Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-There was intense street fighting across Kyiv on Saturday, and the latest Western intelligence reports indicated that the Russian advance had been slowed. But the Russian priority remained the capture of Kyiv.
-President Volodymyr Zelensky praised his outmanned military, saying it has “successfully repelled enemy attacks,” and urged Western countries for more support.
-Russia continued to send more troops into Ukraine, renewing its advance after the Kremlin said it had ordered a pause on Friday.
-Across Ukraine, people huddled in air raid shelters, lined up at bank machines and stocked up on essentials.
-Despite the Kremlin’s efforts to obscure the offensive in Ukraine, the costs of the war were already evident in both economic and social turmoil.
-President Vladimir Putin has for years been idolized by a Who’s Who of populist, nationalist leaders. They are now stumbling over what to say.
-European companies that have operations in Russia are preparing for collateral damage as Western sanctions aim to penalize Russia’s economy.
-As a public defender, Supreme Court nominee helped clients others avoided. Ambitious lawyers usually become prosecutors. Ketanji Brown Jackson worked on behalf of criminal defendants and Guantánamo detainees.
-Nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court is both bold and politically savvy, Democrats told us. Republicans are divided over how much of a fight to put up.
-Chris Licht, a creator of ‘Morning Joe’ and ‘Colbert’ Producer, is set to run CNN. He will take over CNN as the network gets a new corporate owner. He replaces Jeff Zucker, the network president who abruptly resigned this month.
-Some Indigenous leaders have allied with the developers building on sacred land in Cape Town, prompting a debate over who speaks for First Nations people.
-From Cancún to Tulum, several gang-related incidents have killed or injured international visitors. That hasn’t stopped vacationers from arriving.
-Hundreds of passengers were rescued after a blaze on a passenger ferry that burned for most of a week. At least three more are believed to be missing.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Officials in Kyiv said the center of the city remained under government and military control on Saturday, as outgunned troops continued to resist the biggest invasion force in Europe in half a century. Gunfire and explosions were heard in several parts of the capital overnight.
-EU resistance to ejecting Russian banks from the Swift financial messaging system is eroding after Italy said it would not stand in the way of such a move, while Germany came under intense pressure to back it.
Italian prime minister Mario Draghi told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a call on Saturday that Rome would fully support EU work on sanctions against Russia, “including those encompassing Swift”.
-From crude oil to diesel to natural gas, the fossil fuels that power the global economy are trading at or towards record levels, threatening to redraw geopolitical relations between producers and consumers, drive up inflation and potentially even disrupt the fight against climate change.
-By Saturday, three days into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, armed men in military fatigues — with yellow masking tape encircling their sleeves to mark themselves as Ukrainians — were organizing patrols and assistance to the troops defending Kyiv as enemy soldiers closed in. Russian agents are believed to already be in the city center.
-Russian airlines were cut off from an increasing swath of European airspace on Saturday, as tit-for-tat flight bans disrupted commercial aviation and forced some planes on long detours.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia all announced bans on Russian airlines using their airspace or landing at their airports, joining the UK, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland in sealing off their skies. The bans apply to all Russian airlines, including flag carrier Aeroflot.
-Warren Buffett on Saturday lamented the few attractive investments available to his sprawling $713B Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, warning that low interest rates over the past two years had inflated valuations across financial markets.
-The Federal Reserve will fail to control inflation if it delivers only six quarter-point rate rises this year as markets expect, according to almost half of leading academics polled by the Financial Times.
-Stephen Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone Group, received a record $1.1B in income in 2021, and was one of three insiders at the world’s largest private equity group to receive over $160M as its profits soared.
-US president Joe Biden announced on Friday he would nominate federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, saying she is “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds and will be an exceptional justice”.
Jackson would, if confirmed, fill a vacancy at the country’s highest court left by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, who last month said he would step aside at the end of the court’s current term, typically in late June or early July, assuming his successor had been nominated and confirmed.
-Hong Kong is one of the most isolated cities in the world, with arrivals forced to endure a two-week hotel quarantine if they can get in. A ban on inbound flights from nine countries, including the US and UK, was recently extended to April.
-PwC Canada has been fined more than $900,000 by Canadian and US accounting regulators over exam cheating involving 1,100 of its auditors. The watchdogs found that the Big Four firm failed to spot that staff were sharing answers in exams between 2016 and 2020 because of shortcomings in its internal standards and test supervision.
-Why has the post-cold-war order broken apart in a violent fight over Ukraine? It is now beyond question that that order has crumbled, and that Europe will once again, as in 1989, bear a line of division between Moscow-centric and Washington-centric blocs.
THE NEW YORK POST
-Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had President Trump still been in office, a majority of Americans said according to the results of a new poll.
-Ukraine’s vice prime minister called on SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to help the embattled nation with communication satellites on Saturday, as they faced a third day of assaults from Russia: “@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand,” Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted, later sharing the post on his Telegram account as well.
-The Biden administration said it will follow in the footsteps of the European Union and impose sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his decision to send troops into Ukraine. But the practical implications of such a move, which is also reportedly being considered by the United Kingdom, are unclear for a variety of reasons.
-Shares of Foot Locker fell by as much as 35% during trading on Wall Street on Friday as the company said it expects profits to take a hit thanks to Nike’s new strategy of selling direct to consumers. The apparel store released its earnings report on Friday, predicting that none of its vendors will generate more than 60% of total purchases for fiscal year 2022.