Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition December 26, 2022

● Globally, there have been 655 million cases of the coronavirus, and almost 6.7m people have died. China confirmed on Dec. 20 that it’s narrowed its definition of Covid-19 deaths to people who test positive and have respiratory failure, fueling speculation that a lower official tally may mask the chaos unleashed by its abrupt pandemic pivot. ● War in Ukraine ▶ In his first trip abroad since the Russian invasion began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Dec. 21. Zelenskiy was set to address Congress later that night. ▶ The same day, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Beijing, where Chinese President Xi Jinping told him that China wanted to see peace talks on Ukraine. ▶ At his meeting with Zelenskiy, Biden unveiled $1.85 billion in…

Is regulation as we know it unconstitutional? It isn’t inconceivable that, sometime soon, the US Supreme Court could reach that conclusion, invalidating much of the vast administrative apparatus created to promote such public goods as clean air, workplace safety and financial stability. The court is right to worry about dozens of regulatory agencies abusing their power or becoming an unaccountable fourth branch of government. But if that’s the concern, there are better, more prudent and less disruptive ways to proceed. Much of the administrative state rests on a time-honored convention: As long as Congress provides some “intelligible principle” to guide an agency, courts usually defer to its expertise in interpreting statutes and making rules. This deference allows the ambitious application of broad mandates. To promote public health, the Environmental Protection Agency…

China is finally reopening. After three years of mass testing and harsh lockdowns that crippled the nation’s economy and antagonized its citizens, President Xi Jinping’s government has dismantled its absolutist approach to dealing with Covid-19 at an unexpectedly rapid pace. Gone is the policy known as Covid Zero, which portrayed the novel coronavirus as a dangerous pathogen that had to be eliminated, even if that demanded coercive and intrusive methods. Now come public exhortations that the omicron variant spreading across China is no more dangerous than a cold. The shift has sparked euphoria in financial markets. Chinese stocks traded in Hong Kong have surged more than 30% in the past eight weeks on anticipation that jumbled supply chains will untangle and families freed from lockdowns will reopen their wallets. Wall Street’s biggest…

When someone develops high cholesterol, doctors don’t wait until the patient’s arteries are clogged to start treatment. They prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs while the person is still healthy to prevent plaque buildup and stop heart attacks. Now some of the world’s biggest drug companies are trying to do something similar for millions of aging baby boomers at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In massive final-stage trials under way at Eli Lilly Co. and Eisai Co., researchers plan to test brain-plaque-removing drugs on thousands of healthy adults. The hope is to stave off cognitive decline before it begins, or at least delay it. The quest for a treatment has been littered with one failure after another. Only in the past two years has a new generation of anti-Alzheimer’s agents started to show hints of slowing…

When tens of thousands of Taylor Swift fans were unable to complete their orders for tickets in November for her coming New Eras tour, those legions of devastated Swifties were left with little recourse beyond denouncing Live Nation Entertainment Inc.’s botched online ticket sales process and making tearful TikTok videos. But the company could still suffer plenty of hurt from the fiasco, which has left the US Department of Justice under intense pressure to fix what many say was a mistake in allowing Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge in 2010. The agency has opened a new antitrust probe into the largest concert promotion and ticketing company, a move that could even be a prelude to a breakup if the company is found to have abused its market power. “It would…

In its early weeks, ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence tool from OpenAI, has offered up a potential new model for online search. The chatbot responds to questions about topics such as political science and computer programming with detailed explanations, and its question-and- answer format means users can drill down until they fully understand. Users doing similar research on Google must typically scan search results and peruse various websites until they arrive at their own conclusions. ChatGPT, by contrast, delivers a decisive (or at least decisive-sounding) answer in seconds. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has been essentially untouchable in search, but a handful of companies, some founded by former Googlers, think that’s about to change. The entrepreneurs say a shift is under way from the prevailing model of keyword search, in which search…