Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - Here come the mandates

The pioneering coronavirus vaccine made by pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer was granted full approval by U.S. regulators. The government imprimatur is expected to trigger a flood of mandates by municipalities, agencies and private employers that had been waiting for the Food and Drug Administration sign-off. Following the announcement, the Pentagon said it would make vaccinations mandatory for military personnel worldwide and President Joe Biden called for mandates by companies. Though there may be reason for optimism on the infection front, in a world overwhelmed by Covid’s delta variant, the news generally keeps getting worse: More young and healthy pregnant people are ending up hospitalized on ventilators, delivering babies prematurely and sometimes dying. Here’s the latest on the pandemic.
 —David E. Rovella

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

The U.S. is on track to evacuate all Americans from Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 deadline set by Biden for withdrawal, according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Sullivan said roughly 37,000 people have been evacuated in the past week, but didn’t say how many of those were U.S. citizens. The number of Americans in Afghanistan has been difficult to track, he said, because some never registered with the embassy and others failed to unregister when they left.

China is investigating Hangzhou’s top government official for serious disciplinary violations, casting a spotlight on the city that is home to Jack Ma’s Ant Group and Alibaba. Hangzhou Municipal Party Committee Secretary Zhou Jiangyong has been placed under investigation for serious violations of party discipline and state law, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said. While the agency didn’t elaborate on Zhou’s suspected offenses, the party watchdog routinely uses such terminology to describe corruption probes. 

U.S. equities rose Monday following news of the Covid vaccine approval, rebounding from last week’s lows. Wall Street investors see mandates flowing from the FDA decision as a potential bulwark against delta-fueled surges that haves threatened the global economic recovery. Mixed U.S. data Monday showed July home sales coming in higher than expected while growth in U.S. services and at factories slowed to an eight-month low. Here’s your markets wrap.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a meeting of House Democrats Monday as she sought to prevent an intra-party dispute from derailing her strategy for enacting Biden’s $4.1 trillion economic agenda.

Social media companies have thrown considerable resources and money at online creators in recent years. YouTube would like to remind everyone that it throws the most. As in $30 billion over three years.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit agreed to go public through a reverse merger with NextGen Acquisition Corp. II that will value the satellite-launch company at $3.2 billion.

Frackers in America’s largest oil field are letting massive amounts of natural gas spill into the atmosphere. Scientists and activists are trying to find the leaks and get them plugged before they cook the planet further. These investigators are called the methane hunters.

• Leaked footage reveals grim conditions at a notorious Iran prison.
• Cryptocurrencies might be coming back from the brink. Here’s why. 
• Proof that Apple is really listening to its users.
• The Colorado River is vanishing. That’s bad news for Phoenix.
• Businessweek: Women enter a trucking industry not built for them.
• A non-steroidal U.S. pickup truck is actually attracting buyers.
• Disney can use Sex Pistols songs as judge says no to Johnny Rotten.

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It sounds thoroughly implausible: a technology that could unleash nearly unlimited clean energy and safely power the world for centuries. Yet sustainable nuclear fusion, long hypothesized, took a step closer to reality this month. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility, part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announced that they had produced about 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power after blasting a hydrogen capsule with an array of laser beams. The burst lasted only a fraction of a second, Bloomberg’s Editorial Board writes, but it offered significant new evidence that harnessing fusion energy could one day be feasible. 

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