BIDEN: "Chairman Powell and many of the significant banking personnel and economists say we're not in a recession."

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🏎 Sebastian Vettel, one of the most successful drivers in the history of Formula 1, four-time world champion, and the driver for Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team, on Thursday announced his decision to retire at the end of 2022 season.

The racer added that the decision to retire has been difficult for him, adding that his "goals have shifted from winning races and Championships to seeing my children grow, passing on my values and being able to learn from them."

During his career, Vettel won four Formula One Drivers' World Championships, 53 races, and podiumed 122 times. He is the third in the number of Grand Prix victories, behind only British racer Lewis Hamilton (103 victories) and German driver Michael Schumacher (91 victories).

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Russian Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi held talks in Tashkent at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Ministerial Summit. The ministers confirmed their readiness to increase cooperation and coordination within the framework of multilateral formats with the participation of the two countries, which once again refutes statements by the US State Department about the global isolation of Russia.

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🦠 The country’s monkeypox outbreak can still be stopped, US health officials said Thursday, despite rising case numbers and so-far limited vaccine supplies.

The pushback from federal leaders came as they announced distribution plans for 780,000 shots of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine. The doses will be allocated to states, cities and other localities based on their case numbers and the size of their populations that are considered high-risk for the disease.

There were more than 4,600 reported monkeypox cases in the US as of late Wednesday, according to the CDC. More than 99% of reported cases are in men and the vast majority of those are among men who reported sexual contact with other men.

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🗣 Employees at a Trader Joe’s supermarket in Massachusetts on Thursday became the latest workers at a major company to approve a labor union. The union vote, counted by National Labor Relations Board agents in front of witnesses from management and employees, passed 45-31 with one void. Eighty-one store workers were eligible to vote. The company has seven days to file an objection.

During the first nine months of the 2022 fiscal year, from Oct. 1 until June 30, union representation petitions filed at the National Labor Relations Board have increased 58% compared to the first three quarters of the previous fiscal year.

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🌱 An unexpected deal reached by Senate Democrats would be the most ambitious action ever taken by the US to address global warming and could help President Joe Biden come close to meeting his pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, experts said Thursday, as they sifted through a massive bill that revives action on climate change weeks after the legislation appeared dead.

The deal would spend nearly $370 billion over 10 years to boost electric vehicles, jump-start renewable energy such as solar and wind power and develop alternative energy sources like hydrogen.

The deal stunned lawmakers and activists who had given up hope that legislation could be enacted after West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said he could not support the measure because of inflation concerns. In the narrowly divided House, Democrats can lose no more than four votes and prevail on a possible party-line vote.

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💻 In a 243-187 vote on Thursday, the House passed the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen US science and technology innovation. The bill, a Biden administration priority, includes $52 billion in subsidies to encourage chip manufacturers to build out semiconductor fabrications plants, or “fabs,” in the US.

Outside of the chips subsidies, the bill provides the Commerce Department with $10 billion to award states and localities grants to build out “regional technology hubs” across the country. The hubs would serve as mini Silicon Valleys as a means of bringing jobs and economic growth to areas hard hit by globalization.

The National Science Foundation is also set to receive billions in additional funding for semiconductor manufacturing research and workforce development programs.

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🇺🇸White House Press-Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has accused Republicans of "using" illegal immigrants by sending them to big cities

“I said this before ... about Republicans using migrants as a political tool, and that is shameful and that is just wrong … There is a process in place for managing migrants at the border. This is not it,” she declared.

Earlier, the mayor of Washington DC, Muriel Bowser, requested that the National Guard be activated to help deal with the influx of migrants being moved there from Texas and Arizona.

💬Texas lost no time in rejecting Jean-Pierre’s remarks. "Washington DC finally understands what Texans have been dealing with every single day, as our communities are overrun and overwhelmed by thousands of illegal immigrants thanks to President Biden’s open border policies," Governor Greg Abbott's office said in a statement.

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❗️ Pelosi to travel to Asia with US congressmen on Friday, intends to visit Japan, Korea and Singapore; visit to Taiwan "under consideration" - NBC

🇺🇸The US defense contractor and his wife who were photographed in KGB uniforms have been charged in Texas with stealing the identity of two dead children

The couple have been living in the US for decades under false names and it’s still not clear why.

Walter Glenn Primrose and Gwynn Darle Morrison, both in their sixties, took the names Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague - two children who died in Texas in 1987. Under these new identities, they remarried, and Primrose joined the US Coast Guard. After retiring, he became a defense contractor.

The couple were arrested last week. They are charged with appropriating personal data and using it in cases related to the jurisdiction of the US Department of Defense. Primrose faces up to 17 years in prison.

📷 Photos of Primrose and Morrison in Soviet KGB uniform have been used in the case, but the charges against them do not include espionage - the photos were taken as a joke, their lawyer insists.

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China' s top diplomat Wang Yi seems to be in an upbeat mood, waving at journalists at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ministerial summit in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. China is one of the founding members of the transregional bloc, has a lot of influence on its decision-making, and "Shanghai spirit" is the phrase which is often used to describe the organization's cultural diversity.

❗China began a two-day military exercise in the South China Sea off the coast of southern Guangdong province as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares for her trip to Asia