Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Trump’s latest dinner guest: Nick Fuentes, white supremacist.
The former president’s table for four at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday also included Kanye West, whose anti-Semitic statements have made him an entertainment-industry outcast.
-Meet the House Republicans who will wield power in the new Congress.
The GOP lawmakers in line to lead key committees have made it clear they will prioritize investigations of the Biden administration.
-Walmart gunman bought a pistol to kill co-workers and left a ‘death note.’
A message on the killer’s phone asked God to forgive him for targeting co-workers, whose deaths were the latest in a string of mass shooting fatalities.
-Kherson evacuates hospitals under relentless Russian shelling. “This is the revenge of those who lost,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said of Russia’s attacks.
-Artillery is breaking in Ukraine. It’s becoming a problem for the US.
Ukrainian soldiers are firing thousands of shells daily, forcing the Pentagon to replace gun barrels across the border in Poland.
-Retailers push sales, and normalcy, but economic uncertainty looms. Black Friday deals returned, drawing shoppers back into stores, but inflation worries left many companies unsure what the holiday shopping season would look like.
-Major shareholder raises concerns about News Corp’s merger with Fox
T. Rowe Price, News Corp’s largest owner after the Murdoch family, says the deal to combine the two companies risks undervaluing News Corp.
-John Brown Jr., KFC Mogul and Kentucky Governor, dies at 88
Though his political career was brief, after storming to victory with a former Miss America by his side, he made millions on the fried chicken chain.
-Meet the mice who make the forest.
Scientists are unearthing a quiet truth about the woods: Where trees grow, or don’t, depends in part on the quirky decisions of small mammals.
-An Israeli schoolboy died in the West Bank. To find his body, foes joined forces. After Palestinian gunmen refused to hand over a dead Israeli teenager on Tuesday, officials on both sides of the conflict worked together to recover his abducted body.
-In the midst of a criminal trial of 10 of its officials on charges of financial impropriety, the Catholic Church put forth a long-delayed document that lays out standards for avoiding improper investments.
-A fire in a residential high-rise in Urumqi, where many residents have been under lockdown, set off public anger and questions about China’s zero-Covid policy.
-As Venezuelan antagonists talk, the US softens its stance. Negotiations between the Venezuelan government and opposition could lead to an easing of the country’s protracted crisis.
-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strongly defended the decision at a public inquiry into the government’s use of an emergency law to shut down the blockade.
-A Chinese Court has sentenced a Canadian singer to prison for rape.
Before his arrest over #MeToo allegations, Kris Wu was one of China’s most popular entertainers, with legions of fans and brand deals.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Qatar has launched a review of its investments in London after the city’s transport authority this week banned the Gulf state’s advertisements on the UK capital’s buses, taxis and underground train system. The move by Transport for London was prompted by concerns about Qatar’s stance on LGBT+ rights and its treatment of migrant workers. It has infuriated Doha, which has become increasingly angered by criticism aimed at it as host of the football World Cup.
-For old colleagues, and many in Hollywood, outgoing Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s defining mistake was not missing numbers but something more intangible. His public spats over pay with stars such as Scarlett Johansson were a symptom of a deeper problem. Chapek had lost the confidence of the creative community, as well as the support of the one man who could give him the keys to Hollywood.
-EU ministers say that time is running out to resolve the worsening dispute with the US over Washington’s $369B in green subsidies as they seek to head off a transatlantic trade war. Brussels and Washington have set up a task force to address the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its “buy American” provisions, but European capitals are growing impatient with the lack of progress.
Jozef Sikela, the Czech minister who is chairing a meeting of EU trade ministers in Brussels on Friday, said he wanted solutions by the next meeting of a separate bilateral Trade and Technology Council on December 5.
-US businesses are hiring fewer seasonal workers this holiday shopping season, as stubborn inflation dims the outlook for retail sales. Employers posted 8.25 fewer holiday openings this year than last year, according to jobs site Indeed. The decline came even as Indeed reported that searches for seasonal jobs rose 33% this year over 2021 to their highest level since 2019.
-Scenes of protest from the locked-down western Chinese city of Urumqi have spread on social media after a fire killed 10 people, as nationwide unrest over the country’s strict Covid policies continues to build. Social media posts alleged that restrictions in the capital of Xinjiang province, which has been locked down since August, hampered rescue efforts and the ability of residents to escape the fire in an apartment block on Thursday evening.
-Donald Trump faced a new backlash after it emerged that he dined with one of America’s most prominent white supremacists at his Mar-a-Lago estate this week, just days after announcing a new bid for the White House in 2024. According to Axios, Trump had a meal on Tuesday with Nick Fuentes, who is known for his extreme views, along with rapper Kanye West — who now goes by the name Ye and who has also stoked controversy by making anti-Semitic comments.
-Washington’s top telecommunications regulator has barred China-based Huawei and ZTE from selling equipment in the US, citing national security concerns in a move that could further fuel tensions with Beijing. The Federal Communications Commission announced the step on Friday, saying it was the latest effort by US authorities to “build a more secure and resilient supply chain” in the telecommunications industry.
-NATO plans to increase shipments of power generators, clothing and other non-lethal items to Ukraine to help it withstand Russia’s onslaught on its power and water networks, the alliance’s chief said. Jens Stoltenberg said he would use a meeting of its members’ foreign ministers in Bucharest next week to secure additional pledges. The demand for more support to patch up Ukraine’s power, heating and water supplies comes as Russian missile strikes this week left a majority of the country in darkness.
-A decade on from the Libor scandal, US courts have rejected a series of criminal charges against traders accused of fiddling the rate once used to benchmark hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts.
Between January and October, a New York court has thrown out criminal charges against Tom Hayes, a UK trader who worked at UBS and Citi trader, and Roger Darin, another former UBS trader. It also overturned the convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders, Matthew Connolly and Gavin Black.
-One of Northern Ireland’s leading unionist politicians lobbied the British government to dilute legislation that gives UK ministers powers to tear up the post-Brexit deal governing trade in Northern Ireland. The Democratic Unionist party has expressed support for the legislation, which threatens to unilaterally sweep away the so-called Northern Ireland protocol that has bedeviled relations between London and Brussels since Brexit.
-The dealmaking and networking on the sidelines of the COP27 summit was notable at the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, where energy industry executives rubbed shoulders with top government officials at the vast conference, held against the backdrop of higher gas prices.
Energy security was in focus as countries worked to secure gas supplies and diversify their energy mixes by adding renewables. The EU, in particular, has looked to African nations with fossil fuel reserves this year, to replace Russian gas supplies following the war on Ukraine.
-Itamar Ben-Gvir is set to be Israel’s new national security minister after his Jewish Power party reached an agreement with the Likud grouping of the prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu. The deal will give Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist previously convicted of incitement to racism, a seat in the prospective government’s cabinet, as well as making him responsible for the police. “We took an important step tonight towards establishing a fully rightwing government,” Ben-Gvir said on Friday morning, urging other rightwing parties to form a new government “as quickly as possible”.
NY POST
-Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that he struggled to find a job after his four-year stint as America’s top doctor under former President Donald Trump.
“People still are afraid to touch anything that is associated with Trump,” Adams told the Washington Post in an interview published on Friday. While he sought out positions in academia, Adams and his wife, Lacey, recounted receiving polite rejections from university officials who they believed were worried about how having a former Trump administration official on campus would be received by left-leaning students.
-A big US furniture company this week fired all of its 2,700 employees while they were sleeping, telling them in texts and emails not to come to work the next day. The mass firing on Tuesday by United Furniture Industries, which makes budget-friendly sofas and recliners for Simmons Upholstery, left thousands of employees including truck drivers and factory workers in North Carolina, Mississippi and California unemployed just two days before Thanksgiving.
-President Biden and scandal-plagued first son Hunter Biden went shopping Friday on Nantucket amid a federal investigation of the first family’s overseas business deals — as House Republicans vow a parallel probe to unearth Joe Biden’s role in his brother and son’s foreign consulting work. The president, 80, and his 52-year-old son visited several small businesses on the exclusive Massachusetts island after Joe Biden lunched at a restaurant called Brotherhood of Thieves — apparently without Hunter. Hunter Biden and his father popped into shops before attending the island’s annual Christmas tree lighting festival, where Hunter then stood alongside his dad to greet eventgoers. The Biden family is staying — likely for free — at the home of private-equity billionaire David Rubenstein, who also lent his $20M compound to the president last Thanksgiving.
-The owners of 9 West 57th Street insist they have no plans to sell the iconic property, one of Manhattan’s premier office towers, despite a bombshell report which claimed a deal was in the works. “There are no plans to sell the building,” Hayden Soloviev, a son of and a spokesman for Soloviev Group chairman Stefan Soloviev told Realty Check. “The news must’ve been mixed up with the residential sales,” Hayden Soloviev speculated. (Soloviev Group has in fact been selling off some of its luxury rental apartment buildings).
-The Internal Revenue Service is reminding tax filers to prepare to report transactions of at least $600 that are made through so-called “third-party” facilitators such as Venmo and PayPal. The IRS on Tuesday posted an explainer warning American business owners earning $600 or more per year on payments that are received through apps such as Zelle, Cash App, Venmo, and PayPal to file a tax form known as Form 1099-K. The IRS is interested in transactions involving part-time work, side gigs, and selling goods, according to the agency.
-More holiday shoppers are putting off paying their bills with buy-now-pay-later apps, even financing lower-priced goods, according to new data on Thanksgiving spending. Spending on such apps rose 1.3% on Thanksgiving, according to Adobe, while the average order value for purchases made with the apps declined 6%, according to Salesforce data. Buy-now-pay-later apps like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna “started as a way to finance bigger ticket items but have morphed into everyday purchases and for lower priced gifts as consumers think about the economy and their personal finances,” Salesforce vice president of retail Rob Garf told The Post.