NYT
(Saturday): Former national security advisor John Bolton knows about “many relevant meetings and conversations” connected to a pressure campaign on Ukraine that House impeachment investigators have not yet been informed of, but he is unlikely to testify about them to Congress; A form of vitamin E has been identified as a “very strong culprit” in lung injuries related to vaping THC, according to health officials, a major advance in an outbreak that has killed 40 people and sickened more than 2,000; Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has entered the 2020 presidential race, plans to take an unconventional approach: He will skip traditional early-state contests and focus on big states that hold primaries after; Hospitals across the country are increasingly suing patients for unpaid bills, a step many institutions were long unwilling to take—in some places, major hospitals now file hundreds or even thousands of lawsuits annually, straining court systems; Donald Trump said he had not yet agreed to roll back any of the tariffs he had imposed on China and that, if a trade deal is reached, he would not eliminate all of the levies he’s placed on $360B worth of goods; Trump reached out to African-American voters at a campaign event, arguing that his economic and criminal justice policies had done more for them than decades of false promises by Democratic leaders who he said took them for granted; As global temperatures rise, a fledgling wine industry is growing across Scandinavia, as Nordic vintners bet they can develop what were once mainly hobbyist ventures into thriving commercial operations; + MA: In a bid to help transgender and non-binary people, cards issued by some banks on the Mastercard network will soon let customers use their chosen names on payment cards, even if they have not changed their legal names;
(Sunday): The tech industry has been more diligent in recent years about identifying online child sexual abuse material, with a record 45M photos and videos flagged last year, but it has consistently failed to take aggressive steps to eliminate the material, and its efforts often leave pedophiles with the upper hand; A new kind of suburbanization is sweeping through politics in cities such as Richmond Atlanta, Houston, and Denver, where Democrats are starting to breach Republicans’ firewalls in elections and turning red states blue; More than a hundred nations have joined a global campaign to reduce the international trade in mercury, an element so toxic there is no safe level of exposure, but the effort has backfired in Indonesia, which has become a major global black-market supplier; House Republicans’ scorched-earth strategy to fight against impeachment involves demanding testimony from figures at the center of Trump’s favorite unsubstantiated theories, such as those involving the Bidens in Ukraine; + Saudi Aramco: The world’s largest oil company took another step on its lengthy path to a stock market listing on Saturday, saying that it would announce a final price for its shares on December 5, with trading expected to start in mid-December; Sunday Business: Utility companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in natural-gas plants, insisting that renewables aren’t ready to serve as the primary source of electricity, but environmentalists and many states are pushing back against their efforts; Magazine: Feature story profiles Republican House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff—whom Democrats believe could be the man to bring down Donald Trump—and looks at at the process he’s using to run the investigation.
WSJ (Weekend): “Months before Donald Trump pressed Ukraine’s new president to investigate Joe Biden’s son and alleged 2016 U.S. election interference, two associates of Rudy Giuliani urged Ukraine’s prior president to announce similar probes in exchange for a state visit to Washington”; +/- PCG: As many as 100,000 California residents who lost property, jobs, and loved ones in fires linked to the utility will eventually get their day in court, but Chapter 11 rules could shield the company from potentially crippling jury payouts by putting a lid on compensation; The Trump administration is proposing to raise the cost of applying for U.S. citizenship, as well as creating new fees for some asylum seekers and the ‘Dreamers’ in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; As Democratic voters assess their choices for the 2020 presidential nominee, they are dividing into clear groups by ideology, race, and other personal qualities, leaving three candidates—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders—dominating the primary contest; Iran said it shot down an unidentified foreign drone near one of its Persian Gulf ports close to the Iraqi border, risking another flare up in the Middle East and further exacerbating tensions in the region; +/- DIS, AAPL, T: Research shows that Americans are willing to spend $44 monthly on streaming, on average, for 3.6 services, but 47% of U.S. consumers are frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services required, a situation that poses a potential problem for new arrivals; China’s “Singles Day,” created as a gimmick a decade ago, has entrenched itself on the Chinese calendar as a hybrid of Black Friday and Super Bowl Sunday and has become both an opportunity and a headache for shops and consumers; Emerging markets are increasingly adopting “earnings management,” artificially smoothing their earnings to pander to analysts and investors, according to research from Rayliant Global Advisors, which says the trend is even more widespread in emerging markets than in developed ones; H.O.T.S.: Defense stocks have delivered outsize returns over the past six years, but political issues and high valuations could pose problems; SQ is no longer in the food-delivery business, and now it must deliver more growth; Americans aren’t as optimistic heading into the holidays as they were last year, but certain measures bode well for holiday spending.
FT
(Weekend): Front page story reports on the case in Italy in which thirteen bankers from Monte dei Paschi di Siena, NMRA, and DB were sentenced to imprisonment after being found guilty of helping the Italian bank hide millions of euros in losses using derivatives contracts between 2008 and 2012; Josef Stadler, head of the ultra-high-net-worth wealth management unit at UBS, said the world’s billionaires are victims of bad press, and that they are better corporate leaders than many less wealthy executives; Big Read piece on MCD says the company’s firing of chief Steve Easterbrook wasn’t about puritanism, but about grappling with a sexual harassment problem that has long plagued the company’s thousands of franchises; Lex Column: Saudi Aramco is proving a tough sell to investors—the company could meet its goals by badgering local billionaires and friendly wealth funds, but reaching numbers acceptable to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman could be tough; Like rivals J. Crew and ANF, GPS is being squeezed by cheaper fast-fashion chains at one end and premium ones at the other; SEC chairman Jay Clayton says lack of investor access to private companies is a concern, but disclosure issues at startups should make retail investors wary; Comment: Olfa Scholz, Germany’s finance minister, faces an uphill battle as he tries to convince his country’s political and financial establishments, as well as eurozone governments, on the merits of his plan to complete Europe’s banking union
NY POST
(Saturday): Two former executives are suing Jim Spanfeller, the head of G/O Media, which owns The Onion and Deadspin, claiming he discriminated against female staff members; The annual UBS Billionaire Insights report says there are more billionaires than ever, and that their fortunes rose by 34.5 percent from 2013 to 2018, to $8.5T; (Sunday): Nearly two-dozen New York non-profits are among the richest in the country, raking in hundreds of millions in donations, according to a new analysis, with Columbia University at the ninth spot nationwide and the first in New York City; Some 33M Americans, many of them millennials, are financially tapped out and will not take vacations this winter, according to a new WalletHub survey; Fifty percent of U.S. commercial banks—more than 3,000 FDIC-insured institutions—could shutter in the coming years just as many start to report record profits, according to Neocova, a financial services technology company