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Washington DC
US funds tech race with China: The Senate has approved a $250bn spending bill to boost funding for technology research and development amid rising competition from China, says John McKinnon in The Wall Street Journal. The US Innovation and Competition Act should also win approval in the House of Representatives, having passed the upper chamber by a wide margin.
It promises “to turn the tide on several long-term trends in US competitiveness”, such as “eroding federal investments in research overall and a shrinking share of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing”. However, talks between President Joe Biden (pictured) and Senate Republicans over a huge infrastructure spending package have collapsed over its “size and nature”, note James Politi and Lauren Fedor in the Financial Times. The $2.3trn package, together with a separate $1.8trn social-spending plan, “is central to [Biden’s] hopes of... giving the government
