NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Walt Disney (DIS.N) has pulled a rabbit out of its hat when it comes to streaming. The Mouse House on Wednesday reported that it now has as many subscribers to its video services – Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ – as Netflix (NFLX.O), totaling 221 million customers. Additionally, Disney rolled out its pricing strategy for its forthcoming ad model for Disney+. Starting Dec. 8, the $205 billion company run by Bob Chapek will offer a service with ads at $7.99 per month. It is hiking the ad-free price by $3 monthly.

Chapek also lowered the company’s forecast for the service, emphasizing a renewed focus on margins. Though Disney will charge less than Netflix, which costs about $15 a month in North America, it has more to lose with a price war. That may be one reason why it’s jumping the gun, releasing a strategy ahead of Netflix revealing its own ad-supported tier. Still, Netflix can probably lower its prices, too. And with widening...

Aug 10 (Reuters) - A Wyoming judge on Wednesday blocked the state's near-total ban on abortion from taking effect while doctors, a clinic operator and others sue to invalidate the law.

Judge Melissa Owens of the District Court of Teton County said the lawsuit raised important questions about the ban, which has only narrow exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies, under Wyoming's constitution.

Owen said irreparable harm could occur if the ban were enforced before those questions are answered. She also said she believes the plaintiffs would win on the merits of their case, though a final decision will likely come from the state's Supreme Court, whose five members were all appointed by Republican governors.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - U.S. consumer prices were unchanged in July due to a sharp drop in the cost of gasoline, delivering the first notable sign of relief for weary Americans who have watched inflation climb over the past two years.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) was flat last month after advancing 1.3% in June, the Labor Department said on Wednesday in a closely watched report that nevertheless showed underlying inflation pressures remain elevated as the Federal Reserve mulls whether to embrace another super-sized interest rate hike in September. read more

The reading was the largest month-on-month deceleration of price increases since 1973 and followed on the heels of a roughly 20% drop in the cost of gasoline since mid-June. Prices at the pump spiked in the first half of this year due to the war in Ukraine, hitting a record-high average of more than $5 per gallon on June 14, according to motorist advocacy group AAA. read more

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., Aug 10 (Reuters) - Muslims in New Mexico interviewed on Wednesday said they felt shock and shame at the arrest of a Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan in connection with the murders of four Muslim men.

Police on Tuesday said they detained 51-year-old Muhammad Syed. A motive for the killings remains unclear, but police said he may have acted on personal grudges, possibly with intra-Muslim sectarian overtones.

Syed denied being involved with any of the four killings when questioned by police, according to the New York Times.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Google Fiber plans to bring its high-speed internet service to multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska and Nevada over the next several years in its first big expansion since it spun out as an independent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit in 2015.

In his first media interview since becoming chief executive of Google Fiber in February 2018, Dinni Jain told Reuters on Wednesday that his team was finally prepared to "add a little bit more build velocity" after over four years of sharpening operations.

The anticipated expansion to 22 metro areas across the United States from 17 today includes previously announced projects to launch in Mesa, Arizona and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The choices were based the company's findings of where speeds lag.

ISLAMABAD, Aug 10 (Reuters) - More than 70 economists and experts, including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, called for Washington and other nations to release Afghanistan's central bank assets in a letter sent to U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

The letter said foreign capitals needed to return the roughly $9 billion in Afghan central bank assets to Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) to allow the economy to function, despite criticism of behaviour by the ruling Taliban towards women and minorities.

"The people of Afghanistan have been made to suffer doubly for a government they did not choose," the letter said. "In order to mitigate the humanitarian crisis and set the Afghan economy on a path toward recovery, we urge you to allow DAB to reclaim its international reserves."

SEOUL, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Using a plastic bowl, Ha In-sik bailed water out of his lower ground apartment in the low-income housing district of Sillim in southwestern Seoul on Wednesday, where flooding caused by torrential rain forced his family to sleep at a nearby park.

The 50-year-old man, along with his wife and daughter had collected home appliances, furniture, books and even cutlery, and put them outside to see what was salvageable.

The scene bore uncomfortable similarities with the sewage-flooded semi-basement flat depicted in the 2020 Oscar-winning South Korean film "Parasite," that was a tale of growing social disparity in Asia's fourth-largest economy.

(Reuters) - The latest legal business numbers are alarming: Law firm expenses are up, profits are down and demand is shrinking.

This trifecta of gloom comes from the Thomson Reuters Law Firm Financial Index, which analyzes quarter-over-quarter changes in rates, demand, productivity, expenses and other factors that influence profitability at large and midsize law firms. As my colleague Karen Sloan reports, the index just fell to its lowest point since its 2006 founding.

The decline is so steep in part because the 2021 highs were so high. In that sense, the economic indicators aren’t quite as dire as they might seem — and may explain in part why we haven’t seen overt law firm layoffs, even as companies including Tesla Inc, Netflix Inc and Walmart Inc have been shedding workers.

(Reuters) - Colorado could soon join other U.S. states that have set up programs to license some trained professionals who aren't lawyers to deliver limited legal services.

The Colorado Supreme Court has released for public comment until Sept. 14 an implementation plan that would allow licensed legal paraprofessionals, like paralegals, to provide services confined to some types of family law matters.

The court will then review the proposal and comments and could decide whether to adopt the program, according to Rob McCallum, a spokesperson for the Colorado Judicial Department. There is no specific time frame for a decision to be made, he said in an email this week.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Ukraine will respond to the Russian shelling of a town and needs to consider how to inflict as much damage on Russia as possible to end the war quickly, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday.

Ukraine said 13 people died and 10 were wounded when Russia fired rockets at Marhanets from the territory of a nuclear power plant it has captured in the Dnipropetrovsk region. read more

"The armed forces of Ukraine, our intelligence and our law enforcement agencies will not leave today's Russian shelling of Dnipropetrovsk region unanswered," Zelenskiy said in a late night video address.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Florida's governor wants pension plans in conservative U.S. states to band together to fight shareholder initiatives on issues like climate change and diversity, but the idea may prove hard to pull off.

The call by Ron DeSantis last month opened a new front in Republican efforts to push back against activist-led environmental, social and governance -- or ESG -- initiatives at corporate shareholder meetings. read more

With assets of over $5.7 trillion under management, U.S. state and local defined-benefit pension plans are a powerful shareholder force that can help activists pass or defeat ESG issues on corporate ballots by declaring how they will vote and giving momentum to reform efforts, or slowing them.

(Reuters) - The Jacksonville University College of Law became the first new U.S. law school to open in nearly a decade when its inaugural cohort of 14 students arrived on campus Monday.

Until this week, Jacksonville was the largest U.S. city without a law school following the abrupt closure of the for-profit Florida Coastal School of Law. That school shuttered last year amid declining enrollment, financial shortfalls, accreditation problems and a poor track record of graduates passing the bar and finding legal jobs.

Jacksonville University’s starting enrollment falls just below the 15 to 20 students it had aimed for, said founding dean Nicholas Allard. The school told prospective students on its website that it would cap initial enrollment at 30.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's legal team is demanding Twitter turn over the names of employees responsible for calculating what percentage of the social media site's users are bot and spam accounts, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Bot and spam accounts on Twitter have become a central issue in the legal fight over whether Musk, who is Tesla's (TSLA.O) chief executive, must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.

Musk said last month he was terminating the deal because Twitter has withheld information about these accounts. Twitter sued Musk to complete the deal, and has said the issue has no bearing on the agreement with Musk.

WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - The main revenue source in the U.S. Senate's newly passed tax, climate and drugs bill is a novel 15% corporate minimum tax aimed at stopping large, profitable companies from gaming the Internal Revenue Service code to slash their tax bills to zero.

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the new tax will add around $222 billion to U.S. government coffers over the next 10 years, down from a previous projection of $313 billion after last-minute changes to the bill. It will apply to companies with more than $1 billion in "book income," the profits they report to shareholders before the effects of tax deductions and credits.

Here are some key details on how it would work:

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Gaming companies are facing a slowdown in demand for video games from pandemic highs, raising doubts about their ability to weataher an economic downturn.

Rising prices and a lack of hit titles have added to problems for video game publishers Activision Blizzard Inc (ATVI.O) and Electronic Arts (EA.O) that are also battling supply-chain delays and a shift in consumer choices due to easing lockdowns.

The latest proof of that came on Tuesday from gaming platform Roblox (RBLX.N) whose revenue growth eased to just 30% from 83% two quarters ago. read more

SEOUL, Aug 11 (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has declared victory in the battle against the novel coronavirus and ordered a lifting of its maximum anti-epidemic measures imposed in May, state media KCNA said on Thursday.

North Korea has not revealed how many confirmed infections of the virus it has found, but since July 29 it has reported no new suspected cases with what international aid organisations say are limited testing capabilities.

Kim said North Korea's official death rate of 74 people is an "unprecedented miracle" compared to other countries, KCNA reported.

WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday the United States could not allow China to normalize the new level of pressure on Taiwan it asserted with days of military drills following her visit to the Chinese-claimed island.

"What we saw with China is that they were trying to establish sort of a new normal. And we just can't let that happen," Pelosi told a news conference with four other Democratic House members who accompanied her on the trip to Asia.

China said on Wednesday it had "completed various tasks" around Taiwan, but will continue regular patrols, potentially signaling an end to days of war games while keeping up pressure on the self-ruled island. read more

MONACO, Aug 10 (Reuters) - World champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce scorched the track with the fastest time over 100 metres this year at the Monaco Diamond League meeting on Wednesday, winning the race in 10.62 seconds to comfortably beat Shericka Jackson and Marie-Josee Ta Lou.

Fresh from a fifth world title in Eugene, Oregon last month, Fraser-Pryce had produced blistering performances to clock 10.66 at the Silesia Diamond League event on Saturday and 10.67 at the Hungarian Grand Prix two days later.

She went even quicker in ideal conditions at Monaco's Stade Louis II to easily break the 10.70 barrier for the sixth time in a stellar season, while Jackson (10.71) and Ta Lou (10.72) also ran personal bests in an absorbing race.