful policy achievements hinge on a handful of critical ongoing negotiations, centered mainly in the Senate, and each of those is now struggling to move forward. (Washington Post)
China’s leading diplomat will travel to Russia today for security talks, the latest sign of deepening ties between Beijing and Moscow. Yang Jiechi, who leads China’s central committee for foreign affairs, will be in Russia until Wednesday for a strategic and security consultation. The announcement was made as both countries place greater emphasis on bilateral relations in a period where U.S. dominance of geopolitics has receded and the Covid-19 pandemic has stoked global upheaval. (Financial Times)
U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel is set to announce a “wholesale” reform of the nation’s immigration system in the wake of its exit from the European Union. Patel will pledge to overhaul immigration rules to allow Britain to attract skilled workers while tightening security. (Bloomberg)
European leaders called for an immediate international response after Belarus forced a Ryanair flight bound for Lithuania to land in Minsk and arrested one of its passengers, a top opposition activist. Raman Pratasevich, a 26-year-old Belarusian national, was "upset" after realizing the Ryanair flight was unexpectedly landing in Minsk, a witness told Radio Free Europe's Belarus department. "After a sudden turn of the plane, one guy (Pratasevich) started panicking, grabbing his head," the source, another passenger on the flight said. "He told us who he was and added: 'A death penalty awaits me here.’” (Financial Times, Deutsche Welle)
First polls after Gaza ceasefire show Lapid rising, but deadlock still in place: Israel’s politicians renewed their efforts to broker a coalition agreement that will avoid yet another round of elections. The first opinion polls since the ceasefire, meanwhile, indicated the deadlock between parties loyal to the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those who seek to oust him remains broadly unchanged. There were some shifts within the blocs, however, with the centrist Yesh Atid and Blue and White parties gaining ground. Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid was seen closing in on Netanyahu as Israelis’ preferred choice for prime minister. The polls also showed widespread public dissatisfaction with the results of the Gaza conflict, and widespread skepticism that it would yield long-term calm. (Times of Israel)
Animal rights activists block UK McDonald's sites: The group, dubbed Animal Rebellion, used trucks and bamboo structures to block McDonald's distribution centers. They want to see the company fully switch to plant-based foods by 2025. (Deutsche Welle)
President Joe Biden will host George Floyd’s family at the White House on Tuesday. The visit marks the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death, which triggered international protests against police brutality and racism in the criminal justice system. (CNBC)
A year after George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, and the racial justice protests that followed, Americans continue to be more focused on race-related concerns than they were prior to those events. After surging to 19% in June 2020, the percentage of Americans naming racial matters as the nation's top problem declined to 10% last summer and has since remained near that level, including 11% in the latest Gallup update. (Gallup)
For seventh straight year, a named storm forms in Atlantic ahead of hurricane season. Scientists say the recent tendency for preseason storms is another sign of the effects of climate change on tropical weather systems. (Washington Post)
Tuition discounts at private nonprofit colleges are expected to hit a new record in the 2020-21 academic year. Discount rates reached 53.9% for first-time, full-time students and 48.1% for all undergraduates across 361 schools studied — a year-over-year increase of more than two percentage points for both groups. (Higher Ed Dive)
In just two decades, U.S. drops from second to 16th in percentage of young adults wit a college degree. (Forbes)
Economy
Bitcoin fell 13% on Sunday after the world's biggest and best-known cryptocurrency suffered another sell-off that left it down nearly 50% from the year's high. Bitcoin fell to $32,601 at 1800 GMT (2 p.m. ET), losing $4,899.54 from its previous close. It hit a high for the year of $64,895.22 on April 14. Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain network, dropped 17% to $1,905 on Sunday, losing $391.31 from its previous close. (Reuters)
Deutsche Bank will have to appoint women to about 50% of vacant senior management positions to meet its new 2025 gender target, a Financial Times calculation shows. The bank promised to raise the share of women among its roughly 600 most senior executives to at least 30% by 2025, up from 24% now. (Financial Times)
Investor protests over executive pay hit an all-time high as ire deepens for packages that were rewritten during the pandemic to make it easier for chief executives to earn tens of millions of dollars. Halliburton became the 13th S&P 500 company this year to garner less than 50% support for a pay vote at an annual meeting. The failure tally in 2021 marks the highest number since non-binding executive pay votes were mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. (Financial Times)
Robinhood announced it would allow customers to buy pre-IPO shares. Robinhood claims that the IPO Access feature was created to give everyday investors access since typically IPO shares go to institutional or wealthy investors. (Protocol)
A startup owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. aims to shake up the construction industry by making it more like car manufacturing. MiTek Inc., a Missouri-based construction-technology company, is launching a new modular building venture with New York City-based architect Danny Forster & Architecture. The company plans to build entire rooms for hotels and apartment buildings in factories, and then send them to a construction site to be stacked on top of each other. (Wall Street Journal)
Paul Romer was once Silicon Valley’s favorite economist. The theory that helped him win a Nobel prize — that ideas are the turbocharged fuel of the modern economy — resonated deeply in the global capital of wealth-generating ideas. In the 1990s, Wired magazine called him “an economist for the technological age.” The Wall Street Journal said the tech industry treated him “like a rock star.” Not anymore. Today, Romer, 65, remains a believer in science and technology as engines of progress. But he has also become a fierce critic of the tech industry’s largest companies, saying that they stifle the flow of new ideas. He has championed new state taxes on the digital ads sold by companies like Facebook and Google, an idea that Maryland adopted this year. (New York Times)
Technology
Crunchbase found states such as Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, North Carolina, and Michigan as the fastest growing states for venture capitalist investments between 2016 and 2020. Michigan, the fastest growing state, saw nearly a 900% percentage growth. While those states are ones that grew the fastest, the top three states for US venture investment still remain to be California, New York, and Massachusetts. (Crunchbase)
Epic Games’ courtroom battle against Apple is expected to end today with a debate-style format in which the judge will drill each side with questions about their cases. The trial’s outcome will reverberate far outside the courtroom as Apple faces scrutiny from lawmakers, regulators and software developers who say the company exercises too much control and restricts competition within its App Store. The judge is expected to rule in the coming months. (Wall Street Journal)
Netflix is looking to hire an executive to oversee an expansion into videogames, a sign it is stepping up its efforts to grow beyond traditional filmed entertainment. Netflix has approached veteran game industry executives about joining the company. One option the company has discussed is offering a bundle of games similar to Apple’s online subscription offering, Apple Arcade. (The Information)
Researchers developed a suite of AI tools that can automatically identify characteristics of every buildings in a city and compute the risks they would face during a natural hazard event. The team tested the tools with simulated earthquakes in San Francisco; and hurricanes in Lake Charles, LA, the Texas coast, and Atlantic City, NJ. The simulations generated realistic spatial distributions of buildings and identified some building characteristics with 100% accuracy. (UT-Austin)
Smart Links
Bosses still aren’t sure remote workers have “hustle.” (Wall Street Journal)
California gas tax is rising again. (Los Angeles Times)
China and green energy drive copper prices to record high. (Nikkei Asian Review)
UK PM Boris Johnson to wed fiancee Carrie Symonds next summer. (Reuters)
Wristwatch once belonging to Pablo Picasso sold for 20 times presale estimate. (Barron’s)
Summer camps left waiting for CDC guidance on vaccinated kids, staff. (U.S. News & World Report)
Racial diversity in US professional sports. (GZERO Media)