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Your Evening Briefing

Your Evening Briefing

(Bloomberg) --

Senator Kamala Harris has so far failed to catch fire with Democratic voters, and nobody is sure why. For those looking for a return trip to the Obama era, her attacks on former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden backfired. And for those partial to the progressive rebirth championed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Harris’s record as an aggressive prosecutor who won questionable convictions and then fought hard to preserve them may be anathema.  

Here are today’s top stories

Boris Johnson lost his House of Commons majority in a showdown with fellow Tories that may determine how (or whether) the U.K. exits the European Union, not to mention how long he can keep his job as prime minister. Then, this afternoon, he lost control of Brexit itself.  

A key U.S. factory gauge unexpectedly contracted for the first time since 2016. Stocks tanked to start the shortened U.S. workweek.

Hurricane Dorian is inching northwest and potentially up the U.S. East Coast after inflicting catastrophic damage on the Bahamas.

China is using drones to kill worms, deploying an army of them to fight crop-devouring pests. The strategy apparently worked, recording a mortality rate of as high as 98%, the manufacturer claimed.

South Africa is awash in xenophobic attacks on migrants as the nation prepares to host a meeting of political and business leaders from across the continent.

A new Netflix documentary about a Chinese-owned factory in Ohio isn’t being screened in China, but that hasn’t kept hundreds of thousands of people there from seeing it anyway. 

What’s Joe Weisenthal thinking about? Bitcoin, of course. The Bloomberg news director is annoyed by people who think the cryptocurrency is the answer to everything. Payment system too slow? Use Bitcoin. Too much excess natural gas in Texas? Solve it with Bitcoin. And when Bank of England Governor Mark Carney spoke of transitioning to a post-dollar world, Bitcoiners had a predictable response. But Joe has some bad news for them: Bitcoin will probably never replace the dollar on the global stage. 

What you’ll need to know tomorrow

What you’ll want to read tonight

And we thought malls were dead. After 16 years of false starts, a massive retail and amusement complex is set to open just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. To get there, however, an expected 40 million visitors must join the traffic-choked roads of northern New Jersey. With no new rail links planned and an existing transit infrastructure in slow-motion collapse, the “American Dream” mega-mall may end up being a mega-nightmare.

Your Evening Briefing

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