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The World
Senate Democrats and Republicans finalized a roughly $1 trillion proposal to improve the country’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections, setting in motion a long-awaited debate in the chamber to enact one of President Biden’s economic policy priorities. The package arrives after weeks of haggling among a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers, who muscled through late-night fights and near-collapses to transform their initial blueprint into a roughly 2,700-page piece of legislation. The fate of their labors now rests in the Senate, where proponents of infrastructure reform have little margin for error as they race to adopt the sort of bill that has eluded them for years. Roughly half of its $1 trillion overall price tag constitutes new federal spending, with the rest coming from existing, planned investments in the country’s roads, highways and bridges, according to details released in recent days by lawmakers and the White House, which supports the proposal. (Washington Post)
Japan’s defense minister called on the international community to pay greater attention to the “survival of Taiwan” as he warned that China’s military build-up was enveloping the island. Nobuo Kishi said that broad international pressure was crucial to prevent Taiwan’s future being decided by military confrontation .His comments mark a further step up in rhetoric after Japan broke with years of precedent and directly linked Taiwan’s security to its own in a recent defense white paper, with an explicit reference to the need for a greater “sense of crisis.” (Financial Times)
The Taliban escalated its nationwide offensive in Afghanistan, renewing assaults on three major cities and rocketing a major airport in the south amid warnings that the conflict was rapidly worsening. (The Guardian)
America has abandoned its duty to protect democracy and human rights in Afghanistan, leaving its people to face a “bloody, brutal civil war,” General David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in the country, told The Times. As the Taliban lay siege to cities that British, American and other coalition troops died defending during 20 years of fighting, the architect of counter- insurgency warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq highlighted the dangers of an Islamist takeover. (The Times)
Americans split on whether the Afghanistan war was a mistake. This is only the second time that less than half of Americans (46%) say U.S. involvement was not a mistake. (Gallup)
The U.S., Britain and Israel all accused Iran of carrying out a drone attack last week on an oil tanker in the Arabian Sea that killed two people on board, raising fears of an escalating maritime war in the Middle East, as Tehran denied responsibility for the strike. (Washington Post)
Pfizer raised the price of its Covid-19 vaccine by more than a quarter and Moderna by more than a tenth in the latest EU supply contracts as Europe battled supply disruptions and concerns about side effects from rival products. The terms of the deals, struck this year for a total of up to 2.1bn shots until 2023, were renegotiated after phase 3 trial data showed their mRNA vaccines had higher efficacy rates than cheaper shots developed by Oxford/AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. The new price for a Pfizer shot was €19.50 against €15.50 previously. (Financial Times)
Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that “things are going to get worse” as a more contagious variant of the coronavirus has led to a surge of new cases. (Wall Street Journal)
The Delta variant pushed new daily cases of Covid-19 in Florida to a record high. The 21,683 new cases reported on Saturday was Florida’s highest one-day total since the start of the pandemic. It came a day after Ron DeSantis signed an executive order prohibiting school districts from requiring staff and students to wear masks. On Sunday, the state broke its previous record for hospitalisations, also set more than a year ago. (The Guardian)
Offices closing, cases rising: In Silicon Valley, it’s March 2020 all over again. "We'll reopen when it's right, but right now the world is changing too much." (Protocol)
Israelis over 60 flock to receive COVID vaccine booster dose. (Times of Israel)
A W.H.O. expert advisory panel issued two new reports recommending the implementation of global standards aimed at preventing unscrupulous, inequitable and potentially dangerous uses of CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies. The reports call for efforts to develop global standards, the establishment of an international registry of gene-editing experiments and a way for whistleblowers to report concerns. The committee, made up of ethicists, policy makers and lawyers, said in the reports that the use of gene editing had evolved dramatically since they set out in December 2018 to develop a governing framework and that recent successes in altering the DNA of people with lethal diseases had opened up ethical challenges. (Wall Street Journal)
An albino opossum was born — through CRISPR, a gene editing tool. The fact that CRISPR works on marsupials means more than just the birth of more albino creatures. The ability to tweak marsupial genomes could help biologists learn more about the animals and use them to study immune responses, developmental biology, and even diseases like melanoma. (MIT Technology Review)
A gene editing startup, Prime Medicine, raised $200 million in Series B funding and in addition disclosed that it raised $115 million in Series A funding. Based in Cambridge, MA, the startup was co-founded by biochemist David Liu, one of the foremost CRISPR innovators. Prime editing differs from other CRISPRs systems as it can insert, delete, or replace long stretches of DNA in any cell type and any spot on the genome. (Axios)
Economy
Companies across the U.S. economy are raising pay to recruit workers in a tight labor market, increases that are rippling through firms and prompting employers to rethink pay for existing staffers. So-called wage compression—when pay for new hires or entry-level staff approaches what longtime staff or senior colleagues make—poses a financial and management challenge for employers, and has gained new urgency as companies fight to attract and retain employees amid record-high rates of job-quitting. (Wall Street Journal)
Big money-management firms expanded their dominance in Silicon Valley last quarter, crowding out venture capitalists in a once-niche business and putting 2021 on pace to nearly double last year’s record in startup financing. Hedge funds, mutual funds, pensions, sovereign-wealth groups and other so-called nontraditional venture investors were more active in 2Q21 than in any previous period. These firms participated in 42% of startup financing deals, and those deals accounted for more than three-quarters of the invested capital. Investment in U.S. startups for the first half of 2021 hit $150 billion, eclipsing full-year funding every year before 2020. (Wall Street Journal)
A tsunami of deferred debt is about to hit homeowners no longer protected by a foreclosure moratorium. About 1.8 million homeowners are still in forbearance as the safety net is removed. About a fifth of them will not be able to extend their forbearance past September. And 1.5 million more are at least three months behind on their mortgage without the protection of a forbearance plan. Those who aren’t forced out will still be displaced if selling is their only option, and an estimated 1 in 10 borrowers in forbearance will not have enough equity to sell. (Washington Post)
A move to reorient Hong Kong's benchmark share index toward Chinese technology stocks was intended to reinvigorate interest and help investors capture growth in the country's highest-profile growth sector. Instead, with China's widening regulatory crackdown, the shift toward tech now threatens to bring the Hang Seng Index into bear market territory. A 30% hike in Hong Kong's stock trading transaction tax, due to kick in when the market opens Monday, is only adding to the gloom, alongside tightening U.S. regulations on investing in Chinese companies. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Technology
Is TikTok winning the Olympics? This is the first Summer Olympics in the age of TikTok, and coverage of the games on the short-form video app looks wildly different from TV. Many viewers don’t want to wait for big moments to air on prime time or sit through commercial breaks. Twitter offers quippy takes and YouTube deeper dives. But the surge of clips like the footage of Biles’s vault or intimate shots of gymnast Sunisa Lee’s flawless makeup before competition shows Gen Z viewers will tune in for personality-driven content delivered quickly on TikTok. (Washington Post)
The battle for the cloud — once Amazon vs. Microsoft — now has many fronts. Customers increasingly sign with multiple vendors to lower costs and cobble together the best services. (Wall Street Journal)
CEOs ignore social issues at their own peril: Leaders are more likely to be fired for riling shareholders about social, rather than financial, concerns, a new study suggests. (Wall Street Journal)
If you still have a device running Android 2.3.7 (the final version of Gingerbread) or older, Google won’t let you sign in to your Google account on that device starting September 27th, according to a support document. (The Verge)
Smart Links
JetBlue ready to launch low-cost New York to London flights. (The Guardian)
Commercial-property sales volume returns to pre-pandemic levels. (Wall Street Journal)
Zoom reaches $85 mln settlement over user privacy, 'Zoombombing.' (Reuters)
Square to acquire Afterpay for $29bn as ‘buy now, pay later’ booms. (Financial Times)
How has Microsoft escaped the scrutiny of reinvigorated antitrust regulators? (The Atlantic)
Among the 20 biggest dailies newspapers in the US, nearly two thirds of newsrooms are run by a woman or person of color, or both. (Nieman Lab)