Weekend Papers Summary
THE NEW YORK TIMES
-At G20 in Rome, President Biden and other world leaders made a landmark pact that seeks to stop big corporations from moving profits across borders to avoid taxation.
-In a diplomatic win for President Biden, the summit kicked off with the endorsement of a landmark agreement for a global minimum tax. Protests continued throughout the day, with demands for urgent action on climate change.
-In NASCAR, the Confederate flag is gone, and a new car is being counted on to bring back classic stock car thrills and reverse more than a decade of fan attrition. Billions ride on its success.
-Chinese leader Xi Jinping is not attending the G20 in Rome. His lack of face time with world leaders signals a turn inward on domestic issues and a reluctance to compromise on the global stage. And the Chinese leader has not left China in the past 21 months.
-The district attorney has not committed to prosecuting former NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo, and experts called the sheriff’s decision to proceed independently unusual.
-The Guardian Angels founder, Curtis Sliwa, has sought the spotlight for decades. With his long-shot bid to become the city’s next mayor, he has found it again.
-As wildfire seasons worsen in the rural West, a growing number of residents are buying and outfitting fire rigs to protect their property and themselves.
-An in-depth feature on Lebanon discusses the country’s corruption through the ‘lens’ of the 2020 deadly port blast, the triple-digit inflation, the energy shortages among others of— Lebanon’s many crises. All problems, suggests the article, have a common root: misrule by a self-dealing elite.
-A reconstruction of the events leading up to the fatal shooting of the cinematographer of “Rust,” the Alec Baldwin western, reveals a series of errors.
-Former President Trump began discussing a $300M SPAC deal with a “blank check” company early this year. Investors weren’t told.
-After being hired as expert witnesses for groups opposing a restrictive voting law, a group of Law professors could not participate in the lawsuit against the state.
-The National Archives says former President Trump is asserting executive privilege to withhold over phone logs, notes and other records concerning the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-“Multilateralism is the best answer to the problems we face today. In many ways it is the only possible answer,” Draghi, Italy’s prime minister and host of the G20 this year, said in his opening comments on Saturday.
“From the pandemic, to climate change, to fair and equitable taxation, going it all alone is simply not an option. We must do all we can to overcome our differences”.
-Joe Biden acknowledged on Friday that the US treatment of France had been “clumsy” in its handling of the launch of a new security pact with the UK and Australia last month that had excluded and enraged Paris.
-While this vision of the metaverse seems far off in the future, if achievable at all, Zuckerberg is convinced that his 3bn-strong social network, now arguably the world’s most controversial tech company, must move decisively to capture what he thinks will be the next evolution of the internet.
-US allies are lobbying Joe Biden not to change American policy on the use of nuclear weapons amid concern the president is considering a “no first use” declaration that could undermine long-established deterrence strategies aimed at Russia and China.
-In an interview, French President Emmanuel Macron urged bigger financial commitments towards the fight against global warming on the eve of the COP26 climate summit in Scotland, and for particular attention to be paid to a deal to phase out coal power.
-A US intelligence agency has spelt out for the first time how and why it thinks the virus that causes Covid-19 first jumped from animals to humans via an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
-Gas prices in the UK and Europe fell by as much as a fifth on Friday on further signs Russia will increase exports to the region after restricting supplies for months.
-The wedding ceremony of Mako Komuro (nee Her Imperial Highness Princess Mako of Akishino), who married a ‘commoner, “was an evidently loving, ceremony-free marriage to a hard-working, aspiring lawyer whom she met and fell in love with at a private Christian university. It was a deed of such stolid conventionality that, surely, only the deranged could view it as an act of disrepute.”
-Headlines about price-gouging landlords, public sector strike threats and a reported plague of rats, have cast a shadow ahead of Glasgow’s moment in the global spotlight as host of the COP26 climate summit.
-“If approved by Congress, the new levy on multimillionaires singling out the very wealthiest American families and individuals — in this case the top 0.02 per cent of taxpayers — would be a recognition of a significant shift to the left within the Democratic party on fiscal policy in recent years. And would raise as much as $230B.”
-Microsoft regained its crown as the most valuable publicly listed company in the world on Friday from Apple, whose shares slumped following a weak quarterly earnings update from the maker of iPhones and Mac computers.
-Saudi Arabia has banned imports from Lebanon and expelled its ambassador in retaliation for criticism of its military intervention in Yemen by Beirut’s new information minister.
-A surge of migrants attempting to enter the EU via its eastern border, a movement of people that both the EU and Poland say is orchestrated by Belarus’ dictatorial leader Alexander Lukashenko in retaliation for Brussels’ support for Belarus’ persecuted opposition.
-The Financial Times breakfast indicator, based on futures prices for coffee, milk, sugar, wheat, oats and orange juice, has shot up 63 per cent since 2019, in a move that has accelerated since this summer.
-Janan Ganesh reviews the hit movie Dune. While praising its entertainment quality, Ganesh advises audiences to “stop intellectualizing pop culture,” and that “Showing a dust bowl of a planet is not an insight into climate change. Showing a case of imperialism is not a rumination on imperialism. Whispering a sentence does not make it wise. If the big idea is that power is a burden, it is a Harry Potter film.”
-The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized the use of the BioNTech/Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11 years, paving the way for the US to become the first country in the world to green light that jab for younger children.
-Profits at US oil supermajors ExxonMobil and Chevron soared to multiyear highs in the third quarter, as surging crude and gas prices buoyed their finances amid scrutiny over their clean energy strategies.
THE NEW YORK POST
-President Biden met with the leaders of Germany, France, and Great Britain Saturday for a strategy session on potential nuclear negotiations with Iran amid threatening signals from Tehran. “They’re scheduled to resume,” Biden said cryptically when asked during the G20 meetings in Rome when he hoped the on-hold talks with the Islamic Republic would restart.
-“This year’s Thanksgiving meal is shaping up to be ‘one of the most expensive’ on record, according to a New York farmer who says the nationwide labor shortage is jacking up prices. Fire Creek Farms in Livonia has been forced to hike the price of its holiday turkeys to upwards of $100 each — a markup of around $6 per pound, or 20%, from last year, said Jake Stevens, who owns and operates the farm with his wife Kyli.”
-Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, on Thursday reported a quarterly profit that topped Wall Street expectations, helped by strong gains in its mortgage technology business and robust demand for its interest rate and energy hedging products.