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The World
Global food prices have surged by the biggest margin in a decade, as one closely watched index jumped 40% in May, heightening fears that the inflation initially stoked by pandemic disruption was accelerating. The year-on-year rise in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s monthly index was the largest jump since 2011, as commodity prices surged. (Financial Times)
Restaurants, supermarkets can’t find enough workers to open new locations: Many food sellers are adding stores to capitalize on high consumer spending as Americans emerge from a year spent largely at home. But grocers and restaurants say they are struggling to hire all the workers they want for these stores. They are adding perks and bonuses to entice job seekers and in some cases delaying openings. (Wall Street Journal)
President Biden recently called former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, a Democrat who has been openly critical of his economic agenda, to acknowledge Summers’s concerns and ask him to explain his objections, according to three people with knowledge of the private exchange. (Washington Post)
Biden signaled he could accept a narrower infrastructure package that didn’t raise the corporate tax rate, telling Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R., W.Va.) that he wants $1 trillion in new spending and floating alternative ways to pay for the measure. The new proposal includes a minimum corporate tax of 15% for the nation’s largest companies and the repurposing of some Covid-19 aid funding. (Wall Street Journal)
Dr. Anthony Fauci called on China to release the medical records of nine people whose illnesses might provide vital clues into whether Covid-19 first emerged as the result of a lab leak. Fauci told the Financial Times that the records could help resolve the debate over the origins of a disease that has killed more than 3.5m people worldwide. The records in question concern three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who reportedly became sick in November 2019, and six miners who fell ill after entering a bat cave in 2012. Scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology subsequently visited the cave to take samples from the bats. Three of the miners died. (Financial Times)
The UK removed Portugal from the green list of countries and added seven more countries to the red list – moves that provoked fury within the travel industry and left many holidaymakers in limbo. (The Guardian)
Spain details new system of coronavirus restrictions to be applied until 70% of population is vaccinated. (El Pais)
An organizer of Hong Kong’s Tiananmen vigil, Chow Hang-tung, was arrested on the June 4 anniversary on suspicion of advertising or publicizing an unauthorized assembly. Police banned the event this year citing Covid-19 rules and will deploy 7,000 officers across the city to deal with any possible unauthorised gatherings. (South China Morning Post)
The U.S. is keeping up its spy plane flights over South China Sea, in a ‘huge increase’ from 2020. American reconnaissance has been constant since the start of the year, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative found, with 72 reported flights during May — twice that of a year ago. (South China Morning Post)
China’s education ministry has suggested that Putonghua, the official national language, be incorporated into the exam system in Hong Kong to better integrate the city with the mainland. (The Times)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will leave office after 4,454 consecutive days on Wednesday, when the new government of incoming prime minister Naftali Bennett is scheduled to be sworn in. Meanwhile, Netanyahu, facing the prospect of an end to his 12-year run as premier, said on Twitter "all legislators elected by votes from the right must oppose this dangerous left-wing government." (Jerusalem Post)
Researchers in Cambridge have re-engineered the genetic code of microbes to create a synthetic cell with capabilities unlike anything in nature, opening up the possibility of new materials for everything from plastics to antibiotics. The knowledge of how to manipulate and edit the DNA at the heart of all genetic processes is established, but until now it has not been possible to alter the 3bn-year-old code through which DNA instructs cells to form the chains of amino acids that make up the working molecules of life. “This is potentially a revolution in biology,” said Jason Chin, project leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. (Financial Times, Science)
Lynparza, a cancer-fighting pill marketed by AstraZeneca and Merck, reduced the risk that breast cancer would return in an invasive form when it was given for a year to patients who carried cancer-causing variants of the BRCA gene. (STAT News)
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say their major sources of political news are only sources with right-leaning audiences (Fox News or talk radio) tend to be less open to international cooperation and to have different foreign policy priorities than other Republicans. Similarly, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who only rely on sources with left-leaning audiences (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times and/or The Washington Post) for political news stand apart from other Democrats in some areas, including by placing a higher priority on multilateralism and addressing global climate change. (Pew Research Center)
Economy
Bitcoin slid after a cryptic tweet from Elon Musk hinting at a potential split with the largest cryptocurrency — tweeting a broken-heart emoji for a token — the latest post from the billionaire to buffet the token’s price. The coin dropped as much as 3.4% and was trading at about $37,790 as of 10:50 a.m. in Hong Kong. (Bloomberg)
Monthly net orders for Tesla vehicles in China fell by half last month, reflecting a massive shift in public opinion. Just a few months ago, Tesla was so popular that one small business owner bought five Teslas as holiday gifts for his employees. But a spate of negative articles about accidents and complaints has undermined sentiment. China accounted for 29% of Tesla revenue in the first quarter. (The Information)
The Biden administration is banning Americans from investing in dozens of Chinese defence and surveillance technology companies in an effort to stop US capital from being used by China to undermine national security. Biden signed an executive order to prohibit investments in 59 companies, including marquee Chinese groups such as Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest chipmaker, which US intelligence says is critical to the Chinese military. (Financial Times)
British employers took on permanent staff last month at the fastest rate since records started being kept in the late 1990s. Growth in temporary staff placements also hit a six-year high. (Reuters)
Etsy is buying the resale home for Gen Z consumers, Depop, for $1.6 billion. Secondhand retail and social commerce has been on the rise as the younger generation integrates sustainable fashion in their wardrobe—an estimated 90% of Depop’s users are under 26. One of Depop’s competitors, Poshmark, went public in January and currently trades at over a $3.5 billion valuation. (Protocol)
Chart of the Day: (Statista)
Technology
Facebook plans to end its controversial policy that mostly shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users, a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network. The change, which Facebook is set to announce as soon as today, comes after the Oversight Board — an independent group funded by Facebook to review its thorniest content rulings — affirmed its decision to suspend former President Donald Trump but critiqued the special treatment it gives politicians. (The Verge)
Google is strengthening privacy protections for Android users who want to make it harder for advertisers to track them when they move between apps, as the company tries to counter Apple’s image as a better steward of personal data. In changes that will come as a fresh blow to the near $400bn-a-year digital advertising industry, Google will introduce extra safeguards for Android users that opt out of sharing their “Advertising ID” — a device identifier that allows marketers to track them as they switch from app to app. (Financial Times)
Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Blue, the company’s first subscription service designed for power users willing to pay a monthly fee for exclusive features. The service is rolling out to users in Canada and Australia respectively for $3.49 and $4.49 in local currencies per month. The company did not say when Twitter Blue will become available for U.S. users. (CNBC)
Amazon’s Ring, long criticized for a cozy relationship with law enforcement, will start requiring the police to publicly request home security footage captured by the company’s doorbells and cameras. (Bloomberg)
Weekend Reads
Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international: A new paper by Thomas Piketty makes the rise of right-wing populism look like a historical inevitability. A new study combining historical data on demography and ideology in 21 Western democracies implies that the rise of right-wing populists like former President Donald Trump and events like Brexit "were not an abrupt departure from precedent, but rather the consequence of a 60-year-old international trend," The Economist writes. In other words, the paper, co-authored by Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin, and Clara Martinez-Toledano, makes Trump's 2016 election victory "look like a historical inevitability." The main finding of the paper — which like any academic study has its critics — is that "income and education began diverging as predictors of ideology" decades ago. Back in 1955, for example, "both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties," while "poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labor or social-democratic" parties. But over time, and with "striking" consistency, the most highly-educated voters moved toward the left-wing parties, while those with less schooling "slid the other way." The wealthiest voters maintained their support of conservative parties, giving the right a "coalition" of the rich and those with less education, paving the way for politics as you know them today.(The Economist, The Week)
The Pandemic Revealed How Much We Hate Our Jobs. Now We Have a Chance to Reinvent Work. As the postpandemic great reopening unfolds, millions of others are also reassessing their relationship to their jobs. The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model—strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption that there is a wife to handle duties at home. But after years of gradual change in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken. Millions of people have spent the past year re-evaluating their priorities. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live if they can work remotely? Do they want to switch careers? For many, this has become a moment to literally redefine what is work. More fundamentally, the pandemic has masked a deep unhappiness that a startling number of Americans have with the -workplace. During the first stressful months of quarantine, job turnover plunged; people were just hoping to hang on to what they had, even if they hated their jobs. For many more millions of essential workers, there was never a choice but to keep showing up at stores, on deliveries and in factories, often at great risk to themselves, with food and agricultural workers facing a higher chance of death on the job. But now millions of white collar professionals and office workers appear poised to jump. Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, set off a Twitter-storm by predicting, “The great resignation is coming.” But those conversations miss a much more consequential point. The true significance isn’t what we are leaving; it’s what we are going toward. In a surprising phenomenon, people are not just abandoning jobs but switching professions. This is a radical re-assessment of our careers, a great reset in how we think about work. (Time)
Smart Links
38,680 people died on U.S. roads in 2020, the highest yearly total since 2007. (Axios)
At these colleges, professors are being told not to ask students if they’re vaccinated. (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
Palantir, DoorDash CEOs top highest paid list for 2020. (Wall Street Journal)
United aims to revive Concorde spirit with 15 supersonic planes (The Guardian)
All graduating MIT students can choose to receive a free digital version of their diploma. (MIT)
YouTube says it paid out $4 billion to music industry over past 12 months. (Variety)
49% of adults would choose an ad-supported version of full streaming platforms over a more expensive ad-free option. (Morning Consult)