By Noel Randewich (Reuters) – The S&P 500 will trade near current record levels at year-end, according to a Reuters poll of market strategists that suggests the AI rally is losing steam as investors wait for a widely-expected U.S. central bank interest rate cut next month. The benchmark S&P 500 will end 2024 at 5,600 points, according to the median forecast of 41 equity strategists, analysts, brokers and portfolio managers collected Aug. 8-20. The index … Read more…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan that for the first time reorients Washington’s deterrent strategy on China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The White House never announced that Biden had approved the revised strategy, titled the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” the newspaper reported. An unclassified notification to Congress of the revision is expected to be sent before Biden leaves … Read more…

(Reuters) – Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is considering ending his campaign to join forces with Republican rival Donald Trump, Kennedy’s running mate said in an interview posted online on Tuesday. The vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, said that as independents she and Kennedy ran the risk of drawing support from would-be Trump voters and clearing the way for Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win the November election. “Or we … Read more…

By Jorge Garcia and Ted Hesson LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Miguel Aleman, a 39-year-old who was brought to the United States from Mexico at age 4, is among hundreds of thousands of immigrants hoping to find a path to citizenship through a new Biden administration program set to launch on Monday. The program is one of the biggest moves by Democratic President Joe Biden to provide legal status to long-term U.S. residents who entered illegally. … Read more…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Ten additional states have joined the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster for monopolizing markets across the live concert industry, the department said on Monday. The Justice Department, along with a group of 30 states and the District of Columbia, filed the lawsuit in May to break up Live Nation [LYV.N], arguing the concert promoter and its Ticketmaster unit illegally inflated concert ticket prices and hurt artists. (Reporting by Ismail Shakil … Read more…

By Paul Sandle LONDON (Reuters) – Mike Lynch, the tech tycoon missing after his luxury yacht sank off Sicily, spent more than a decade building Britain’s biggest software company and then almost as long again fighting fraud charges related to its multi-billion pound sale. Lynch founded Autonomy from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University in 1996, and was lauded by shareholders, scientists and politicians when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion 15 years … Read more…

By Jarrett Renshaw (Reuters) – In the five weeks since U.S President Joe Biden abandoned his flailing reelection bid, the Democratic Party’s fortunes have changed dramatically, and this week the change will be on full display.  Vice President Kamala Harris, now the party’s candidate, is heading into the Democratic National Convention riding a historic whirlwind: her campaign has broken records for fundraising, packed arenas with supporters, and turned the polls in some battleground states in … Read more…

WARSAW (Reuters) – Suggestions that Ukrainian authorities supported by Poland were behind planning and executing the sabotage attack on Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 are groundless, the Polish president’s aide said on Sunday. Germany’s former intelligence chief August Hanning told Die Welt this week he believed there were agreements between presidents of Poland and Ukraine to carry out the attack. “These are completely groundless insinuations,” Mieszko Pawlak, head of the international policy bureau at … Read more…