Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Nadine Arslanian, who would eventually marry Sen. Bob Menendez, quickly introduced him to longtime friend Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman in New Jersey. The future Ms. Menendez was eager to connect her influential new boyfriend with Mr. Hana’s high-level connections in the Egyptian government. What unfolded in the next four years is what prosecutors described on Friday as a sprawling corruption scheme that would ensnare the halal meat industry, American military aid to Egypt and the appointment of a top New Jersey law enforcement official. Prosecutors accused Mr. Menendez of abusing his power to influence arms sales to Egypt and to attempt to interfere with criminal investigations into Mr. Hana’s web of business associates.
-One day on the border: 8,900 migrants arrested, and more on the way. A sudden surge of people is arriving at the southern border, despite danger. “If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said one man who traveled from Peru.
-What does social media do to the teenager’s brain? Despite the headlines, the impact of social apps on adolescent mental health isn’t so clear.
-Europe pledged ammunition for Ukraine. Providing it is another challenge. After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken defense industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by next March.
-Ukrainian forces targeted occupied Crimea with an air attack on Saturday, the second in two days, Russia said.
-An Ohio town struggles between President Biden’s clean energy agenda and union support. Contract talks at an electric vehicle battery plant in Lordstown could have even more of an impact than the autoworkers’ strike on the labor standards of the emerging electric-vehicle industry.
-Tyson and Perdue are facing child labor investigations. The Labor Department has opened inquiries into whether migrant children were working inside slaughterhouses owned by the poultry-processing giants.
-An ambitious antiracism center scales back amid a funding slowdown. Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” and leader of Boston University’s Antiracism Center the center’s leader who has become a flashpoint of national controversy, also faces an inquiry into the center’s management.
-Tropical Storm Ophelia makes landfall in North Carolina. As the storm hit the Carolina coast, its winds were near hurricane force. The storm was expected to weaken over the weekend.
-The man who trapped americans in databases. Hank Asher was a drug smuggler with a head for numbers — until he figured out how to turn citizens’ private information into a big business.
-Cassidy Hutchinson reappears. She Has More Trump Stories to Tell.
The former White House aide has a new memoir about her journey down a political rabbit hole. “I would like not to be a hermit,” she said in an interview.
-Fear and chaos grow in Nagorno-Karabakh after takeover. With food shortages and blackouts, rumors of revenge-taking abound — and are flatly denied by the Azerbaijani authorities.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-The US government is heading for a shutdown from next weekend, as lawmakers look increasingly unlikely to strike a budget deal in the face of hardline opposition from the right wing of the Republican Party. Legislators have just one week to come up with a spending plan that can make it through both chambers of Congress, which will not be easy, given that the Republicans control the House of Representatives by a slim majority and Democrats holding the Senate by a similarly razor-thin margin.
-Shareholders and top bosses at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have fared far better than workers in the past five years, as the US auto industry enjoyed a stunning recovery following the 2008 financial crash, according to Financial Times analysis.
-US president Joe Biden has decided to send American long-range missiles known as ATACMS to Ukraine after months of deliberations. Washington will send a version of the missiles armed with cluster munitions rather than a single warhead, the people said.
-EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis has warned over “new areas of concern” in the bloc’s relationship with China, as part of a maiden visit that aims to confront “unbalanced” dealings between the two regions. In an interview with the Financial Times in Shanghai, the EU vice-president cited “implications of the anti-espionage law” in China and “data flows” as concerns, alongside market access for foreign companies in the mainland.
-French billionaire Xavier Niel has bought Czech energy tycoon Daniel Kretinsky out of his stake in Le Monde, in a move that will advance Niel’s longstanding plan to put ownership of the newspaper in a foundation to protect its future.
-The North American fossil fuel sector is undergoing a wave of transactions tied to changes in the energy mix, with companies placing their bets on the relative values of oil, natural gas or clean power. The moves are happening as electricity consumption rises in response to demand from sources such as electric vehicles and data centers. More EV use may in turn mean less petrol burnt in the years ahead.
-The US Dollar achieved a six-month high on Friday at the end of a week when US stock and bond markets weakened and investors prepared for a prolonged period of high interest rates.
NY POST
-Queens is bearing the brunt of the Big Apple’s migrant crisis, with more settling in the borough than anywhere else in the city, immigration court data shows. At least 39,131 migrants listed a Queens address on their initial paperwork upon entering the country this fiscal year through the end of August, edging out Brooklyn, where at least 36,579 migrants planned to settle, according to stats tracked by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit at Syracuse University.
-The Federal Trade Commission is expected to file an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon over its alleged anti-competitive business practices as early as Tuesday. This was long expected and FTC Chair Lina Khan will likely target “Amazon’s monopolistic behavior in the online retail space.”
Khan rose to prominence with a 2017 paper she wrote as a Yale Law School student that was highly critical of the Jeff Bezos-founded company — wants the court to break up Amazon’s $1.3T empire.