Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Inside Trump’s decision to skip the GOP debate. Fox News leaned on former President Trump privately and publicly to join the debate. But all the while he had his own plan for counterprogramming.
-The prospect of a possible second presidential term for Donald Trump has many officials in Europe worried.
-A view of the outside of the Fox News building in Manhattan, showing a news ticker reading “President Trump” and red, white and blue signs.
-These voters share almost no political beliefs, but they agree on one thing: The US is failing as a nation.
-As legal bills pile up, Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly sought a financial lifeline from Donald Trump.
-Hurricane Hilary, Now a Category 3 Storm, is approaching Mexico and California. The storm was still expected to produce heavy rain and flooding despite weakening as it headed toward the coast.
-The last survivors of an Amazon tribe. Have been found. Now what? The last two isolated members of the Piripkura people are posing a tricky challenge for the authorities.
-Hawaiian Electric was warned of its system’s fragility before wildfire. The utility company knew it needed to upgrade its equipment but did not make changes that could have reduced risks of fires, energy experts said.
-Wildfires have prompted evacuations in Washington State and British Columbia, Canada.
-With TikTok and lawsuits, Gen Z takes on ‘Climate Change’. A growing number of young people are engaged in a movement to shape policy and sway elections. “We’re the last resort,” one young activist said.
-Inmates in a Wisconsin prison who have been confined mostly to their cells for months described poor conditions. Experts said staffing shortages were likely to blame.
-A Kansas newspaper is the talk of the town, and not just for getting raided.
The rare search of a newsroom has uncorked a debate in Marion, Kan.: What is a newspaper’s role, anyway?
-China’s economic growth has led to the demolition of many rural homes, and a burgeoning nostalgia.
-A defense agreement likely to deepen Chinese Rancor. Its signers, Japan, South Korea and the United States, see deterrence whereas China sees encirclement, and even provocation.
-Ceaseless war in Syria leaves lethal threats lurking underfoot. Even as the fighting in Syria has largely stalled, more than a decade of conflict has left behind an array of unexploded munitions like cluster bombs.
-How nursing homes failed to protect residents from Covid. A series of hurdles prevented the facilities from shielding older people. Experts are calling for reforms before the next virus arrives.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-A group of Silicon Valley’s biggest private tech companies are dusting off long-delayed plans to list their shares, with the upcoming initial public offering of chip designer Arm set to provide a new gauge for market sentiment. Grocery delivery group Instacart, software company Databricks and identity verification start-up Socure are among those considered candidates to launch stock market debuts by next year, according to people familiar with their thinking.
-Ahead of next week’s first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Florida governor Ron de Santis has continued to lose ground in national polls of the party’s primary voters and struggled to make big gains against the former president in crucial battlegrounds such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
-Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon is is contending with the most challenging period of his nearly five-year tenure as CEO, with the past 12 months punctuated by falling profits, sagging morale and unflattering press coverage — including a damaging story this month in New York Magazine that asked if he was “too big a jerk” to run the bank.
-China has launched military exercises around Taiwan, lashing out against the country’s vice-president and election frontrunner Lai Ching-te for visiting the US this week. The drills, which the People’s Liberation Army called a “serious warning against the provocation of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces colluding with external forces”, came after Lai returned on Friday from one of the most low-profile US visits by a top Taiwanese politician in recent years.
-Brussels would need to translate hundreds of thousands of pages of EU law into Basque, Galician and Catalan under a Spanish proposal that will add to the strains on Europe’s stretched translation service. Spain has asked the EU to add the three tongues to its list of 24 official languages as part of Pedro Sanchez’s efforts to woo smaller regional parties, whose support he needs to secure a fresh mandate as prime minister.
-For Ukrainians, however, engaged in an existential struggle for their independence against Russia’s war of ‘recolonization,’ Alexander Pushkin is a symbol of the Russian imperialism that has long denied Ukraine’s right to a separate national existence. Pushkin was a great poet, but also a poet of Russian imperialism, just as Rudyard Kipling was a great poet, but a poet of British imperialism.
-The strength of the US economy and the specter of persistent price pressures have fueled a big surge in borrowing costs on both sides of the Atlantic as investors rethink the trajectory for global interest rates.
-The global luxury travel market is projected to grow by 45 per cent over the next five years to $2T, according to market research cited by consultancy Deloitte in a recent report. Luxury travel has rebounded even faster from the pandemic than mid-market travel, as the economic slowdown has held back middle-class spending, according to analysts.
-The Women’s World Cup is set to have attracted 2B viewers on screens globally, with almost 2M tickets sold for the matches in Australia and New Zealand. The tournament had generated $570M, allowing it to break even, according to FIFA boss Gianni Infantino.
-Morocco’s King Mohammed VI’s prolonged absences abroad in the past year and his friendship with a flamboyant martial arts fighter and his two brothers had set tongues wagging and upset senior courtiers, concerned about the image of the monarchy in a country riven by inequality but where the sovereign is seen as a foundation of stability. “Since his return we’ve seen him almost daily on television,” said Omar Brouksy, a Moroccan political scientist and commentator. “He’s been inaugurating this and launching that and exercising his authority.”
-Authorities in Brazil have arrested top police commanders in the nation’s capital for alleged involvement in riots by radical supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro who stormed government buildings at the start of the year.
NY POST
-Access to water should be predicated on “conversations about equity,” according to the Hawaii official under fire for delaying access to water during the Maui wildfires. M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, waited for more than five hours to release water during the wildfires that devastated Maui, according to reports. In a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, Manuel described water as a sacred god. “Let water connect us and not divide us,” said Manuel, referring to water distribution on the island. “We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity…How do we coexist with the resources we have?”
-Chefs and restaurant owners have joined local Chinatown residents to demand that the city abandon plans to build the world’s tallest jail in the heart of the neighborhood — saying it threatens to become a “death knell” for local businesses, Side Dish has learned. “The city needs to completely rethink the size and scale of the jail. We don’t want a repeat of Rikers Island. We want it small and controllable,” said Jan Lee, a third-generation local and co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal.
-Lawyers for Sam Bankman-Fried on Friday rejected as “entirely inadequate” the government’s plan for letting the jailed founder of the collapsed FTX cryptocurrency exchange prepare for his October fraud trial. In a letter to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, the lawyers said giving Bankman-Fried just two days a week, without a dedicated computer, to review the “extraordinary volume” of evidence violated his Sixth Amendment constitutional right to effective counsel and aid his defense.