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The World
Boris Johnson plans to push G7 leaders to back a new climate change ‘Marshall plan’ to help developing countries to decarbonize their economies and limit global warming. The prime minister wants to use the summit in Cornwall this week to get agreement from the world’s biggest economies to support large-scale renewable energy projects across Africa and parts of Asia. (The Times)
G-7 is preparing to write Taiwan Strait into its summit statement, as the meeting also will cover China's treatment of Uyghurs. (Nikkei Asian Review)
U.S. authorities recovered millions of dollars in digital currency paid to the hackers who hit a major East Coast fuel pipeline with a ransomware attack last month, in a law-enforcement operation that officials said demonstrated progress undermining criminals’ ability to disrupt American commerce and critical infrastructure for profit. Investigators seized about 64 bitcoin, valued at roughly $2.3 million, from a virtual wallet—the alleged proceeds from the ransom hack carried out by a suspected Russian-based criminal gang on Colonial Pipeline. (Wall Street Journal)
China’s top legislative body is set to pass a new anti-sanction law on Thursday, giving substantive legal backing and protection to the country’s retaliatory measures against punitive actions by Western governments on Chinese officials and companies. State broadcaster CCTV reported that the new law was aimed at offering a legal basis for the central government to take retaliatory measures against foreign sanctions, but stopped short of fleshing out details of the legislation. (South China Morning Post)
In order to approve a new Alzheimer’s treatment, the F.D.A is rewriting its rulebook, an enormously risky move that could accelerate the public’s access to medicines but upend the future of drug regulation, forcing the 114-year-old agency to do the equivalent of redesigning a fighter plane in mid-flight. With its conditional clearance of Biogen’s Aduhelm, the F.D.A. is creating a framework that could require less certain evidence of safety and efficacy for medicines beyond Alzheimer’s treatments. In doing so, it is choosing to alter many of its well-established processes and standards, seemingly on the fly. (STAT News)
Biogen set the price at $56,000 a year, far higher than analysts were expecting. Patients will also need expensive brain scans to check for side effects such as brain swelling. And there will be significant charges to administer the infusions as well as for scans or other tests to confirm patients have amyloid build-up. Biogen’s price was “far above where we believe most investors had speculated,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Brian Abrahams wrote in a research note. (Bloomberg)
Why Biogen may be sitting on the most lucrative product in pharmaceutical history. (STAT News)
A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation. The study was prepared in May 2020 and was drawn on by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins during the final months of the Trump administration. (Wall Street Journal)
It is impossible to hold the Tokyo Olympics without the risk of a super-spreader event, an expert adviser on the pandemic to the Japanese government says in a new challenge to the decision to go ahead with the Games. Professor Hitoshi Oshitani, one of Japan’s most senior virologists, said “everybody knows” promises of a “safe Olympics” were impossible to make, but the Olympic authorities were failing to release essential data that would allow experts to assess the risks. (The Times)
India’s daily Covid-19 cases drop below 100,000 for the first time in two months. (Bloomberg)
In the UK, the June 21 lockdown lifting is set to be delayed by two weeks because of a rise in the Delta variant. (The Times)
The amount of carbon dioxide piling up in Earth’s atmosphere set a record last month, once again reaching the highest levels in human history despite a temporary dip in the burning of fossil fuels worldwide caused by the pandemic. (New York Times)
Maine’s beloved blueberry fields are warming faster than rest of nation, study finds. (Washington Post)
Montreal plots ‘charm offensive to lure workers downtown: Employers and officials are set to roll out the red carpet for the 310,000 office workers whose patronage is vital to the survival of downtown businesses, and who’ve been away for 15 months. (Bloomberg)
Remote workers reluctant to return to the workplace. (Statista)
JPMorgan and Citibank are resuming campaign donations: JPMorgan said it wouldn’t give money to Republican lawmakers who challenged the election of President Biden while Citigroup said it wouldn’t ban donations to those Republicans. (Wall Street Journal)
TX Gov. Greg Abbott signs bill to punish businesses that require proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Abbott's signature means that businesses that require so-called vaccine passports can't get state contracts and could lose state licenses or operating permits. (Texas Tribune)
Economy
In May 2021, women gained 56% of the month’s jobs, a solid figure but a lower share than the month before and nowhere near enough to recover the losses of the past year-plus. Some more highlights, per the National Women’s Law Center: Unemployment was 8.2% for Black women and 7.4% for Latinas. (White men: 5.1%.) The economy gained 559,000 jobs in total, which means women began 313,000 new positions. There are still 1.8 million fewer women in the workforce than there were at the start of the pandemic. (The Broadsheet)
Goldman Sachs reversed its stance on disclosing the effects of forced arbitration after an embarrassing vote at its annual investor meeting. The bank plans to support a shareholder proposal it previously opposed that required the firm to prepare a report on how mandatory arbitration affects staff and the workplace. The initiative attempted to chip away at a longstanding Wall Street practice of keeping harassment complaints confidential. (Bloomberg)
Japan's economy shrank 3.9% in 1Q21, slightly better than the initial estimate of a 5.1% contraction, revised government data showed, posting its first decline in three quarters as private spending took a hit from a resurgence in coronavirus infections. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Latin America’s fintech industry is booming, with more than $7 billion invested in the space since 2016, according to Crunchbase data. U.S. venture capital firms are not only taking notice, but are backing that growth with some significant investments. (Crunchbase)
Overstock shares rise fivefold in a year: Meet the CEO rebuilding the eCommerce pioneer. CEO Jonathan Johnson said he focused on making it easier for customers to find things on the site, improving Overstock’s mobile app and expanding into Canada, which it had previously neglected. Combined with a surge in online shopping triggered by the pandemic, those efforts drove Overstock to a 94% year-over-year increase in revenue and a return to profits in the first quarter of the year. Investors have responded: Its stock price has soared to $94 from $22 last June, giving Overstock a market capitalization of about $4 billion. (The Information)
Technology
Apple WWDC 2021: the 15 biggest announcements. 1) iOS 15 brings big improvements to FaceTime, updates to notifications, and more; 2) Apple is building video and music sharing into FaceTime; 3) Apple is going to use AI to read all the text in your photos; 4) You’ll soon be able to use your iPhone as your ID at the airport; 5) iPadOS 15 lets you drop widgets on the home screen and brings changes to multitasking; 6) Apple adds welcome privacy features to mail, Safari; 7) Apple’s Siri will finally work without an internet connection with on-device speech recognition; 8) Apple lets users see family members’ health data; 9) Apple is making AirPods easier to hear with and find; 10) Apple’s iCloud plus bundles a VPN, private email, and HomeKit camera storage; 11) Apple announces WatchOS 8 with new health features; 12) Siri is coming to third-party accessories; 13) MacOS Monterey lets you use the same cursor and keyboard across Macs and iPads; 14) Apple redesigns Safari on the Mac with a new tab design and tab groups; 15) Apple is bringing Testflight to the Mac to help developers test their apps. (The Verge)
Apple said its new "private relay" feature designed to obscure a user's web browsing behavior from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China for regulatory reasons. (Reuters)
Apple announces new features to share health data with doctors, track trends over time. (STAT News)
Less than two hours before Apple’s big Worldwide Developers Conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be launching a new interface for creators that shows how different fees affect their earnings on the platform. The announcement comes as Apple is under intense scrutiny for its App Store fees. The piece includes a preview of what the new interface will look like, with an example that breaks down exactly how taxes and fees are taken away from a creator’s event revenue. (The Verge)
Finance ministers are plotting a raid on Amazon’s lucrative cloud-computing business to ensure it pays more corporate tax under the new G7 agreement on a global rate. Despite Amazon appearing to fall outside the profit margin threshold set by the G7, the $1.6tn tech group will have to pay more corporate tax in some of its largest markets if the new G7 agreement on a global rate is ratified. (Financial Times)
Disney and Comcast are feuding over Disney’s decision last year to not launch Hulu overseas, a move that Comcast believes undermined its growth potential and valuation. The issue has inflamed arbitration proceedings now underway between the two companies over the value of Hulu. The dispute is a prelude to what could be a bigger fight in 2024, when Disney is scheduled to buy Comcast out of its minority stake in Hulu at a price that could be anywhere from $9 billion to $13 billion. (The Information)
Smart Links
Covid outbreak at Taiwan factory may worsen chip shortage. (Bloomberg)
Bruce Springsteen to return to Broadway this month. (Wall Street Journal)
FTC says consumers have reported losing more than $80 million to crypto-investment scams since October. (Wall Street Journal)
Could the U.S. soon get its interstate highway for bikes? (City Lab)
Mystery buyer pays $157.5 million for two condos on New York’s Billionaires’ Row. (Wall Street Journal)
Real-estate boom has bargain-hungry investors looking for deals in nondescript suburbs and small towns. (Wall Street Journal)
Global corporation tax levels in perspective. (Statista)