Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-An analysis of witness testimony and videos reveals a bloody scene in which dozens were killed at a worship area where Friday Prayer had been underway in the ethnic Baluch region on Sept. 30. It represents the most lethal Iranian government action since nationwide unrest began last month.
-The UK fallout, offers lessons for a world facing harsh economic realities.
The sharp policy U-turn by Prime Minister Liz Truss reveals the perils of taking the wrong path in the fight against inflation.
-For Liz Truss and the Tories, a ‘Fairy Tale’ has unraveled. Having abandoned her signature economic plan for Britain, it remains unclear whether Prime Minister Liz Truss or her party can reclaim a mandate.
-US asks court to end special master review of files seized from Trump.
The Justice Department told an appeals court that a judge was wrong to intervene in its inquiry into former President Trump’s hoarding of sensitive records.
-In a rambling, 14-page “restatement of false claims and conspiracy theories”, former President Trump did not indicate whether he would testify before the House panel investigating the Capitol riot.
-Despite its barrage of missiles, Russia still loses ground in Ukraine. “They use their expensive rockets for nothing, just to frighten people,” said a member of Ukraine’s Parliament of Russia’s attacks.
-Belarus wavers as Putin presses it to join Ukraine war. Belarus’s President Aleksandr Lukashenko, survives with support from Vladimir Putin, but entering the fight could be “political suicide.”
-Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock Grapple over abortion and the economy. The rivals in a heated Senate race in Georgia clashed in a debate that was heavy on policy and light on issues of character.
-The Senate isn’t what it used to be, our correspondent writes, as more veteran lawmakers throw in the towel and leave.
-A 15-year-old boy was in custody as investigators searched for a motive in a shooting rampage that killed five people in Raleigh, NC.
-Remarks about Oaxacans from the Los Angeles City Council president shocked the city. But they highlighted a history of racism within the Latino community.
-Residents struggled with the killing of two members of the Connecticut town’s police force in an outburst of violence that left many questions unanswered.
-Founder Trevor Milton was accused of boasting about nonexistent technology to inflate the stock price of Nikola, a maker of electric trucks.
-What the $24.6B Kroger-Albertsons merger could mean for groceries. Two of the largest US supermarket chains hope to join forces as inflation pushes food prices higher and as Amazon and Walmart become more powerful.
-Alaska cancels snow crab season amid population declines. Biologists say the warming of the waters of the Bering Sea in recent years is a possible factor in the decline of snow crabs.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Liz Truss sacked her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and shredded her economic strategy on Friday, but her effort to salvage her premiership failed to win over financial markets and left Conservative MPs in a state of mutiny.
In a Downing Street press conference lasting less than 10 minutes, Truss named Jeremy Hunt, former foreign secretary, as her new chancellor and backtracked on her promise to avoid an £18B corporation tax rise.
-You would not know it from this week’s results at LVMH, owner of Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. Revenues at the world’s largest luxury and fashion group rose by 19 per cent in the third quarter of this year as American tourists flocked to Europe bearing strong dollars to snap up Vuitton and Loewe leather bags, Dior clothes and Tiffany jewelry.
-Just over a month after she took office promising a new radical, tax-cutting Conservative government, British Prime Minister Liz Truss now faces political ruin, her signature economic policy rejected by markets, voters and her own MPs.
Ominously, Sir John Curtice, a leading pollster, says Truss is now as unpopular as former premier John Major was in the aftermath of the Black Wednesday currency crisis, the Conservative party’s last encounter with economic disaster in 1992. It took the Tories 18 years to win another election.
-The head of the Federal Reserve’s Atlanta branch violated the US central bank’s trading rules and restrictions, the regional bank’s board disclosed on Friday, reigniting one of the worst reputational crises in the institution’s history. Transactions were found to have been made on behalf on Raphael Bostic, who has served as president of the Atlanta Fed since 2017, during the blackout period when trading activity is prohibited ahead of meetings where monetary policy is set.
-Beijing’s daily dispatch of fighters, drones and warships towards Taiwan is stoking suspicion that Xi Jinping intends to seize the country by force.
So when China’s president kicks off the 20th Communist party congress on Sunday, nothing will be more closely scrutinized than what he says about the island.
-Rupert Murdoch wants to merge Fox with News Corp: a deal that would reunite the television group behind the Fox News cable channel with the owner of newspapers including The Wall Street Journal. The 91-year-old media mogul has proposed the combination of the two companies in an all-stock deal, in a move to gain scale in a cut-throat and consolidating media landscape.
-As the battle against Russia enters its eighth month following Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February, Ukraine’s military appears to have conquered Twitter with an effective mix of posts that blend humor and tragedy. The aim is to “win hearts and minds” across the globe and keep international allies onside.
-Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia’s mobilization drive to bolster its forces fighting in its faltering invasion of Ukraine will end within two weeks but defended the army from criticism of the draft. Russia’s president on Friday said about 220,000 men had been drafted into the army since he called up reserves and moved to annex four occupied regions of south-eastern Ukraine. He said this was a sufficient effort to bolster forces on the battlefield.
-The Pentagon is in talks with Elon Musk’s Starlink mobile internet system to keep connectivity for Ukrainian forces, after the billionaire Tesla chief complained he was burning through nearly $20M a month funding the service.
-Kroger has agreed to acquire rival Albertsons for $24.6B in a deal that would create one of the US’s largest grocery store chains if it can overcome significant antitrust hurdles.
-JPMorgan Chase reported a 17% year-on-year drop in quarterly net income, a smaller decline than analysts had anticipated as record income from lending helped offset the continued slowdown in investment banking and a $1.5B provision to cover bad credit.
-US prosecutors subpoenaed Celsius Network just days after the now-bankrupt crypto lender froze customer withdrawals in June in one of a range of federal inquiries surrounding the company.
-In one of the bleakest meetings of the IMF and World Bank since the financial crisis, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Indonesia’s finance minister and chair of the Group of 20 leading economies, summed up the mood. “The global economic situation has become more and more challenging,” she said in her closing remarks to the gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors in Washington, DC on Thursday. “The world is in a dangerous situation.”
-As a result, he stands alone at the top of Chinese politics in a way that no other “paramount leader” has done since the party’s revolutionary hero, Mao Zedong. Even Deng Xiaoping, a veteran of Mao’s revolution and architect of China’s economic miracle, had to contend with powerful peers who were skeptical of his reform program.
-Strikes by oil refinery workers demanding higher wages, led by the hard-left CGT union, have become a major test for the French government as it grapples with the fallout from Europe’s energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The walkouts at some TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil sites left a third of petrol stations reporting shortages, forcing France to buy expensive diesel imports, while the state’s efforts to blunt the effect of soaring energy prices with fuel subsidies caused runs on some petrol stations.
-Germany’s deputy chancellor has hit out at critics of the €200B energy support package Berlin unveiled last month, denying it was “selfish” and insisting it will help protect the whole European economy.
-The field of bidders vying to buy Toshiba in what would be Japan’s biggest ever buyout has narrowed to two frontrunners, one consortium led by US private equity group Bain Capital and another spearheaded by a Japanese domestic fund, according to three people familiar with the matter.
NY POST
-More than 40 immigrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last month may receive special visas after a Texas sheriff certified them as victims of crime, The Post has learned.
Sheriff Javier Salazar of Democratically administered Bexar County certified the migrants as victims of “unlawful criminal restraint,” which gives them legal grounding to apply for a special “U visa” to stay in the country and then apply for permanent residency and citizenship.
-Jamie Dimon told clients this week that “some investors don’t give a %$#t” about “ESG,” the woke investing approach that US companies increasingly have embraced under political pressure, sources told The Post. The JPMorgan CEO emphasized the importance of conventional energy sources as the nation invests in green energy, telling attendees at a company “fireside chat” that “pumping more oil and gas and using energy security” is critical for the US to maintain its financial stability and independence, according to a source briefed on the comments.