Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-On 15th vote, McCarthy is elected House Speaker. Kevin McCarthy won over a bloc of right-wing holdouts and finally clinched the speakership after four days of voting. The result came after a dramatic, late-night roll call that hinged on a single vote, ending the longest speaker election since 1859.
-As the Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has made concessions to the far right, he has effectively agreed to give them carte blanche to disrupt the workings of the House — and to hold him hostage to their demands.
-After dramatic 14th vote, Trump calls holdouts who refused to back McCarthy. The former president made crucially timed calls to Representative Matt Gaetz and others who sunk McCarthy’s 14th effort to be elected House speaker.
-Biden honors ‘extraordinary Americans’ who defended democracy on Jan. 6. President Biden marked the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack by awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to 14 people.
-Attacks continue in Ukraine despite Russia’s supposed ceasefire
Ukraine never accepted Russia’s unilateral Christmas truce, dismissing it as a ploy, and Russian shelling was as intense as ever in a hotly contested city.
-Ant group says its founder, Jack Ma, will relinquish control. Ant Group, the fintech sister company of the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, is one of China’s most influential companies.
-A 6-year-old has shot a teacher at a Virginia elementary school. The teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News has “life-threatening injuries” after being shot by one of her students, the authorities said.
-Widening highways doesn’t fix traffic. So why can’t we stop? With billions available to improve transportation infrastructure, states can try new ways to address congestion. But some habits are hard to break.
-Here are the people Iran sentenced to death in its protest crackdown.
An updated look at the Iranians marked for execution in the government’s attempt to curb a months-long uprising.
-A judge declined to dismiss the suit by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, against former President Trump, calling his lawyers’ filing frivolous.
-After troops arrested a son of the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo, cartel gunmen tried to free him, resulting in a series of gun battles and thousands of troops called into the fight.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Kevin McCarthy has been elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives, ending a tortuous week of wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill that exposed sharp divisions in the Republican Party and raised fresh questions about whether Congress can govern effectively in the years to come.
-Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover did not go down well on Wall Street, which feared the chaos and political polarization it unleashed would tarnish the automaker’s brand and distract him at a critical time. A Tesla stock price slide that began in the autumn turned into an avalanche; shares are now 73% below their peak of a little more than a year ago. Musk himself is $200B poorer.
-Chinese billionaire Jack Ma is to relinquish control of Ant Group, the fintech company revealed on Saturday, as its founder continues his withdrawal from his online businesses following Beijing’s tech crackdown.
Ma will see his voting rights shrink from above 50% to 6.2%, according to calculations based on a statement from the online payments and loans provider. The planned change of control, first reported last July, would help release the company from the limbo it has experienced since an intended IPO was pulled at the last minute in November 2020.
-Rising economic optimism buoyed stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday, after Eurozone inflation figures and US jobs data boosted hopes of a soft landing this year. But economists warned that while a recent big fall in energy prices has bolstered prospects for 2023, underlying inflation would maintain pressure on central banks to raise interest rates further to keep price rises under control.
-Russia is trying to block the reappointment of the Danish head of the UN’s leading environmental agency, following a highly critical report about the impact of the war on Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter.
-Rival members of Qatar’s royal family are battling for control of the world’s largest cut blue diamond in London’s High Court, with one side trying to force a $10M sale of the opulent 70 carat “Idol’s Eye” gemstone. The storied Indian diamond, whose past owners include a Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, is at the centre of a lawsuit filed by Qipco, a conglomerate run by Qatar’s big-spending art collector Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah al-Thani.
-Data show UK public support for leading members of the royal family holding firm in the face of criticism from Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The latter prince’s own personal popularity, however, has been on the slide since he embarked on a series of media appearances and interviews last year.
-Since early 2020, the Chinese, the world’s largest tourism population, have been cut off from the world by China’s apparatus of zero-Covid restrictions that included mass-testing, lockdowns and quarantine for arrivals.
Some countries are imposing border controls and compulsory testing on visitors from China. This weekend, as Beijing finally dismantles the last of those measures, that is set to change. Around the world, airlines, hotels and luxury businesses are bracing for the return of tens of millions of tourists and their hundreds of billions of dollars — though experts suggested the revival could take months to fully gather pace.
-Launches of hedge funds have dropped to their lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis, as some managers struggle to make money in falling markets and huge firms such as Millennium and Citadel hoover up traders who once might have branched out on their own.
-Rival teams leading FTX bankruptcy proceedings in the US and the Bahamas, which have clashed over the insolvency proceedings for the cryptocurrency exchange, struck a co-operation agreement on Friday following weeks of public feuding.
Under the agreement, “the parties commence work together to share information, secure and return property to their estates, co-ordinate litigation against third parties and explore strategic alternatives for maximizing stakeholder recoveries”, the two bankruptcy teams said in a statement on Friday.
-Mali has pardoned 49 Ivorian soldiers arrested in July and sentenced last week by a court to 20 years in prison, the military junta said on Friday. The gesture, amid diplomatic efforts to free the captives, ends a dispute that had raised tensions between the neighboring countries and sparked threats of sanctions being imposed on the Malian regime by the ECOWAS regional bloc.
-US jobs growth slowed for a fifth consecutive month in December after the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate rises squeezed economic activity even as the US labor market remained historically tight. The world’s largest economy added 223,000 jobs in the final month of 2022, lower than the downwardly-revised 256,000 increase registered in November and well below last year’s peak of 714,000 in February. Most economists had expected a 200,000 increase.
-As commissioner of the US National Football League, Roger Goodell has presided over the expansion of the NFL, the world’s most valuable professional sports league. But his tenure has been marked by controversies from player protests to legal settlements over concussions.
On Monday, Goodell and the league were thrust into a new crisis after Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field, causing the suspension of a nationally televised primetime game with ramifications for the postseason games leading up to the Super Bowl next month.
NY POST
-Former President Donald Trump added to Friday night’s drama on the House floor by calling two Republican lawmakers who were refusing to back eventual House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy during the 14th round of voting, according to reports. Trump phoned Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — former supporters of the 45th president — to urge them to back McCarthy for the gavel after four days of grueling negotiations, Politico reported.
During the 14th ballot, Gaetz ultimately voted “present,” which, in part, derailed McCarthy’s speakership bid that round. Biggs voted for Rep. Jim Jordan in the 14th round. The former president also apparently called conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, (R-Ga.), who is supporting McCarthy.
-Amazon employees openly welcomed a potential comeback by Jeff Bezos to run the struggling e-retail giant after current CEO Andy Jassy announced a larger-than-expected wave of layoffs, according to a report Friday. Speculation that Bezos could seek to supplant Jassy as CEO has increased during a sustained downturn in Amazon’s stock price. In a recent blog post, Michael Batnick, a managing partner of Ritholtz Wealth Management, suggested Bezos could “pull a Bob Iger” this year and return to stabilize the company he founded.
-Burger chain McDonald’s said Friday that it will review corporate staffing levels and aim to build more restaurants as part of an updated business strategy. The new plan, announced in a letter from Chief Executive Officer Chris Kempczinski to global employees and seen by Reuters, calls for the Chicago-based company to cancel or “de-prioritize” some initiatives while also accelerating development. That could lead to layoffs in some areas and expansion in others, the company said. “We will look to our strategy and our values to guide how we reach those decisions and support every impacted member of the company,” the letter said, adding that McDonald’s will begin announcing key decisions by April 3.