Included in this week’s edition, U.S. manufacturing is moving out of China to other Asian countries, cutbacks on nuclear reactor inspections are being recommended, criminals are using “audio attacks” to steal money from corporations.

These are the newsworthy stories from this past week.

Business and Economics

• China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in almost three decades in the second quarter as the trade war with the US took its toll on exports.
  
  From Financial Times

• U.S. manufacturers are shifting production to countries outside China to avoid the 25% duty on imports from that country.
  
  But manufacturers aren’t bringing work back to the U.S., a major goal of the Trump administration’s tariff strategy.
  
  Instead, they are moving production to other Asian countries where costs are low, such as Vietnam, India and Malaysia. Many of those countries have recorded sharp increases in exports.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• As Southeast Asia grapples with massive tides of rubbish hitting its beaches, a Cambodian coffee shop owner is looking to build a business out of some of this waste as a way to promote sustainability.
  
  From Reuters

Government and Politics

• The EPA won’t ban the use of a controversial pesticide—which has been linked to health issues in children—on U.S.-grown fruits and vegetables.
  
  From Reuters

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s staff is recommending a cutback on inspections at nuclear reactors.
  
  The cost-cutting move is promoted by the nuclear power industry, but denounced by opponents as a threat to public safety.
  
  From AP

• On average, immigrants wait 727 days for decisions on their court cases — roughly twice as long as immigrants had to wait two decades ago, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which includes millions of court records.
  
  From Axios

Society

• Criminals are starting to use deepfakes — starting with AI-generated audio — to impersonate CEOs and steal millions from companies, which are largely unprepared.
  
  Symantec, a major cybersecurity company, says it has seen three successful audio attacks on private companies. In each, a company’s “CEO” called a senior financial officer to request an urgent money transfer.
  
  From Axios

• A study of European elections shows journalistic fact-checking rarely catches up with fake news.
  
  Online communities exposed to junk news in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland had little overlap with those sharing fact-checks.
  
  From Reuters

• Elon Musk and top-level scientists from his neuroscience startup Neuralink, who are developing a next-generation brain-computer interface, unveiled what they billed as a significant advance toward a therapeutic device.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

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