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Microsoft and Activision continue merger talks, despite missing the deal's deadline.

Plus a milestone for EV sales and US lawmakers propose banning themselves and federal executives from trading stocks.

We found that about one in five top executive branch officials invested in a company that they could impact or influence.

So if you remove the ability to own a stock, you're going to take care of most of the problem.

It's Wednesday, July 19th.

It's August for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are continuing to work toward their $75 billion merger despite failing to close the deal by midnight Pacific time as they had previously agreed.

That is, according to people familiar with both companies who say that neither intends to enforce a prior merger agreement that would have seen Microsoft pay Activision a $3 billion breakup fee if either party terminated the deal after the deadline.

Last week, a US federal judge denied a bid by the Federal Trade Commission to block the transaction, leaving the UK's competition and market authority as the only major obstacle preventing the deal from closing.

Meanwhile, US anti-trust authorities have issued new guidelines spelling out how the US will police propose mergers, part of the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission's strategy to support more aggressive enforcement of anti-trust law.

Wall Street Journal deputy finance editor Quinton Webb says the guidelines signal a tough new stance on deal making.

This is effectively part of their push to more aggressively enforce anti-trust law and for the first time this includes explicit references to problems resulting potentially from deals and involve very powerful technology companies and also from deals relating to private equity firms.

Among other things, it looks at what happens when platforms acquire companies that sell products on that platform.

There is also a slightly tougher stance on market share concentration, so the new guidelines will lower the bar for deciding whether a merger is presumptively illegal if it has market share once the mergers gone through of more than 30%.

There will be a 60-day comment period on the guidelines which crucially won't be binding on the courts that said the agencies hope their guidelines influence how judges think about mergers and whether they potentially post problems for competition.

The UK's stubbornly high inflation has dropped by more than expected with June consumer prices 7.9% higher for the month compared to a year ago down from 8.7% in May.

The journals Paul Hannon told me that core inflation which includes food and energy was a major contributor.

The big change this month is food prices. They're still rising pretty quickly by any standards at 17.3% that compares with just under 5% in the US for example, but they've come down quite a bit.

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