USA - San Francisco accountant Scott Hoppe had a client who was planning to stretch the sale of founder shares in a tech-sector company over a three-year period. Instead, the client compressed the installment sale into a one-shot transaction this month. What accelerated the deal? The 2020 presidential race. “Assuming all else was equal, that was the driver of the choice,” said Hoppe, principal of the accounting firm Why Blu. Right now, Hoppe’s client, worth between $10 million and $20 million, will be taxed on capital gains at a rate of 23.8%. If Democratic candidate Joe Biden beats President Donald Trump — and Democrats retain the House of Representatives and flip the Senate — that client could have potentially been staring at a 39.6% tax rate in two out of the installment sale’s three years. The compressed transaction, then, could have saved the client approximately $320,000 in taxes on the $6 million sale. “The seller, for sure, was motivated, and the buyer had the wherewithal” to pay the full price upfront, said Hoppe.

USA - Hurricane Sally has been downgraded to a tropical storm, but it is battering the Gulf Coast with high winds and torrential rain, making it still a “catastrophic and life-threatening” flood event, according to the National Hurricane Center. The Associated Press reported on the storm: The storm’s eye crossed over land near Gulf Shores, Alabama, early Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 105 mph. As of Wednesday afternoon, the eye was about 30 miles west-northwest of Pensacola, Florida, with winds of 70 mph. The storm is now creeping north-northeast at 5 mph, maintaining an excruciatingly slow pace, which means it could produce nearly three feet of rain in some areas and storm surges as high as seven feet. Rainfall is already being measured in feet – not inches – and tornadoes remain a possibility in Florida, Alabama and Georgia.

USA - Hurricane Sally lumbered ashore near the Florida-Alabama line Wednesday with 105 mph (165 kph) winds and rain measured in feet, not inches, swamping homes and trapping people in high water as it crept inland for what could be a long, slow and disastrous drenching across the Deep South. Moving at an agonizing 3 mph, or about as fast as a person can walk, the storm made landfall at 4:45 am close to Gulf Shores, Alabama, about 30 miles from Pensacola. It accelerated to a light jog as it battered the Pensacola and Mobile, Alabama, metropolitan areas encompassing nearly 1 million people.

GERMANY - In her first speech on the state of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc should significantly increase its emissions-cutting targets. She also unveiled a plan to reboot Europe's economy amid the coronavirus crisis. She suggested that 30% of the bloc's €750 billion coronavirus recovery package should be raised through green bonds, which are financial instruments aimed at supporting climate-friendly projects. The EU agreed the stimulus plan in July that will allow the European Commission to raise billions of euros on the global financial markets. MEPs and EU governments would still need to agree to the plan.

GERMANY - A practical “alliance” between the two simply no longer exists. Washington and Berlin disagree on far too much in policy terms for us to whistle past the graveyard any longer. The sooner American statesmen wake up to the harsh new geopolitical reality of German neutralism, the better. Germany is the most glaring case in point of when an ally is no longer an ally. Over vast patches of primary foreign policy terrain, Washington and Berlin simply do not agree.

USA - The economic recovery has stalled, and in some cases, reversed. The $600 unemployment benefits that Americans received following the virus pandemic that crashed the economy in March-April expired on July 31, which means a fiscal cliff has been underway for 44 days (as of September 14). Millions of people are still out of work, their emergency savings wiped out, and insurmountable debts are increasing. As former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen warned in August, Congress' inability to pass another round of stimulus checks could weigh on the economic recovery. In Richmond, Virginia, about 125 miles south of Washington, DC, a food bank has been shelling out more than one million meals per month as the metro area battles deep economic scarring sustained by the virus-induced recession.

MIDDLE EAST - The Palestinians need to want to help themselves and understand that the normalization deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel will aid their cause if they allow it to, a senior Emirati diplomat told The Times of Israel ahead of the inking of the deal at a White House ceremony on Tuesday. “They need to want to help themselves as well, and perhaps instead of using the traditional criticisms and curses, they actually look at what we are trying to do,” said Assistant Minister for Cultural and Public Diplomacy Omar Saif Ghobash in an interview. The agreement “is going to help rather than hinder” the Palestinian cause, he argued. Ghobash called on the Palestinian Authority to take the opportunity to return to the negotiating table with Israel, noting the Emirati demand that Israel suspend West Bank annexation in return for the deal. “Using what we managed to achieve, we encourage the Palestinians to reach out to the Israelis and the US authorities and to rethink what might be possible,” he said.

USA - Yelp on Wednesday released its latest Economic Average Report, revealing business closures across the US are increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemics economic toll. As of August 31, 163,735 businesses have indicated on Yelp that they have closed. That’s down from the 180,000 that closed at the very beginning of the pandemic. However, it actually shows a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July. In addition to monitoring closed businesses, Yelp also takes into account the businesses whose closures have become permanent. That number has steadily increased throughout the past six months, now reaching 97,966, representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening.

USA - The damage in Kenosha is astounding. Kenosha isn’t a huge city. It has a population of about 100,000 people. Until these riots, it was not considered a dangerous city. But things changed fast. So many people are convinced this can never happen where they live. I see the denial all the time in the comments on my articles about this subject. And while it’s true that some parts of the country are more resistant to the riots and arson than others, it needs to be clearly understood that these are not locals perpetrating the damage. These are people being bussed in from other places. Time and time again, we see articles with local authorities claiming most of the arrests made were people from out of town.

USA - Bob Woodward writes that Trump’s Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, spoke together about taking “collective action” to remove President Trump from office. General Mattis said Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.” This is the same thing that the Generals and the CIA said about President John F Kennedy.

USA - Israel on Tuesday signed historic diplomatic pacts with two Gulf Arab states at a White House ceremony that President Donald Trump declared will mark the “dawn of a new Middle East,” casting himself as an international peacemaker at the height of his re-election campaign. The bilateral agreements formalize the normalization of Israel’s already thawing relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in line with their common opposition to Iran. But the agreements do not address the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, who view the pacts as a stab in the back from their fellow Arabs and a betrayal of their cause for a Palestinian state. But in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian militants fired two rockets into Israel, apparently meant to coincide with the ceremony.

RUSSIA - Russia has been plagued by swarms of insects sparking panic for citizens in the city of Krasnoyarsk. Residents have taken to Twitter to share "apocalyptic" scenes of the winged insects swarming the air, with some claiming the invasion has parallels with biblical plagues. Research leader Le Kang, a professor of entomology and ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology, explained the cause of serious locust swarms. He said: "In human history, locust plagues, drought and flood were considered as three major natural disasters which caused serious agricultural and economic losses all over the world. As the most widely distributed and one of the most dangerous locust species, the migratory locust represents a serious threat to agriculture worldwide."

ISRAEL - Israelis reacted with anger and dismay Monday at an imminent nationwide lockdown aimed at curbing one of the world's highest novel coronavirus infection rates. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday announced a new countrywide lockdown will be imposed amid a stubborn surge in coronavirus cases, with schools and parts of the economy expected to shut down in a bid to bring down infection rates. The shutdown will be implemented hours before the start of the Jewish New Year and the High Holidays, which also include the Day of Atonement and Sukkot. "Our goal is to stop the increase (in cases) and lower morbidity," Netanyahu said in a nationally broadcast statement. "I know that these steps come at a difficult price for all of us. This is not the holiday we are used to."

UK - Scientists have created gene-edited pigs, goats and cattle to produce sperm with traits such as disease resistance and higher meat quality in what they say is a step towards genetically enhancing livestock to improve food production. The animals, created for the first time by researchers in the United States and Britain using a gene-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9, could be used as "surrogate sires", essentially sterile blank slates that could then be transplanted with stem cells that produce the desired sperm, the scientists said. The process could help farmers rear healthier, more productive animals using fewer resources such as feed, medicines and water, they said. "With this technology, we can get better dissemination of desirable traits and improve the efficiency of food production," said Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University in the United States, who co-led the work. The researchers stressed that the gene-editing process they used was designed only to bring about changes within an animal species that could occur naturally.

USA - If you could go back to 1950, would you do it? There would be no Internet, no cellphones and you would only be able to watch television in black and white. But even though they lacked many of our modern conveniences, people genuinely seemed to be much happier back then. Families actually ate dinner together, neighbors knew and cared about one another, and being an “American” truly meant something. Of course there has never been any era in our history when everything has been perfect. But without a doubt, things are vastly different today than they were back in 1950…