TheChek News Flow

- President Biden has sent “dueling messages” on Afghanistan, on one hand the administration has sought to reassure Americans that it is ending “forever wars”. On the other, it is signaling to Afghans that the U.S. is not abandoning the country to a chaotic fate.

- On Friday, U.S. officials effectively closed Bagram Air Base, the nerve center of 20 years of American military operations in Afghanistan. As the last US troops and equipment trickle out of Afghanistan, “an atmosphere of unreality has settled over” the Afghan government and Kabul.

- The question about when to end the search for survivors at the site of the Florida condo is approaching as no survivors have been found since the collapse. After a week long search and rescue effort, the death toll has risen to 22.

- The case against Donald Trump’s family business resonates with “echoes of his father’s tactics on taxes.” Last week’s criminal prosecution involving the former president’s business “hearkens back to Fred Trump’s $16,135 purchase of boilers in the 1990s.”

- The term that just ended showed “two very different Supreme Courts.” For much of the last nine months, the court seems to have defied expectations that the conservative majority of six Republican appointees “would regularly steamroll their three liberal colleagues.”

- Former President Trump will hold a Fourth of July-themed rally on Saturday night in Sarasota, Florida, fueling controversy due to the ongoing search and rescue effort at the site of the collapsed residential tower near Miami.

- Hundreds of businesses around the world, including a major Swedish grocery chain, confronted potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities after software provider, Kaseya, said it had been the victim of a “sophisticated cyberattack.” Predictably, the New York Times blamed the Russians: “the attack may have been carried out by REvil, a Russian cybercriminal group that the F.B.I. has said was behind the hacking of the world’s largest meat processor, JBS, in May.”

- Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is about to blast off to space later this month. He has left his post to Andy Jassy, who has inherited the task of managing a $1.7 trillion dollar enterprise.

- Miami officials have decided to demolish what’s left of the Champlain Towers South with explosives on Sunday, due to an approaching tropical storm.

- The Biden administration may extend the ‘pandemic freeze’ on Americans’ student-loan payments beyond its expected expiration in September while adopting some piecemeal measures to lower student-debt bills.

- Videogame companies such as Electronic Arts Inc., Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. and Zynga Inc. are snatching up mobile-gaming studios and creating new mobile titles, in some cases, adapting popular console and personal computer based games.

- As Big Tech’s power comes under scrutiny and antitrust attention, “Beltway pundits and the companies themselves are all competing to explain to the public what it might mean to…the everyday consumers of goods and services from those in the crosshairs.”India’s Bharat Biotech claims that “late-stage clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine showed it was effective against the coronavirus and provided significant protection against the Delta variant.”

- OPEC and its partners did not reach an agreement to increase oil production on Friday. Talks became deadlocked as the UAE was “opposed to a deal that does not address concerns over its own output target.”

- London is once again Europe’s largest share trading center “after it was dethroned by Amsterdam in the wake of Brexit,” thanks to the resumption of UK trading in Swiss stocks.

- The 37-year old North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s weight loss has raised some questions about his health. Kim appeared on state television after a long absence and looked noticeably thinner, sparking speculation among North Korea watchers about a potential power struggle.

- July 4 celebrations in the US could accelerate “the spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19, particularly in parts of the country where vaccination rates have lagged.”

- Three private investment groups led by SoftBank-owned Fortress have agreed to buy Wm Morrison, the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain, for £9.5bn.

- The new Amazon executive Andy Jassy is expected to get more than $200m in Amazon shares when he takes over from Jeff Bezos on Monday.

- Citigroup is raising junior investment bankers’ salaries in an effort to improve terms for younger staff after some Goldman Sachs bankers “complained publicly about the industry’s arduous working conditions.”

- China’s cyber security regulators are investigating Didi, prompting the ride-hailing group’s shares to fall by the end of its third morning of trading in New York.

- Nine armed people dressed in combat gear who do “not recognize our laws” belonging to the group said to be named ‘Rise of the Moors’ were arrested early Saturday after a standoff with police in Massachusetts, forcing a shutdown of I-95 near the communities of Wakefield and Reading, just north of Boston.

- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and her so-called “Squad” colleagues in the House of Representatives “have a history of branding opponents and policies they disagree with as racist or white supremacist.”

- NY City Upper East Side residents are concerned that Hilda Barrion, known for spitting on people and duly nicknamed ‘The spitting lady of 77th Street,’ has returned to the neighborhood. The residents fear she may be ready to resume screaming at pedestrians and targeting them with her saliva. “At least she waited for the pandemic to subside.”