Here is today’s one Foreign police brief: LinkedIn moves away from China, EU and UK Brexit officials meet in Brussels, and Lebanon organizes a day of mourning following street violence.

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LinkedIn leaves China

Here is today’s one Foreign police brief: LinkedIn moves away from China, EU and UK Brexit officials meet in Brussels, and Lebanon organizes a day of mourning following street violence.

Do you have any advice or comments? Click Reply to this email to let me know your thoughts.

If you were to use the perpetually optimistic language of the platform it owns, you could say that Microsoft is “aggressively seeking new and exciting opportunities,” but not in China. The software giant decided to pull its professional networking site LinkedIn out of the country on Thursday, making it the last major U.S. social network to leave China amid a crackdown on online expression.

In a statement, Mohak Schroff, senior vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, cited “a significantly tougher operating environment and tighter compliance requirements” in China as the impetus behind the move.

LinkedIn follows Facebook and Twitter (both blocked since 2009) out of the country as China’s online regulator forces the choice between playing ball with Beijing or quitting altogether to avoid the hassle. Increasingly severe penalties, including prison terms, for Internet users who post comments critical of the Chinese government have made doing business particularly difficult for the social network.

LinkedIn’s problems in China became evident in March, when it suspended new Chinese listings and was given 30 days by the Chinese internet regulator to better control content on its platform. The pressure led LinkedIn to prevent the profiles of several activists and academics from being seen in China, whether residents or not.

This is not the end for Microsoft in China. It still makes widely used software, and its Bing search engine is still available in a country where Google is not. Even LinkedIn in China won’t go completely black, as the company plans to retool itself as a pure job board, removing any features that could work against Chinese regulators.

The episode reflects the ways in which the West and China continue to diverge on the previously shared space of the World Wide Web. China has even started pushing for its own version of the Internet. Dubbed New IP, the infrastructure Huawei developed allows for greater government control than today’s freer Internet, with the ability to restrict individual users at will.

As LinkedIn leaves China, American hysteria over the Chinese-owned TikTok app appears to have faded, a year after a threat to ban it under President Donald Trump. Backlash against the app could still resurface, however, after President Biden in June gave government agencies 180 days to assess and report on national security risks associated with foreign-owned apps.

Protocol issues. UK Brexit Minister David Frost meets with his EU counterpart Maros Sefcovic in Brussels today, days after the two set out separate ways to address issues arising from the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit deal. Frost called for the removal of the current protocol in a speech on Tuesday, while Sefcovic on Wednesday outlined plans to ease some trade restrictions on imports to Northern Ireland.

Lebanon Day of Mourning. Lebanon is celebrating a day of mourning today after six people were killed in street clashes in the capital Beirut on Thursday. Fighting erupted between opposing militias following a demonstration by Hezbollah and supporters of the Amal movement to protest the judge leading the investigation into the deadly August 2020 port explosion. Hezbollah and The Lebanese Christian Forces party accused each other of firing the first shot in Thursday’s Clashes.

Malley goes east. Robert Malley, the United States’ special envoy to Iran, begins a week-long trip to the Middle East today that will include stops in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to discuss the nuclear program Iran and a possible return to international negotiations in Vienna.

The trip comes after Malley said on Wednesday that the United States would consider “all options” if Tehran does not consider reverting to the constraints of the 2015 deal. Malley’s comments came on the same day the secretary of US state Antony Blinken said the Biden administration was “prepared to look to other options if Iran does not change course.”

Kishidanomy? Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a veiled criticism of the “Abenomics” pursued by his two predecessors and hinted at a new economic direction for the world’s third largest economy in his first interview with Western media since taking over from Yoshihide Suga at the start of the month. Speaking to Financial Time ahead of the Oct. 31 elections in Japan, Kishida said he hoped to usher in a “new form of capitalism” that would increase the income of Japanese society.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s cousin Ali Makhlouf, the son of Syrian business tycoon Rami Makhlouf, was spotted in Los Angeles driving a $ 285,000 Ferrari sports car when he apparently did not have working and had a father on a US sanctions list since 2008. Makhlouf was accidentally caught on video after being ambushed by Daniel Mac, a popular Instagram star for a series in which he approaches car drivers sports to ask them what they do for a living.

Makhlouf first stumbled upon Mac’s questioning, eventually deciding he was doing an “internship” and hastily adding that the Ferrari was a rental.

That’s all for today.

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