Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - Chaos and panic

Scenes of panic and chaos are playing out all over Afghanistan as Taliban fighters solidify control of the capital, Kabul. The speed at which the Taliban moved through the country and the stunning fall of the Afghan government took some by surprise. Criticism of the Biden administration’s failure to predict the fast collapse mounted. On Monday, President Joe Biden blamed the Afghan military, saying it lacked the will to fight. With most exit points around the country sealed off, desperate Afghans crowded onto runways at Kabul’s airport. Some even grabbed onto planes trying to take off, resulting in several deaths. The images highlighted the fear that the Taliban will, despite assurances, punish those believed to have helped U.S. forces. —Margaret Sutherlin

Bloomberg is tracking the progress of coronavirus vaccines while mapping the pandemic worldwide. 

Softer economic data out of China coupled with the spread of the coronavirus delta variant sparked concern that the global recovery is in jeopardy. Here’s your markets wrap. 

Hopes that the world will reach herd immunity from Covid-19 are fading. The number of people dying in U.S. hospitals is hitting previous highs in some low vaccination hot-spot states—upending hopes the virus has become less lethal. Pfizer-BioNTech submitted early-stage data to regulators on booster shots. In Asia, Hong Kong added the U.S. and 14 other locations to its list of high-risk places and Vietnam’s biggest city extended its lockdown. Here’s the latest on the pandemic.

With Tropical Depression Grace set to make landfall in Haiti Monday night, rescue efforts picked up speed after a major earthquake Saturday left almost 1,300 dead.  

More than one million acres of California landscape have already been burned by wildfires, and firefighters are bracing for worsening conditions. Meanwhile, utility PG&E began notifying some customers that it may need to cut power to prevent more fires.

Tesla’s Autopilot system is under investigation after almost a dozen collisions at crash scenes involving emergency vehicles, sending shares sliding. 

Don’t look now but there’s a growing bottleneck at two of the U.S.’s most important ports, threatening to extend transportation delays, bite further into margins for importers and raise prices for consumers.

Broad vaccine mandates in some of the biggest U.S. cities are winning praise from employee unions, diners and concert-goers who find comfort in a virtual wall against delta-fueled Covid-19 spread.

• The Big Take: Taxing the rich’s empty homes won’t fix the crisis.
• China pledged policies to prioritize its labor market.
• He called the Great Recession. Now he’s betting against Cathie Wood. 
• Meet the man who made a fortune buying malls no one else wanted. 
• Democrats are scrambling ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recall vote.
• Jack Dorsey’s side hustle for open source social media has a leader.
• This once-experimental Covid treatment is now a routine first step. 

Amazon announced earlier this summer that it had acquired distribution rights to SmartLess, a popular podcast hosted by actors Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes. The e-commerce giant will be spending more than $20 million a year so it can offer new episodes of the talk show on its music service exclusively—for just one week—before they’re released on other outlets. To most outsiders, it seemed as though Amazon had overpaid. But the company didn’t make the deal for distribution rights.

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