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The World
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meets NATO leaders today after they declared his country's future lay inside the alliance but rebuffed his call for a timeline to membership. Zelenskiy will join the NATO leaders on the second day of their summit in Vilnius for an inaugural session of the NATO-Ukraine Council, a body established to upgrade relations between Kyiv and the 31-member transatlantic military alliance. He will also meet separately with U.S. President Joe Biden as he seeks more arms and ammunition from the United States and other NATO nations to fight the war triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year. The US, Britain, France and Germany are expected to issue assurances to Kyiv of long-term security support in the form of advanced weaponry, training and other military aid, possibly soon after the summit ends, according to officials. (Reuters)
Zelensky slams NATO for omitting a timeline for Ukraine to join: The alliance said in a joint statement that Ukraine can join when “conditions are met.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called that statement “absurd.” (Washington Post)
North Korea condemned President Biden's decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a "criminal act" and demanded an immediate withdrawal of the plan. The fact that Biden had admitted it was a difficult decision showed he was aware of the disastrous consequences of the use of cluster munitions, North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency. (Reuters)
North Korea fired an unspecified ballistic missile off its east coast, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement on Wednesday, a launch also reported by Japan's military. The missile was still flying, according to a Japanese Defense Ministry official quoted by broadcaster NHK. No further details were immediately available about the launch, which came barely a month after North Korea's last launch and is its 12th such launch this year. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Supplies are running out for a key antidote for life-threatening lead poisoning. The drug, named dimercaprol, has been a go-to treatment for years for the worst cases of lead poisoning. But doctors have had to scrounge for dwindling doses since the medicine’s sole manufacturer for the U.S. declared bankruptcy in February. Now that some parts of the country don’t have any supplies left, doctors have been forced to turn to other, less preferred treatments. (Wall Street Journal)
Vermont capital submerged in floodwaters with dam on verge of capacity: A dam upstream from the Vermont state capital was holding a t maximum capacity on Tuesday after "catastrophic" flooding shut down roadways leading out of Montpelier and trapped people in their homes. The Wrightsville Dam, which forms a reservoir four miles (6.4 km) north of Montpelier, neared the point at which a spillway would need to release water into the North Branch of the Winooski River, city officials said. Much of the U.S. Northeast including parts of New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut have already had as much as 8 inches (20 cm) of rain over the last several days. (Reuters)
Record-breaking heat is baking the US south-west this week, putting millions under extreme heat warnings as temperatures upwards of 100F (38C) hit Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and southern California for days on end. Even desert residents accustomed to scorching summers are feeling the relentless grip of the heat. Phoenix, which hit a 12th consecutive day of 110F on Tuesday, could see its longest ever heatwave. (The Guardian)
In Phoenix, Heat Becomes a Brutal Test of Endurance: Forecasters say the streak of consecutive 110-degree days may end up being the longest Phoenix has ever seen, potentially breaking a record set in 1974. (New York Times)
U.S. students have not caught back up to pre-COVID levels of learning in math and reading, with Black and Hispanic pupils among the hardest hit by the pandemic. The analysis by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) highlights the continuing toll on education from the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to prolonged school closures and remote learning for millions of school children. (Reuters)
Americans Prepare for Tighter Budgets as Student Loan Payments Resume: The restart of federal student loan payments this fall will be a renewed burden for millions of borrowers and another headwind for a US economy that’s losing momentum. The Biden administration agreed not to extend the three-year moratorium on payments as part of the debt ceiling deal it cut with Republicans, so the almost 27 million borrowers who have a total of $1.1 trillion in student loans in forbearance will need to resume servicing them starting on Oct. 1. (Bloomberg)
A humble lake in a Canadian suburb may soon become the symbolic starting point for a radical new chapter in Earth’s official history: the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. A group of scientists said Tuesday the best evidence for humanity’s overwhelming impact on the planet could be found at Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario. The lake’s finely layered sediments contain a thousand-year record of environmental history, culminating in an explosion of man-made disruption around the middle of the 20th century. That’s when scientists say human activities — from nuclear weapons tests and fossil fuel combustion to deforestation and global trade — began to leave an indelible imprint on Earth’s geologic record. (Washington Post)
Economy
The U.S.’ outdated and fragmented power grid is increasingly threatened by the effects of climate change and global warming, but estimates show that upgrading it may cost billions, even trillions, over the coming decades. The price of those improvements will likely pale in comparison to the costs — in economic damage and in lives lost — that will be incurred by not sufficiently modernizing the grid, experts say. Tallies of how much modernizing the grid will cost vary widely, ranging from more than one trillion to even several trillion over the coming decades. But most of the estimates argue that not enough resources are being devoted to ensuring that the grid will function under the expected weather extremes of the future, making costly damages more likely. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the U.S. energy system a "C-" grade on its 2021 infrastructure report card, said then that grid investment trends will eventually lead to a funding gap of almost $200 billion by 2029. The Department of Energy currently estimates that power outages cost the U.S. economy $150 billion annually, though the estimate did not include the human toll of outages. (Axios)
Latin America is set to become a major oil producer this decade. In deep blue waters off the coast of Guyana, gargantuan ships are sucking oil from reservoirs three kilometres below the surface. These machines are transforming the fortunes of one of South America’s smallest and poorest countries. In 2015 ExxonMobil, an American oil giant, found the first of what are now around 11bn barrels of proven crude oil reserves, or around 0.6% of the world’s total. Production began three years ago, and is now picking up pace. By 2027 it could reach more than a million barrels a day—a rate that today would make Guyana one of the top 20 oil producers in the world. That is a stunning bonanza for a country of only 800,000 inhabitants. (Economist)
Japan’s financial regulators have warned that regional banks are prone to “gender-washing” in disclosures to investors due to legal ambiguity over leadership roles occupied by women. An average of just 13.7 per cent of managers at regional banks were women, compared with an average 20.8 per cent at the country’s three megabanks, according to a survey of 100 regional banks published by the Financial Services Agency last month. But the tally included positions that would be considered relatively junior at most banks and did not typically oversee many subordinates. Once those titles were stripped out, the survey showed that only an average 8.1 per cent of women held managerial roles at the regional lenders. (Financial Times)
The U.S. electric vehicle market is growing, but not fast enough during the latest quarter to prevent unsold EVs from stacking up at some automakers' dealerships or to allow Tesla to avoid new price cuts, according to analysts and industry data. Rising inventories and price-cutting could represent only a short-term pause in EV market growth. But they could be signals that boosting U.S. EV sales above the current 7% market share level will be more costly and difficult than expected, even with federal and state subsidies. (Reuters)
Salesforce plans its first price hike in seven years by ~9% for some products like Tableau and Sales Cloud, effective August 2023 for new and existing customers. (Bloomberg)
Technology
KPMG plans to invest $2 billion in artificial intelligence and cloud services across its business lines globally over the next five years through an expanded partnership with Microsoft, the latest move by a Big Four accounting firm to double down on the technologies. The professional-services company said it expects the partnership to bring in more than $12 billion in revenue over five years. Annually, that would represent about 7% of KPMG’s global revenue. Through the new investment, the roughly 265,000-person company will further automate aspects of its tax, audit and consulting services, aimed at enabling employees to provide faster analysis, spending more time on doling out strategic advice and helping more companies integrate AI into their operations. (Wall Street Journal)
27% of jobs at high risk from AI revolution, says OECD. More than a quarter of jobs in the OECD rely on skills that could be easily automated in the coming artificial intelligence revolution, and workers fear they could lose their jobs to AI. Jobs with the highest risk of being automated make up 27% of the labour force on average in OECD countries, with eastern European countries most exposed. Jobs at highest risk were defined as those using more than 25 of the 100 skills and abilities that AI experts consider can be easily automated. (Reuters)
Microsoft has moved closer to securing its $75bn purchase of Activision Blizzard after a US federal judge rejected the FTC’s attempt to halt the deal and the UK’s competition watchdog signaled it was open to discussing a merger it had previously rejected. Shares in Activision, the group behind video games including Call of Duty, were up more than 11 per cent at $92 in lunchtime trading in New York, their closest to the $95-per-share offer price since Microsoft announced its bid in January 2022. (Financial Times)
Microsoft-Activision ruling highlights Lina Khan’s struggles to fight tech: Challenging the $68.7 billion deal has been one of the FTC’s biggest swings yet under Khan. Even as many in Congress have become more open to a different view of antitrust in the digital age, the courts still pose a major hurdle to newer theories about how online companies can amass and leverage power to stifle rivals. (CNBC)
Global PC shipments fell 13.4% YoY to 61.6M in Q2 2023, the sixth consecutive quarter of decline; in the top five, only Apple gained, up 10.3% YoY to 5.3M units. (IDC)
Google quietly ditched plans for an AI-powered chatbot app for Gen Z: Called “Bubble Characters,” the app featured cartoon-like characters engaging in conversations with young users and even offering advice. The Gen Z chatbot was one among a range of AI-powered projects using Google’s large language models in the last several months. (CNBC)
Smart Links
Nuclear fission start-up backed by Sam Altman to go public. (Financial Times)
Migration pushes EU population back to growth in 2022. (Reuters)
Credit card interest rates soar as balances are a top share of household debt. (CNBC)
Why strip malls are a bright spot in a bleak real estate market (Semafor)
SAG-AFTRA and studios turn to federal mediator as strike threat looms. (Los Angeles Times)