Fifa crisis, Norway’s oil fund out of coal, robot overlords

The daily briefing “FirstFT” from the Financial Times.

Allegations of “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” corruption and bribes worth over $150memerged after yesterday’s dramatic dawn raid and the arrest of seven Fifa officials. Fifa delegates are trying to put on a brave face but the organisation is looking at the worst crisis in its history and American authorities are adamant that they are not finished yet. While “US law enforcers and courts reaching overseas to get their men and women often irritates”, John Gapper reckons America is the perfect referee for Fifa’s many fouls.

Here are the targets of the corruption probe – US authorities also named the banks where accounts were used to facilitate payments and wire transfers, raising the prospect of Wall Street being involved in yet another scandal.

Simon Kuper thinks that while its eternal president Sepp Blatter has never faced as big a threat before, his regime may well survive. Bloomberg looked at how he has retained his position asFifa’s supreme leader for all these years. (FT, NYT)

In the news

US probes China’s anti-corruption chief American authorities are demanding all correspondence with Wang Qishan, the man leading China’s anti-graft drive, be handed over as part of its investigation of JPMorgan’s hiring of Chinese princelings. The move is seen as a further blow to US relations with China, already tense over disputes in the South China sea. (FT)

Fitbit sued on eve of IPO Rival Jawbone filed a lawsuit alleging that the tracking device maker poached employees from Jawbone who took with them trade secrets costing hundreds of millions of dollars. (FT)

Norway’s oil fund out of coal The $916bn sovereign wealth fund is considering pulling billions of investment dollars out of coal. Parliament approves but any move to exit from companies whose business relies more than 30 per cent on coal could threaten European utilities dependant upon the fossil fuel to generate power. (FT)

Tony Blair out as Mideast envoy The former British prime minister will step down after a controversy-ridden eight years in Middle Eastern diplomacy. His stint brought scrutiny to Mr Blair’s sprawling business interests and his poor relations with senior Palestinian Authority figures. (FT)

Hatching jihadis The roughly 25,000 mujahideen that have swollen the ranks of violent Sunni terrorist organisations come from more than half the world’s countries, according to a UN report. “What has changed over the past three years is the scale of the problem. The overall numbers have risen sharply, from a few thousand foreign terrorist fighters a decade ago.” (FT)

It’s a big day for

Liliane Bettencourt Judges will announce their verdict on the trial of 10 people close to the L’Oreal heiress who have been charged with exploiting her mental fragility. (NYT)

Nordic politics Early elections have been called in Denmark for June 18 and a new centre-right government has been unveiled in Finland, with Timo Soini, the leader of the anti-EU True Finns, named foreign and Europe minister . Mr Soini has left the door open for possible Nato membership for Finland, one of the notable holdouts among EU countries in the Baltic Sea area, along with Sweden. (FT)

Google Its annual developer conference starts today and it is expected to unveil the next Android operating system as well as more streaming technology. Here is what to expect. (TechCrunch)

Food for thought

AIIB: better than the real thing? David Pilling argues that far from the caricature propagated of a World Bank-clone that would “lend to dictators, despoil the environment and trample on human rights”, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank may “even exceed the standards of existing institutions”. (FT)

Hollywood goes to China It should not surprise that films for the Chinese market are customised – Hollywood has always been concerned with the bottom line. Though it is admittedly tricky to entertain in a country where films are also expected to take “socialist core values as a guide” and “contain more elements of the Chinese Dream.” (The Diplomat)

$90 or $90k After she discovered that prints of images from her SuicideGirls Instagram account made by artist Richard Prince were being sold for $90,000 at a New York gallery, Selena Mooney decided to sell prints on her own, for $90, with proceeds going to charity. Mr Prince has a long history of appropriating images without permission and selling them for vast sums, but lawsuits against him always fail. (The Guardian, WaPo)

Vanguard’s commanding position The index fund pioneer’s low fees have driven down costs and ushered in an era in which the most popular funds are those that do little more than track the market. But is Jack Bogle’s success a cyclical phenomenon? (FT)

Everyone’s a little racist in online dating At least that’s what OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder discovered when he sorted through the data of 25m users of the dating site. (The Atlantic)

Video of the day

Welcome our new robot overlords In a not at all terrifying vision of the future, Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, says a day will come when machines are more intelligentthan humans – and that more must be done to address the potential risks of such a scenario. (FT)

This article is published in collaboration with The Financial Times. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: FirstFT is the Financial Times’ editors curated free daily email of the top global stories from the FT and the best of the rest of the web.

Image: A match referee uses vanishing spray. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth.