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The World
Russia threatens to restrict gas flows to western Europe via Ukraine: Russia has threatened to restrict gas supplies to western Europe through the only pipeline still connecting the regions, warning that it could lower flows through Ukraine from next week. Gazprom, the state-backed Russian gas pipeline monopoly, accused Ukraine on Tuesday of taking gas meant for Moldova from lines running through the country, and warned that it may reduce supplies from November 28. (Financial Times)
Western Allies Aim to Agree on Russian Oil Price Cap. The U.S. and its allies are seeking to agree as soon as Wednesday on a level for a price cap on Russian oil, with officials discussing setting it at around $60 a barrel as the group rushes to complete the plan, according to people familiar with the talks. The price cap, which the people said could still be set as high as $70, is at the center of the West’s efforts to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The Group of Seven advanced democracies and Australia plan to begin enforcing the price cap on Dec. 5 after struggling to craft its details this fall. (Wall Street Journal)
Bolsonaro contests Brazil election, demands votes be anulled. More than three weeks after losing a reelection bid, President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday blamed a software bug and demanded the electoral authority annul votes cast on most of Brazil’s nation’s electronic voting machines, though independent experts say the bug doesn’t affect the reliability of results. Such an action would leave Bolsonaro with 51% of the remaining valid votes — and a reelection victory, Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party, told reporters. (Associated Press)
China lockdowns reach record level as coronavirus cases soar: Country sticks to zero-Covid policy, with almost 28,000 new infections reported. (Financial Times)
China’s economic pain to persist after zero-Covid ends, economists warn: Policymakers’ attempts to boost China’s economy while it remains constrained by the disruptive zero-Covid policy are deemed ‘powerless’. (South China Morning Post)
Kim Jong Un's sister warns U.S. of 'a more fatal security crisis'. The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned the United States on Tuesday that it would face “a more fatal security crisis” as Washington pushes for U.N. condemnation of the North’s recent intercontinental ballistic missile test. Kim Yo Jong’s warning came hours after U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that the U.S. will circulate a proposed presidential statement condemning North Korea’s banned missile launches and other destabilizing activities. After the meeting, Thomas-Greenfield also read a statement by 14 countries which supported action to limit North Korea’s advancement of its weapons programs. (Politico)
Russia’s crumbling tech sector: Young Russians with tech talent face a bleak future. Before the war, the country’s tech sector was heavily dependent on financial backing from the government and the well-connected people who profit from it. Then, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the US, EU, and other countries ended the export of semiconductors, microelectronics, lasers, telecom equipment, and other tech essentials to Russia. They also blacklisted Russian tech companies and research institutions. Western tech giants left Russia. But the withdrawal of Western technology is not the only seismic shock for Russia’s tech future. Many of those talented young Russians working in tech have fled their country in search of better prospects for themselves and their families. Some men may fear that a future military mobilization will force them to fight in Ukraine, and every new rumor feeds this anxiety. This latest Russian brain drain will deliver economic — and, therefore, political — shocks for decades to come. Well aware of this problem, Moscow has offered military deferments, tax breaks, and other economic incentives to persuade people to remain in Russia. But none of these inducements can match what the most talented can earn in Europe or the United States. (GZERO Media)
Why doesn’t the U.S. have at-home flu tests? No at-home flu tests are available for purchase in the U.S. That’s not for lack of technology — the rapid antigen flu tests at the doctor’s office are “virtually identical” to the Covid tests already in people’s homes, according to Zoë McLaren, associate professor of public policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County who studies health policies for infectious disease epidemics.Rather, the issue comes down to historical hangups — and the need to find digital fixes to address them. (STAT News)
Canada: Why the country wants to bring in 1.5m immigrants by 2025. Earlier this month, the federal government announced an aggressive plan to take in 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025, with almost 1.5 million new immigrants coming to the country over the next three years. This plan would see Canada welcome about eight-times the number of permanent residents each year - per population - than the UK, and four-times more than its southern neighbour, the United States. But a recent poll shows that there is also anxiety about welcoming in so many newcomers. (BBC)
We’re only 8 years away from stronger El Niño and La Niña events. The planet is currently in a rare triple-dip La Niña year, but climate change will likely affect the opposite weather system El Niño as well. These fluctuations in the sea surface temperature near the equator in the Pacific Ocean can weather around the world. But just how much these systems will be impacted has been up in the air. However, a new study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, finds that climate change is expected to strengthen El Niño and La Niña events by 2030. (Popular Science)
Economy
The UK economy is set to be the worst performer in the G20 bar Russia over the next two years, the OECD said, underlining the lasting impact of high energy prices on Europe as a whole. The OECD said in its latest economic forecasts that UK gross domestic product would fall 0.4 per cent in 2023 and rise a mere 0.2 per cent in 2024. That would be a longer and deeper downturn even than the forecast for Germany, whose manufacturing-intensive economy is particularly vulnerable to high energy prices. (Financial Times)
Investor buying of homes tumbled 30% in the third quarter, a sign that the rise in borrowing rates and high home prices that pushed traditional buyers to the sidelines are causing these firms to pull back, too. (Wall Street Journal)
China just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it means. For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an instant image: a Black Mirror–esque web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either. Instead, the system that the central government has been slowly working on is a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values—however vague that last goal in particular sounds. There’s no evidence yet that this system has been abused for widespread social control (though it remains possible that it could be wielded to restrict individual rights). (MIT Technology Review)
Germany’s football federation has said it plans legal steps against Fifa over its banning of OneLove rainbow armbands at the World Cup as it faced the humiliating decision by one of the country’s largest supermarket chains to cut its commercial ties over the row. (The Guardian)
Bankman-Fried issues mea culpa in letter to former FTX employees: Sam Bankman-Fried has told former FTX employees that excessive borrowing by his own trading firm Alameda Research was responsible for FTX’s demise, insisting he was unaware of the margin positions taken by the traders. In a letter to former employees, the FTX founder wrote that he “did not realise the full extent of the margin position, nor did I realise the magnitude of the risk posed by a hyper-correlated crash”. (Financial Times)
Despite Elon Musk publicly distancing himself from SBF, texts between them on May 5 show SBF rolled over $100M in Twitter stock during Musk's takeover. (Semafor)
Technology
More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 marketers — including Mars and Jeep — have not advertised on the social media network in the past two weeks, a Washington Post analysis of marketing data found — an indication of the extent of skittishness among advertisers about billionaire Elon Musk’s control of the company. Dozens of top Twitter advertisers, including 14 of the top 50, have stopped advertising in the few weeks since Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the social media company. (Washington Post)
At an all-hands, Elon Musk said Twitter is done with layoffs and actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales; Twitter has 2,700+ employees. (The Verge)
HP will eliminate as many as 6,000 jobs over the next three years amid declining demand for personal computers that has cut into profits. (Bloomberg)
Xi Jinping’s initial-public-offering boom. In a parallel universe CloudWalk might have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in Hong Kong or New York. The firm is one of the world’s leading facial-recognition outfits: its technology can recognize people in milliseconds with astonishing accuracy. But modern geopolitics pushed it in another direction. America has sanctioned the firm for alleged human-rights violations, owing to reputed links with China’s military. So instead of listing on the nasdaq in New York, CloudWalk chose Shanghai’s star Market, a bourse set up in 2019 to attract China’s rising tech companies. The company’s share price is up by a fifth since its debut in May. (The Economist)
Tesla employees called Elon Musk an 'unapproachable tyrant' who fires people 'because of his ego' in 2018 survey. Tesla employees complained about Elon Musk's leadership and culture in a 2018 survey obtained by Insider. The survey flagged compensation, "Elon and exec team," and "care about the company's employees" as high-risk areas. The survey was referenced on the first day of testimonies in a shareholder lawsuit against Musk. (Insider)
People describing themselves as Foxconn workers pulled down barriers and argued with hazmat-suited authorities at a COVID-hit plant in the industrial Chinese city of Zhengzhou that belongs to the Apple Inc (AAPL.O) supplier, scenes broadcast live on the Kuaishou short video platform showed on Wednesday. The videos showed more than a hundred people clustered outside and coming face to face with dozens of hazmat-suited officials, who they said were police. Some videos showed workers complaining about the food they had been provided while others said they had not been paid bonuses as promised. (Reuters)
Are you ready for workplace brain scanning? Extracting and using brain data will make workers happier and more productive, backers say. Neurotechnology is coming to the workplace. Neural sensors are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial pilot projects that extract productivity-enhancing data from workers’ brains. These projects aren’t confined to specialized workplaces; they’re also happening in offices, factories, farms, and airports. The companies and people behind these neurotech devices are certain that they will improve our lives. But there are serious questions about whether work should be organized around certain functions of the brain, rather than the person as a whole. (IEEE Spectrum)
Holiday ransomware attacks hit education harder than other sectors. (K-12 Dive)
Smart Links
Harvard paper to central banks: Buy Bitcoin! (Politico)
Student loan repayment pause extended through June 2023 by White House. (Axios)
Clothing piles up at Bangladesh warehouses as west cuts imports. (Financial Times)
Disney’s ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Cleared for December Release in China. (Wall Street Journal)
Drought in Hawaii is fueling rare November wildfire concerns. (Washington Post)
Glazers weigh up Manchester United sale. (Financial Times)