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The World
Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison defended his decision to renege on a submarine deal with France as acrimony intensified over Canberra’s decision to sign a new security pact with the US and UK. Morrison said he did “not regret the decision to put Australia’s national interest first” in comments that came just hours after France, which is fuming over being left out of the pact, derided the UK’s role. Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, said Paris had recalled its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra but deemed it unnecessary to do the same in London because “we know about [the UK’s] permanent opportunism.” Added Le Drian: “Great Britain is in this case a bit like the fifth wheel on the coach.” (Financial Times)
A Franco-British defense ministers’ summit due to take place this week has been cancelled as Paris steps up its protests. (The Guardian)
Russia's ruling United Russia party, which supports President Vladimir Putin, retained its majority in parliament after a three-day election and a sweeping crackdown on its critics, despite losing around one fifth of its support, partial results showed. With 33% of ballots counted, the Central Election Commission said United Russia had won just over 45% of the vote, with its nearest rival, the Communist Party, at around 22%. Although that amounts to an emphatic win, it would be a weaker performance for United Russia than the last time a parliamentary election was held in 2016, when the party won just over 54% of the vote. (Reuters)
Russian opposition activists said Google had taken down videos and documents they were using to organize a protest vote in this weekend’s elections, the latest sign of rising pressure from the Kremlin on American internet giants. (New York Times)
China is set to conduct regular tax investigations into top entertainers including online influencers, promising serious punishment for offenders amid a deepening crackdown on the entertainment industry and lucrative culture of fandom. High-income celebrities who self-report offences by the end of the year, however, may receive reduced penalties or exemptions, the country’s taxation authorities said in announcing the plans for greater scrutiny. (South China Morning Post)
Canada election today: The battleground regions of B.C., Ontario and Quebec will be key to deciding who wins government in what the polls show is a tight race. (Globe and Mail)
The Senate parliamentarian ruled that Democrats’ bid to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants through a budget reconciliation — which would have allowed them to leverage their slim majority to overcome Republican opposition to the move — is “not appropriate” for inclusion in the budget bill. The decision is a blow to Democrats’ plans to create a path to legal residency for as many as 8 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., including many who have lived here for years. The last major legalization occurred in 1986. (Washington Post)
Without immediate action to combat climate change, rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050. The World Bank’s Groundswell 2.0 report, modeled the impacts of climate change on six regions, concluding that climate migration "hotspots" will emerge as soon as 2030 and intensify by 2050, hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest. (Reuters, World Bank)
Joe Manchin, the powerful West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate energy panel and earned half a million dollars last year from coal production, is preparing to remake President Biden’s climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry — despite urgent calls from scientists that countries need to quickly pivot away from coal, gas and oil to avoid a climate catastrophe. (New York Times)
Majority in U.S. says the public health benefits of COVID-19 restrictions are worth the costs, even as large shares also see downsides. (Pew Research Center)
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, defiantly unvaccinated, will test the U.N.’s vaccine ‘honor system.’ The U.N. wants world leaders arriving for its General Assembly tomorrow to attest they are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. But the gathering’s very first moments are scheduled to include Bolsonaro, as it’s U.N. tradition that the president of Brazil speaks first. (Washington Post)
Smoke from Russian wildfires this summer reached all the way across the North Pole to hit Greenland and Canada, according to new satellite data. Carbon emissions from global wildfires have set a record high for August this year, after extensive blazes in Russia’s Far East, as well as California and Canada, pushed past the previous highest level for the month. (Financial Times)
Economy
Federal Reserve officials are expected this week to send a clearer signal about plans to begin phasing out pandemic-era stimulus as early as November as U.S. consumers continue to power the economic recovery. The policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee convenes on Tuesday for a two-day meeting that should shed light on the fate of the enormous bond-buying program it put in place last year to stabilise financial markets and shore up the economy. (Financial Times)
Natural-gas prices are surging, and winter is still months away: U.S. natural-gas futures reached $5.105 per million British thermal units. They were about half that six months ago and have leapt 17% this month. It is supposed to be offseason for demand, and prices haven’t climbed so high since blizzards froze the Northeast in early 2014. Meanwhile in Europe, soaring energy prices will push up broader inflation across Europe this year, hurting consumers and threatening the region’s post-pandemic economic recovery, economists are warning. (Wall Street Journal, Financial Times)
How accounting giants craft favorable tax rules from inside the government: Lawyers from top firms often work brief stints in the Treasury Department and then return to corporations with better titles and pay, public records reveal. The revolving door is viewed even by some industry veterans as part of the reason that tax policy has become so skewed in favor of the wealthy. (New York Times)
Finance firms have long struggled to reach young and new customers — until now. A look at US “finfluencers”, creators partnering with fintechs to promote investment products, as App Annie says hours spent on finance apps are up 90% YoY. (Bloomberg)
Technology
Initial benchmarks show iPhone 13's A15 chip offers a roughly 15% improvement for GPU performance and 10%-18% improvement for CPU performance over A14. (MacRumors)
How T-Mobile's John Legere Ripped Up Your Wireless Contract: T-Mobile needed help in 2012. It was running miles behind industry leaders Verizon and AT&T, and even its eventual merger partner, Sprint. T-Mobile only had a third of the wireless subscribers of either AT&T and Verizon. The hope was that Legere could fix the situation. He certainly had the proper background. (Investors Business Daily)
In the latest move to curb screen time for younger Chinese users, ByteDance Ltd., the maker of the hit short-video mobile app TikTok, said that it would restrict access to Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, to 40 minutes a day for users under 14 years old. Douyin’s “youth mode,” which follows the imposition of new limits on younger Chinese users’ access to online videogames, will restrict under-14s to using the app between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. The app will be inaccessible to all users in that age group outside of those hours. (Wall Street Journal)
Zoom Video’s star has fallen. The videoconferencing hit of the pandemic is on the outs with investors, not horribly but enough that it may have trouble winning over shareholders of Five9. That’s the contact-center software firm Zoom proposed buying in July for a price then estimated at $14.7 billion. A 20% drop in Zoom’s stock price since the deal was struck has shrunk the value of its all-stock offer. And now, with Five9 shares trading well above the value of Zoom’s offer, Zoom either has to raise its bid or miss out. (The Information)
LinkedIn is 18 years old — Methuselah by social media standards. Its insistence on adding Instagram-style features can seem cringeworthy. Why would anyone want to put disappearing photos on their LinkedIn page? Who wants to become a LinkedIn influencer anyway? Undeterred, the company is plotting even more bells and whistles. Last week it announced a $25m “creator fund” to encourage users to post more content. TikTok-like short videos are on their way. Soon it will launch its own version of Clubhouse, the audio chatroom app that sent Silicon Valley into a tailspin last year. (Financial Times)
The battle for digital privacy is reshaping the internet: An intensifying battle over the future of the internet. The struggle has entangled tech titans, upended Madison Avenue and disrupted small businesses. And it heralds a profound shift in how people’s personal information may be used online, with sweeping implications for the ways that businesses make money digitally. At the center of the tussle is what has been the internet’s lifeblood: advertising. (New York Times)
Smart Links
Boxer Manny Pacquiao to run for Philippine president in 2022. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Scientists created the world's whitest paint. It could eliminate the need for air conditioning. (USA Today)
Is Peter Thiel the most powerful venture capitalist in the world? (Protocol)
French officials say Notre-Dame cathedral should reopen in 2024. (New York Times)
Junk-debt sales soar toward record year. (Wall Street Journal)
The best courses in the U.S. and beyond for an autumn tee time. (Barron’s)