| |  |  | The Reuters Daily Briefing | Thursday, October 14, 2021 by Linda Noakes | Hello Here's what you need to know. The global economy is caught in a perfect storm as consumers feel the pinch, Japan sets the stage for a general election, and a deadly shooting rocks Beirut | | | | | Today's biggest stories  BUSINESS U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren called for breaking up Amazon.com and Indian retailers demanded a government probe of the company after a Reuters investigation showed the e-commerce giant had copied products and rigged search results in India. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers plans to introduce a bill that would bar Big Tech platforms from favoring their products and services.
President Joe Biden is pushing to ease supply shortages and tame rising prices in time for Christmas, but unsnarling U.S. supply lines could take far longer, experts told Reuters.
Britain's 20-year binge on cheap food is coming to an end and food price inflation could hit double digits due to a tidal wave of soaring costs that are crashing through the supply chain, Britain’s biggest chicken producer said. From beef bowls in Tokyo to chicken fillet rolls in London, consumers are beginning to feel the pinch from the surge in costs washing over the global economy.
Shares and dollar bonds of Chinese real estate firms slid again as investors fretted about a debt crisis rippling through developers including China Evergrande Group, a day after the sector was hit with rating downgrades.
The era of breakneck growth for electric scooter firms is giving way to more selective expansion focused on profits as they face tougher regulations, more demanding customers and wary insurers.
|  A soldier carries a child as civilians flee after gunfire erupted at a site near a protest in Beirut, Lebanon, October 14, 2021. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir WORLD At least two people were killed in Beirut when heavy gunfire targeted supporters of the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah, as they headed to a protest demanding the removal of the judge investigating last year's explosion at the city's port.
A 37-year-old Danish citizen who had converted to Islam is suspected of killing five people with a bow-and-arrow and other weapons in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg in a rare incident of mass killing in Norway, police said.
A fire in a residential building in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung has killed 46 people and injured another 41.
Japan dissolved its parliament, setting the stage for an election at the end of the month that will pit new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida against unpopular opposition in a battle over who can better fix the pandemic-battered economy.
Indonesia's holiday island of Bali reopened to foreign tourists after 18 months of pandemic hiatus, but the island is lacking one crucial ingredient: international flights.
| U.S. Vaccination rates against COVID-19 in the United States have risen by more than 20 percentage points after multiple institutions adopted vaccine requirements, while case numbers and deaths from the virus are down. White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters that 77% of eligible Americans had received at least one shot of a vaccine.
From the outside, First Harvest Ministries in Waveland, Mississippi, could almost be mistaken for a storage shed were it not for the steeple. From the modest building however, Shane Vaughn, the Pentecostal church's pastor, has helped spearhead an online movement promoting personal faith as a way around workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
A congressional panel investigating the deadly January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol said it has issued a subpoena seeking testimony and records from Jeffrey Clark, a former senior official at the Justice Department who was a proponent of former President Donald Trump's false election fraud claims.
Supreme Court justices leaned toward reinstating convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence for his role in the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.
California firefighters took advantage of a break in strong winds to get aircraft aloft and dump retardant on a fast-moving wildfire that was within a half mile of former President Ronald Reagan's ranch.
| | | | | | | | | Video of the day  William Shatner completes 'profound' space voyage Actor William Shatner soared aboard a Blue Origin rocketship on a suborbital trip and landed in the Texas desert to become, at ninety years old, the oldest person ever in space. | | | | And finally… Moon dust: Greenland's recipe for saving Planet Earth  Among the glaciers and turquoise fjords of southwestern Greenland, a mining company is betting rock similar to the one the Apollo missions brought back from the moon can address some of Planet Earth's climate change problems. | | | Thanks for spending part of your day with us. | | | | | |
