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The World
All of New Orleans — nearly 1 million people — was without power after Hurricane Ida leaves 'catastrophic transmission damage' and President Biden approved Louisiana's disaster declaration. The energy company Entergy confirmed that power has been cut off across the entire city, according to an update posted on Twitter by the New Orleans’ Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. The message describes “catastrophic transmission damage.” Ida made landfall twice, around noon at Port Fourchon and near Galliano around 2 p.m. as a catastrophic Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. Since then, the storm has weakened slightly as it has moved ashore with winds of 120 miles per hour. (New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Guardian)
Climate change helped make Hurricane Ida one of Louisiana’s worst: Unusually high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are “like stepping on the accelerator,” a scientist says. (Washington Post)
The majority of the American public does not believe the withdrawal from Afghanistan will have a significant impact on American security from terrorism, according to a new ABC News-Ipsos poll, fielded August 27-28. This comes as just under a quarter of Americans describe themselves as ‘very worried’ about the possibility of a major terrorist attack in the United States. Despite this, large majorities of Americans believe U.S. troops should stay in Afghanistan until all Americans, and all Afghans who aided the U.S. are evacuated. (ABC News/Ipsos)
Britain faces its biggest terrorist threat for many years, Boris Johnson was warned last night, as he offered the Taliban diplomatic recognition if they prevented attacks being launched from Afghanistan. (The Times)
North Korea appears to have restarted a nuclear reactor that is widely believed to have produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has had no access to North Korea since Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2009. The IAEA now monitors North Korea from afar, largely through satellite imagery: “Since early July 2021, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operation of the reactor.” (The Guardian)
China’s anti-corruption watchdog has hit out at the country’s entertainment industry as Beijing tightens its grip on online celebrity culture and widens the scope of a crackdown on wealth and big business. The watchdog’s comments came after China’s internet regulator on Friday set out a list of 10 measures to address issues in the sector, adding that it would “resolve the problem of chaos” in online fan culture that it said was having a negative impact on young people. The measures include banning online popularity rankings of celebrities and regulating companies that work with them. (Financial Times)
Britain’s top universities are chartering flights to get Chinese students to the UK next month amid fears that global travel restrictions could cost hundreds of millions of pounds in overseas fees. The universities are worried that their income from overseas students — which is more than £1 billion, partly because of the premium on domestic fees the institutions are able to charge — could be undermined by travel problems. (The Times)
Japanese disapproval of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's Covid response hits near-record high, as the latest poll shows that even more believe government's vaccine rollout is not going well. Suga still will seek reelection, despite growing calls for 'new party face,’ though the voter rebuke of Suga likely will push back Japan's general election. (Nikkei Asian Review)
The European Union is set to recommend halting nonessential travel from the U.S. because of the spread of Covid-19. European officials have been considering the move for much of the last month, with the average U.S. infection rate now above that of the EU. The Slovenian presidency of the EU last week recommended removing the U.S. and five other countries from a list of countries allowed nonessential travel. A final decision is due today. Two diplomats said they weren’t aware of any objections so far. (Wall Street Journal)
States pull back on Covid data even amid Delta surge: Two state government websites in Georgia recently stopped posting updates on covid-19 cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, just as the dangerous delta variant was taking hold. Data has been disappearing recently in other states as well. Florida, for example, now reports covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations once a week, instead of daily, as before. (Kaiser Health News)
Preventable hospitalizations from COVID-19 have cost the U.S. healthcare system billions of dollars since the beginning of June alone, according to a new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 98% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 between May and July were unvaccinated. Roughly 113,000 of the 185,000 inpatient stays with a COVID-19 diagnosis could have been prevented by vaccination in June and July. Various data pegs the average hospitalization cost for COVID-19 at around $20,000, so based on these estimates, avoidable COVID-19 hospitalizations cost the U.S. health system $2.3 billion in those two months alone. (Healthcare Dive, Kaiser Family Foundation)
Economy
The SEC is stepping up its inquiry into so-called gamification and behavioral prompts used by online brokerages and investment advisors to prod people to trade more stocks and other securities. Wall Street’s top regulator said investors can be misled by rosy projections of profit by technologies that, in reality, understate the risk of a particular investment or the odds of eye-popping returns. (CNBC)
ESPN is seeking to license its brand to major sports-betting companies for at least $3 billion over several years, according to people familiar with the matter, aiming to capitalize on the fast-growing online gambling industry. The sports-media giant has held talks with players that own major sportsbooks, including casino operator Caesars Entertainment Inc. and online gambling company DraftKings Inc. ESPN has existing marketing partnerships with both companies. On offer is the right for a suitor to use the ESPN name for branding purposes and potentially rename its sportsbook after the leading sports TV network in the U.S. (Wall Street Journal)
Kraft Heinz’s move to a hybrid work model means big changes to its Chicago headquarters. As with United Airlines, companies are revamping their offices to create more space for employees to collaborate on the days they come into the office. Here’s what the new office will look like. (Chicago Tribune)
Co-working companies benefit from return-to-office uncertainty. (Wall Street Journal)
With office vacancy rates in many major U.S. cities high, several startups are turning unused space into food distribution centers, storage spaces, boutique gyms, classrooms for microschools and learning pods, co-working spaces, and more. (Crunchbase)
In less than two weeks, El Salvador will become the first country to adopt bitcoin as a national currency. No one knows what comes next. The government of the impoverished Central American nation aims to spend up to $75 million as part of a plan to hand out $30 to people who sign up to an e-wallet called Chivo, or “Cool.” That software-based system would allow an estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans to buy goods or pay for services in U.S. dollars or bitcoin, El Salvador’s two official currencies as of Sept 7. The foray into bitcoin risks wrecking El Salvador’s $26 billion economy. (Wall Street Journal)
Is ‘Big Day Care’ the solution to America’s childcare woes: The industry — with a U.S. market valued at $47.2 billion — has been in dire straits for decades, thanks to its lose, lose, lose economics: It’s expensive for parents, low-paid for workers, and low-margin for providers. And that was before COVID came along, sending many of the small daycares and providers of “center-based” childcare out of business permanently; as of this April, a third of centers have not reopened. Still, there are a few childcare companies that have managed to survive and even grow during over the past year and a half. Call them Big Day Care: KinderCare, Learning Care Group, and Bright Horizons are the largest players in the market. With the help of their scale and resources, they’re emerging from the pandemic as the strongest remaining pieces of the nation’s decrepit childcare infrastructure. (Fortune)
Chinese investors are again looking to Africa’s fintech start-ups: Venture capital funds return to the emerging market after staying away because of the economic uncertainty of the pandemic, with mobile-payment platforms among the recipients. (South China Morning Post)
Technology
A surge of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, a little-known but critical link in the semiconductor supply chain, has opened a new front in the battle to fix manufacturing woes that have rippled across industries during a global shortage of computing chips. The nation is one of the world’s top destinations for assembly and testing of the devices that control smartphones, car engines and medical equipment. Disruptions in Malaysia threaten to prolong uncertainty over chip supply well into next year, dashing hopes of relief in 2H21. (Wall Street Journal)
The City of Chicago filed two sweeping lawsuits against DoorDash and Grubhub for allegedly deceiving customers and using unfair business practices. The suits echo longstanding claims from restaurant owners that the platforms advertise delivery services for their businesses without their consent and conceal lower prices that restaurants offer directly to customers outside of the platforms. The city also claims both platforms use a “bait-and-switch” method to attract customers with low delivery fees, only to charge additional ones when they are about to place their order. (CNBC)
HBO is about to lose 5 million customers, and Andy Forssell isn’t worried. Forssell, the general manager of HBO Max, was a chief advocate for the company’s decision to drop out of Amazon’s channels program, a system the retailer uses to sell different streaming services on top of its Prime video. HBO has amassed about 5 million subscribers using channels, and losing those customers will impact growth in the current quarter. HBO now has about 67.5 million subscribers worldwide across the premium channel and streaming, the majority of which live in the U.S. But channels has become a headache for streaming services that now want to have a direct relationship with their customers, and don’t want to allow a third party to control the user interface and billing. (Bloomberg)
Apple was the most secretive company in tech. Then it developed a Slack habit. The popular messaging tool became a hit at the 160,000-person company during the pandemic, when many employees were forced to work from home. And in recent months, Slack has become a virtual town square. They have rallied there to protest the company’s plan to return to its offices, object to its method of granting exemptions for continued remote work and declare their outrage over Apple’s hiring of a controversial tech industry figure. (The Information)
Smart Links
Here’s why the background check is an ineffective hiring tool. (Protocol)
Everything you should know about California’s recall election. (Los Angeles Times)
Lufthansa plans more flights to woo business travelers. (Reuters)
Switching to salt substitutes could save thousands of lives, landmark study shows. (The Times)
First 3D-bioprinted structured Wagyu beef-like meat unveiled. (Osaka University)
South Korean retailers bank on megamalls to beat online giants. (Nikkei Asian Review)
The world’s top 10 spots for ‘workations’. (CNBC)
EU needs Belarus for Russian gas. (GZERO Media)