The daily business briefing: September 1, 2016

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1. U.K. factories heat up after Brexit chill
2. Tim Cook calls E.U. tax ruling 'total political crap'
3. McDonald's president to retire at end of year
4. British Airways resumes flights to Iran
5. Netflix renews Stranger Things for second season

published 1 September 2016

1. U.K. factories heat up after Brexit chill

British factories have rebounded to a 10-month high in August despite Brexit fears as a weak pound boosted exports, according to a report released by IHS Markit on Thursday. The firm's Purchasing Managers Index made a surprise, record surge to 53.3 after sinking below the key 50 level the month before. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast, on average, that the PMI would come in at 49. Markit said companies reported that they had restarted work postponed in July, the latest sign of the resilience of the U.K.'s economy since the country voted to leave the European Union.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a newspaper interview Thursday that the European Union's order for the company to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland was based on "total political crap." E.U. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Tuesday that a deal with Ireland let Apple pay a tax rate of 0.005 percent in return for creating jobs. Cook said the iPhone maker actually pays 26 percent average annual taxes on profits, and the E.U. just wants tax money Apple should pay in the U.S. "They just picked a number from I don't know where," Cook said. Apple is pushing for the E.U. to overturn the anti-competition penalty.

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McDonald's said Wednesday that its U.S. president, Mike Andres, is retiring at the end of 2016. Andres was a key architect of the fast-food giant's attempt to change its image and boost sales with all-day breakfasts and other changes over the past 18 months. The initiatives helped, but their impact has faded recently. Andres is the second high-ranking executive to leave the company recently. His replacement, Chris Kempczinski, is a former Kraft executive who joined McDonald's as an executive vice president last year.

British Airways is resuming flights to Iran on Thursday in the latest move to renew ties between Tehran and the West. Sanctions were lifted in January after Iran agreed to a deal designed to rein in its nuclear program. The evening flight by a British Airways Boeing 777 will be the airline's first flight to Iran since 2012. The service will operate six times a week, and the airline reported a "huge amount of interest" in the flights.

Netflix confirmed Wednesday that Stranger Things, its enormously popular original series, will return in 2017 for a nine-episode second season. The streaming video service released a cryptic trailer offering few details, other than that the next season will pick up in the fall of 1984, about a year after the end of the action in the first, eight-episode season of the nostalgic science-fiction adventure, which features a group of middle-school children reminiscent of the kids in The Goonies, Stand By Me, E.T., and other classic films.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.