Classes resumed yesterday for thousands of kids in Quebec's English language school board. Kids across the rest of the country will head back to class in the coming weeks. And universities are gearing up for the fall semester. 

But nobody really knows how long it can last and problems are already popping up: 

The Big Picture: Getting kids back in school is key to restarting the economy and allowing people to go to work rather than provide at-home childcare. Shutdown schools will act as a permanent drag on the economy.

An escalating battle between Apple and Facebook is turning into one of the biggest fights in tech.

Driving the news: Apple's iOS 14 will deal a major blow to Facebook's business as it makes ad tracking opt-in only. That means people will have to explicitly say they are okay with being tracked for Facebook (or other advertisers) to track them, and the number of people who do that will be somewhere close to... zero?

Facebook has said the changes may make its in-app ad network for mobile apps "so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14." Yikes!

Facebook's take: Zuckerberg has accused Apple of having a "unique stranglehold as a gatekeeper on what gets on phones" and of blocking innovation. Facebook has also supported Epic Games' fight against Apple's practice of taking 30% of revenue generated through in-app purchases.

Apple's take: The company has positioned itself as a champion of user privacy and frequently bashed Facebook over its tracking practices. Last year Apple shut down a Facebook app that paid users to allow the company to track everything they did on their phones. Apple also temporarily cut off Facebook's access to test versions of iOS.

The business fundamentals: Apple would like to protect its platform's power and continue raking in revenue from the app ecosystem while also breaking into Facebook's bread and butter of information and media. Facebook would like to dislodge Apple's power over the app ecosystem and prevent them from blocking their tracking, a key element of the company's value prop as an advertiser.

Last week the NBA playoffs came to a sudden halt as first the Milwaukee Bucks — and then every other team in the league — decided to carry out what amounted to a wildcat strike following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Players eventually agreed to a restart of the season after NBA ownership agreed to a number of concrete actions, like turning arenas into voting centres for the November Presidential election.

But the action underscored something new: a few superstars are now able to exert outsized leverage in how sports operate, and the strike threat from these players is very real.

Management's response: Owners and league management have been sympathetic to players concerns, and have committed $300m over 10 years to fund economic opportunities for Black communities. But they also pushed hard for a continuation of the season, which some players resisted.

Zoom out: This pattern mirrors the rest of the economy which has increasingly become winner-take-all. One consequence of this is that the winners leverage is growing, and they are increasingly willing to use this influence for political goals. See: the walkout of engineers at Google over sexual harassment in 2018.

The losers: In a winner-take-all economy, the superstars dominate. But the flip side of this is the steady decline of influence of everyone else. 

Global: Confirmed cases: 25.2m, Recoveries: 16.6m, Deaths: 846k.

Canada: Confirmed cases: 128k, Recoveries: 113k, Deaths: 9k.

Health: 81 Quebec City students are in isolation after possible virus exposure; active cases are up 11% in Ontario.

Vaccines: Canada has signed deals to buy 76 million doses of Novavax's potential vaccine and 38 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's. Both vaccines are in Phase II trials.

Resources: Get up to speed on how Covid is most frequently transmitted and how you can avoid it.

Housing: Rents are falling in Toronto and Vancouver for the first time in years, driven by growing inventory of units.

Electric Vehicles: NIO, a China-based EV manufacturer, is riding a wave of interest in the industry to expand its capital raise by 20% to $1.5bn.

Warren Buffet: The Oracle of Omaha has invested $6bn in Japan's five largest trading houses, conglomerates with interests across a range of sectors. The bet runs against recent currents which has seen investors exiting the Japanese market.

China: The country is increasing its R&D spending by 10% this year, bringing total spending to $468bn — the second biggest budget in the world behind only the U.S.

New York, New York. "I <3 NYC" seems to be true for less and less people, as city dwellers are migrating en masse to suburban bedroom communities.

We Didn't Start The Fire. Every year California and the Western United States is devastated by megafires. But it's possible to prevent these fires, and people know how. So why do they continue happening?

Bunker Down. One business that's thriving during the pandemic? Bunker construction. More and more of the rich and famous are building personal bunkers in case things here on the surface go really sideways.