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The World
Succession battle begins after Liz Truss quits as UK prime minister: Rishi Sunak, former chancellor, has emerged as the early favorite to become Britain’s next prime minister, after Liz Truss terminated a 44-day premiership marked by economic and political turmoil. Truss’s resignation made her the shortest-serving prime minister in Britain’s history; her time in Number 10 will be remembered for a disintegrating economic policy and a disastrous slump in Conservative party support. Sunak, who stood against Truss for the Tory leadership in the summer, predicted correctly that his rival would set off panic in the markets if she pressed ahead with a massive package of debt-funded tax cuts. (Financial Times)
Boris Johnson is attempting to make an extraordinary political comeback by challenging Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt for the Tory leadership following the resignation of Liz Truss. Six weeks after leaving office, the former prime minister has asked allies, donors and the team that helped him to win the 2019 general election to run his campaign for a return to No 10. (The Times; Statista)
Science was front and center in Chinese President Xi Jinping's address to the Communist Party Congress, reiterating the country's aspirations and potential paths to becoming a global science and tech powerhouse. Xi laid out the CCP leadership's goals for improving the country's innovation system. They include: 1) A national laboratory system: China for decades has had a network of State Key Laboratories that conduct basic and applied research for commercial and military purposes. 2) Expanding international collaborations: China and the U.S. are among each other's top scientific collaborators. 3) Talent: China's long-term technology and innovation goals require STEM experts. "Both Beijing and Washington recognize whoever wins the science competition will become the most powerful of the two," says Kit Conklin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoTech Center. (Axios)
Italy: Meloni faces uphill battle in Italy How long can any Italian government last? That’s a good question in a country that has had 67 governments in the past 76 years. Now Giorgia Meloni, head of the far-right Brothers of Italy Party, is set to take over as prime minister, and the going won’t be easy. The economy is hurtling towards recession, says the IMF, while consumer prices are soaring, particularly for energy – in part due to the war in Ukraine. But while she has pledged continued support for Ukraine, Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi, head of Forza Italia, has signaled a different view. The aging former prime minister and media mogul is picking fights over ministerial posts, belittling Meloni publicly, and in a leaked recording, talked about recently exchanging liquor with Vladimir Putin while questioning Italy’s support for Kyiv. Berlusconi is a minor partner compared to the more powerful Matteo Salvini and his rightist League Party, but Meloni has also clashed with Salvini on energy matters. (GZERO Media)
At American Airlines, First Class Out, Business Class In for International Trips: American replacing first class with new business-class seats as distinction between the two gets blurrier. (Wall Street Journal)
Study: California wildfires have offset 18 years of greenhouse gas reductions. A decades-long effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA researchers. The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season spewed twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of CO2 reductions made since 2003, according to a recent study. (Los Angeles Times)
Economy
U.S. Home Sales Drop for Eighth Straight Month in September: Slowdown in the market is expected to continue as mortgage rates approach 7%, up from about 3% a year earlier. (Wall Street Journal)
Investors now expect Fed to raise rates to 5% next year: Traders have priced in May 2023 increase as central bank continues to tackle high inflation. (Financial Times)
US Treasuries have entered the longest sustained slump in 38 years, as policy makers signal their determination to keep raising rates until they are sure inflation is under control. The yield on benchmark 10-year notes jumped 21 basis points this week to 4.23% on Friday, heading for a 12-week streak of increases. (Bloomberg)
Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a later-stage fund to help clean-tech startups begin building plants and scaling up their technologies. To date, the fund has focused on “climate mitigation,” which largely concentrates on driving down climate pollution. Climate adaptation refers to developing ways of bolstering protections against the dangers of climate change, rather than just preventing it. The firm’s new focus will include ways to help farmers and communities grapple with increasingly common or severe droughts, and helping crops remain productive as the world becomes hotter, wetter, or drier; potentially through indoor farming and genetic alteration. (MIT Technology Review)
Recently public real estate startups shed over $42B in value: Remember those flashy public debuts from WeWork, Opendoor and other hot real estate startups? Looks like most of those high valuations were built on shaky foundations. Overall, venture-backed real estate startups that went public in the past two years are down an average of 85% from their offering price. (Crunchbase)
Instacart Shelves Plans for 2022 IPO, Citing Market Turmoil. (Bloomberg)
Technology
The Biden administration is exploring the possibility of new export controls that would limit China’s access to some of the most powerful emerging computing technologies, according to people familiar with the situation. The potential plans, which are in an early stage, are focused on the still-experimental field of quantum computing, as well as artificial intelligence software. (Bloomberg)
Chip Maker TSMC Weighs Expansion in Japan to Reduce Geopolitical Risk. (Wall Street Journal)
Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce: Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises. Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000. (Washington Post)
OpenAI, Valued at Nearly $20 Billion, in Advanced Talks with Microsoft For More Funding: OpenAI, whose text- and image-generating artificial intelligence has become a mainstream hit, is in advanced talks to raise more funding from Microsoft, which previously backed the startup with capital that includes credits to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services to develop its technology. (The Information)
How Netflix plans to pivot: 1) Netflix’s foray into advertising is the first pillar of this pivot. The company will launch its ad-supported tier in 12 countries next month, and executives shared a few more details about those efforts this week. 2) Part two of Netflix’s pivot: monetizing account sharing. Starting sometime in early 2023, Netflix will pester people to pay more if they want to continue to share their accounts with others. 3) Netflix Games is the third part of Netflix’s pivot, and we’re only now starting to see how dead serious the company is about gaming. (Protocol)
Why US internet speeds vary so much between neighborhoods: Lower-income areas where residents are from minority ethnic communities are likely to experience distinctly slower speeds. (The Markup)
Microsoft Says it’s Developing a Mobile Game Store to Compete with Google and Apple. (The Information)
Smart Links
Toxic Workplaces Are Bad for Mental and Physical Health, Surgeon General Says. (Wall Street Journal)
Beach Erosion, Rising Seas Threaten Amtrak’s Second-Busiest Rail Line. (City Lab)
Major policy shift: New law will allow denser housing across San Francisco (San Francisco Examiner)
Gates Foundation Will Plow Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Into Improving Math Education Nationally. (The Chronicle of Philanthropy)
Airline Offers Rent and Unlimited Flights for Remote Workers: Japan’s Star Flyer is trying to draw remote workers in Tokyo with airfare-plus-rent subscriptions. (Bloomberg)
Sally Kornbluth is named as MIT’s 18th president. (MIT News)