TheChek News Flow

Weekend Papers Summary

-Democrats will have to spend heavily to mobilize and register Americans after they lost their best chance to counteract voting restrictions.

-The stakes are high as Democrats approach the midterms with a low presidential approval rating, and as Republicans aim to further rewrite election laws.

-Democrats already were expecting a rough election year. But their struggle to advance priorities has some calling for a course correction.

-The Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics.

-The nature of the omicron variant, combined with widespread vaccine use, may make it seem less severe. But it doesn’t always feel that like that in Brooklyn.

-Chinese authorities locked down a neighborhood where one case was detected and are testing thousands of people. The first free tests from the U.S. government will not ship for nearly two weeks.

-With the tournament starting Monday, some players feel that the Novak Djokovic situation is overshadowing everything else, our columnist writes.

-Game publishers are offering NFTs, but skeptical gamers smell a moneymaking scheme and are fighting back.

-Newly released documents show that top career officials at the Census Bureau had drafted a list of complaints about political interference in the 2020 count.

-After an underwater volcano eruption near Tonga, the waters prompted tsunami warnings and advisories on nearby islands and in parts of New Zealand, with surges affecting the United States.

-In Myanmar, as the government confronts a huge loss of revenue amid economic turmoil, the military has sent soldiers to act as debt collectors.

-After a New York judge ruled that a civil suit against the prince could move forward, he was stripped of his military titles. The NY Times speculates on possible scenarios.

-GlaxoSmithKline has rejected a £50B bid from Unilever to acquire its consumer health joint venture with Pfizer, saying it “fundamentally undervalued” the business and its future prospects.

-There are 100,000 Russian troops massed at Ukraine’s border, and Moscow has warned of “the most unpredictable and grave consequences” for Europe’s security if its demands are not met. Though western officials are unsure whether Russia has decided on a renewed invasion, Putin may never have a better time to do so.

-Boris Johnson’s tenure as prime minister stands on a knife edge as cabinet ministers and supporters expressed doubts that he would survive a scandal over Downing Street lockdown parties that prompted an apology to the Queen.

-JPMorgan Chase, the largest lender on Wall Street, said it plans to dramatically increase spending on technology and talent to fortify its competitive position, stirring investor worries about US bank earnings in 2022.

-Small and medium-sized companies are “breathing a sigh of relief”, over the complications involved to fulfill vaccination mandates. While the mandate was a “great source of work” for people in his profession, “for clients it was an administrative and logistical nightmare?.?.?.?not many of them were happy about it”.

-Victoria Nuland, the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, stopped short of blaming Russia for the cyber-attack, which targeted dozens of Ukrainian government websites. But she said the episode was part of a familiar and disturbing pattern of actions from Moscow.

-For Estelle Brachlianoff, appointed this week as new boss of the utility company from July, advances like these will be core to motivating staff after an acrimonious battle for control of Suez, a rival in the French water industry since the 19th century, which descended into the courts.

-By the time they were quelled nearly a week later, the demonstrations in Kazakhstan had spread across the country, mushrooming into wider protests about poverty, corruption and the influence of former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. The unrest prompted the government to resign and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to ask Russian-led forces from former Soviet states for help.

-The loss of David McCormick — and a return to the twin chief executive model that prevailed until his ascension as sole CEO in 2019 — has rekindled questions about the management of Bridgewater at a time when the hedge fund contends with a long stretch of mediocre results and speculation about the future of its quirky founder.

-Although protected by world heritage organization UNESCO, Egyptian authorities are planning a major highway that will cut through Cairo’s oldest and largest necropolis to help ease traffic in the notoriously congested capital of 20M people.

-Canada’s top diplomat will travel to Ukraine Sunday for an emergency visit to help fend off Russian aggression as tensions mount in the region.

“The amassing of Russian troops and equipment in and around Ukraine jeopardizes security in the entire region,” said Foreign Minister Melanie Joly. “These aggressive actions must be deterred.”

-If this medicine thing doesn’t work out, Dr. Anthony Fauci can always get a job on Wall Street. The president’s chief medical advisor and his wife had $10.4M in investments at the end of 2020, newly-released records show.

-Convicted “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli has been ordered to return $64 million in profits his company made by inflating the price of a life-saving drug, a federal judge in New York ruled on Friday. In 2015, Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired the rights to Daraprim, a life-saving drug that is used to treat infections that occur in patients suffering from cancer and AIDS. Shkreli, who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud after he was convicted in 2017, has been barred from ever working in the pharmaceutical industry again.