Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-The battle over electric vehicles is key to understanding the UAW auto strike.
Carmakers are anxious to keep costs down as they ramp up electric vehicle manufacturing, while striking workers want to preserve jobs.
-The strike’s sticking points go to the heart of President Biden’s political identity.
-What’s being called the “summer of strikes” comes amid growing fear that new technologies will threaten jobs.
-In Moscow, the war is background noise, but ever-present. Muscovites are going about their daily lives. But the war’s effects are evident — in the stores, at the movies and in the increasingly repressive environment.
-Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un’s embrace may place Xi Jinping in a bind. Closer ties between Russia and North Korea could weaken Beijing’s leverage over both countries and set back China’s efforts with the West.
-North Korea’s leader inspected nuclear-capable strategic bombers in Russia, according to the Russian state news media.
-Poland, Hungary and Slovakia said they would ban Ukrainian grain exports, reviving an issue that has threatened EU solidarity.
-Texas State senators take the final vote over the State Attorney General Ken Paxton impeachment trial. Paxton’s trial became a proxy for a broader rift in the GOP. He is accused of improperly helping a campaign donor.
-A Colorado city’s deep divide over policing: After Elijah McClain died in 2019, the case seemed to be closed. The George Floyd protests — and the backlash to them — would change everything.
-Dire warnings about Libya dams went unheeded. “The state wasn’t interested,” said an engineer who published a paper on why Derna’s ill-maintained dams might fail under the stress of a powerful storm.
-After a summer of extreme weather, “eco-anxiety,” a term for pervading dread about climate change, is on the rise.
A fugitive survived 13 days on the run in Pennsylvania. Danelo Cavalcante was desperate and resourceful, the authorities said, and for days he stayed ahead of his pursuers, sometimes by steps, sometimes by miles.
-Mahsa Amini fueled in Iran protests in death. Who was she in life? A year after Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody ignited anti-government protests in Iran, her family reminisced about the young woman they called Jina.
-The Atlantic coast braces as post-tropical cyclone Lee begins to bring high winds and rain. Once a Category 5 hurricane, Lee was still a significant storm as it made its way toward Canada on Saturday. Coastal residents were on the alert.
-President Biden wants to target industrial pollution in a 2nd term. If Biden wins re-election, his climate team is likely to try to cut greenhouse gases from steel, cement and other hard-to-clean-up manufacturing.
-Law and medical schools quit US news rankings. The revolt against the rankings has gone only so far. Some officials see little harm in cooperating, and what would dropping out do anyway?
-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced steps to outlaw the ‘American Bully XL’ dogs on Friday, after a string of deaths and a social media campaign piled pressure on the government to act.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Officials and experts outside China are raising questions about the durability of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s cabinet, after Li became the second high-profile minister to disappear with little or no explanation from public view in less than two months.
US officials told the Financial Times they believed Li had been stripped of his duties in a pattern that seemed to follow that of China’s former foreign minister, Qin Gang, who mysteriously disappeared in June and was officially replaced a month later. His fate is unknown.
-Arm’s $5B initial public offering this week was the most expensive in fees for five years, earning a $84M windfall for the professional services firms that advised it, including Deloitte.
-Two senior executives in different industries thought “the ousting of BP CEO Bernard Looney was due to a new wave of Anglo-American puritanism that we will one day regret. A talented CEO who was positioning BP to lead the energy transition should not have been felled by an active personal life, they said.”
-Russia has authorized unreinforced oil tankers to sail through its icy Northern Sea Route for the first time, triggering warnings Moscow is risking a catastrophic Arctic spill as it reroutes sanctions-hit energy exports to Asia.
Two tankers were granted permission in August to carry out the 3,500-mile long journey along Russia’s northern coast, despite not being so-called “ice class” tankers that are strengthened to withstand icier conditions.
-The UAW is demanding higher wages for nearly 150,000 members who work at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Its campaign is part of a much broader battle: to protect workers through the transition to clean energy, which it estimates could cost 35,000 jobs. That is because the most successful new players in electric vehicles, such as Tesla and Rivian Automotive, do not have a unionized workforce.
-Germany’s ruling coalition is split over who to support in the race for the leadership of the bloc’s biggest lender, as EU finance ministers discussed the issue on Saturday. Chancellor Olaf Scholz backs Spain’s economy minister Nadia Calviño as the next president of the European Investment Bank, but the German ministers of finance and economy support her Danish rival, Margrethe Vestager, according to people familiar with the matter.
-A group of international bond investors is drawing up plans to sue Switzerland in the US courts for expropriation over the losses they suffered after the state-orchestrated rescue of Credit Suisse. The case is being brought together by law firm Quinn Emanuel, according to people familiar with the matter.
-Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party are seizing on a publicity boost from hosting the G20 summit last weekend to kick off a busy campaign season that will culminate with national polls early next year.
-Investors have poured $1T into global money market funds in 2023, attracted by the best yields available in years and uncertainty over the outlook for the US economy.
-While experts have long warned that Derna’s dams were liable to burst, the authorities have been quick to absolve themselves. Aguileh Saleh, who heads the eastern-based parliament, told Libyans that no one was to blame. “God wills and acts. Don’t say ‘if only we’d done this or that’,” he told an emergency session of parliament. “What happened in our country was a natural catastrophe.”
-Super-powered dinghies carrying contraband tobacco are dimming hopes of better relations between Spain and the UK over the British territory of Gibraltar. Cigarettes are cheap in Gibraltar because the British territory does not apply sales tax or other levies, enabling smuggling gangs to sell them at a mark-up in Spain after hauling them there on five-minute boat dashes.
NY POST
-NY City took in more migrants than anywhere else in the country since last spring, and city taxpayers are on course to spend an astronomical $40,000 per migrant — far more than any of the top five cities where asylum seekers land according to The NY Post.
Between last April and the end of July 2023, over 125,000 migrants have headed for the five boroughs, according to data on the zip codes where migrants told US Customs and Border Protection they plan to settle.
-Tesla is the biggest beneficiary of labor unrest that has resulted in a strike impacting Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers, according to analysts.
The United Auto Workers, which represents some 146,000 employees based in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, announced a targeted strike for Friday.
Some 13,000 employees of Ford, General Motors and Jeep-Chrysler’s parent company, Stellantis, walked off the job at the stroke of midnight Thursday into Friday after management balked at their demands for a four-day workweek and a 46% pay raise.