Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-The Justice Dept. had concerns over ‘human sources,’ redacted filing shows. The Justice Department released a redacted affidavit detailing former President Trump’s months-long refusal to return highly sensitive government documents. It revealed that the government’s source for information on the movement of documents into, and within, Mar-a-Lago, came from civilian witnesses.
-Classified files on clandestine sources helped trigger alarm. Documents related to the work of intelligence informants are some of the most sensitive in the government. FBI agents found some at Donald Trump’s home.
-Ukraine weighs a risky offensive to break out of a stalemate. Both Russia and Ukraine are preparing for a protracted standoff, but Ukraine has a greater incentive to try to avoid one.
-Inspectors set to visit besieged Ukrainian nuclear plant. The UN’s nuclear watchdog has assembled a team to visit the Zaporizhzhia plant, where shelling has raised concerns of a nuclear accident.
-Stocks plunge after fed chair warns of ‘pain’ from inflation fight. The S&P 500 fell 3.4%, its worst daily showing since mid-June, after the Federal Reserve chair spoke about the path ahead for monetary policy.
-Two top universities say they need affirmative action after it was banned. As a Supreme Court case nears, the California and Michigan university systems say their efforts to build diverse classes have fallen abysmally short.
-Biden Gave In to Pressure on Student Debt Relief After Months of Doubt. Advocates of debt cancellation made a sustained push to win over President Biden, who feared the plan would be seen as a giveaway to the privileged.The White House on Twitter called out critics of the student loan plan who had received government debt relief themselves.
-A child has monkeypox in New York City, but the epidemic may be waning. Federal officials are “cautiously optimistic” as monkeypox cases decline, even as health officials announced the first pediatric case in the city.
-Monkeypox patients often have a range of symptoms that are not typical of the virus, and some of the infected seem to have no symptoms at all.
-Ron DeSantis Suspends 4 Elected School Board Members After Parkland Report. They were found to have engaged in “acts of incompetence and neglect,” but one ousted member called the Florida governor’s move “political retribution.”
-Bills in Britain will soar 80% as energy crisis crashes into Europe. A regulator detailed the latest increase in gas and electric charges, driven up by the war in Ukraine and expected to further stoke inflation.
-Moderna sues Pfizer and BioNTech over Covid vaccine technology. Two lawsuits filed in Massachusetts and Germany claim the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine violated Moderna’s mRNA patents.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-US stocks tumbled after Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell emphasised his resolve to hoist interest rates to curb inflation in a hawkish address on Friday at the annual Jackson Hole central banking summit. Wall Street’s S&P 500 index fell 3.4%, while the Nasdaq Composite, which is dominated by technology shares that are more sensitive to interest rate expectations, slid 3.9%.
-Donald Trump kept dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, including top secret intelligence information, according to a document released by the justice department on Friday. The revelations were part of a heavily redacted version of the affidavit that underpinned this month’s dramatic search of the former president’s Florida home as FBI agents looked for classified material. A federal court in the state had ordered a redacted version of the affidavit be released in response to requests from the media and other groups.
-3M has lost the first round of a legal battle in bankruptcy court over its attempts to stop about 230,000 personal injury claims made against it by US soldiers from moving towards a jury trial. US bankruptcy judge Jeffrey Graham in Indiana on Friday refused a request by the conglomerate to place a temporary stay on lawsuits alleging 3M and its subsidiary Aearo Technologies — which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — sold faulty earplugs to the military.
-Washington and Beijing have reached a landmark agreement that would allow US regulators access to audits of Chinese companies that are listed on American exchanges, in a deal that would halt the threatened delisting of about 200 stocks that trade on Wall Street.
-Chinese tourists, once the biggest driver of luxury sales, have almost disappeared from European high streets since the closure of China’s borders in 2020. With no clear date for their return, retailers are having to come up with new tactics. Rather than selling easy-to-grab items to fast-moving tourists, sales teams are having to slow down and personalize their services for pickier locals.
-Ukraine’s gross domestic product will fall by as much as half this year. Its budget deficit is $5B a month and, by the end of 2022, foreign donors will have spent at least $27B paying the salaries of Ukrainian public sector workers and soldiers, keeping them warm this winter. The central bank has devalued the currency, the hryvnia, by 25% and is printing more to buy government debt, tipping inflation to over 20%.
-Moderna on Friday said it will sue Pfizer and BioNTech for copying the “groundbreaking technology” behind its Covid-19 vaccine, setting up a legal clash between pharmaceutical rivals behind some of the best-selling jabs used to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
-Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said on Friday that the Czechs, as holder of the rotating European Council presidency, would summon energy ministers “to discuss specific emergency measures to address the energy situation”. Czech trade minister Jozef Sikela said it should meet “at the earliest possible date”. The call came as European gas prices hit a record high above €343 per megawatt hour ($100/million BTU) on Friday, showing the stark threat to energy-intensive industries.
-TotalEnergies is selling its 49% stake in a Siberian gasfield to Russian energy producer Novatek, days after accusations that the asset supplied feedstock for jet fuel suspected to have been used by the Russian military.
NY POST
-Goldman Sachs has been hit by a wave of defections, and the atmosphere at the financial giant is at “an all-time toxic high right now,” The Post has learned. Six overworked first-year bankers quit and walked out en masse from the bank’s 200 West Street headquarters Wednesday after getting news of their bonuses, sources told The Post. Their departures have been followed by others in the same division — as everyone from chief executive David Solomon on down — constantly stresses the need to “perform, perform, perform,” sources told The Post.
-Friday’s unsealing of the affidavit tied to the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate has raised more questions than answers. West Palm Beach US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt had ordered the Justice Department earlier in the week to prepare a redacted version of the document in which authorities laid out their reasons for the controversial Aug. 8 search-and-seizure operation at Mar-a-Lago.
-Housing prices could dip by as much as 20% in more than 180 markets nationwide if the US economy falls deeper into a recession, according to a new study. Experts at the research firm Moody’s Analytics said that homes in 183 of the 413 largest regional housing markets in the country are “overvalued” by more than 25%.