Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Thousands more flights around the globe were canceled on Sunday as Omicron sickened airline crews.
-Why the police believe they’re not to blame for deaths in custody. The NY Times examines “the self-reinforcing ecosystem of paid experts who advise and train officers, then absolve those accused of killings.”
-Desmond Tutu, whose Voice Helped slay Apartheid, has died at 90. The archbishop, a powerful force for nonviolence in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
-‘Magic’ Weight-Loss Pills and Covid Cures: Dr. Oz is a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate, has a long history of dispensing dubious medical advice on his daytime show and on Fox News.
-Eastern European nations have drawn a lesson from America’s wars of the last decades: Insurgency works. Ukraine’s training of volunteers has become a factor in the standoff with Russia.
-Many Afghans who evacuated to the Netherlands have been living in tents for months as Europe is wrangling with a heated debate about immigration.
-As the national birthrate declines, a lower cost of living, less-crowded schools and cheaper taxes have drawn newcomers and fueled a baby boom in Texas.
-Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns with its precious payload: the James Webb Telescope. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Germany’s premium car manufacturers enjoyed record high prices for their luxury models in 2021 as a shortage of semiconductors restricted the supply of vehicles to major markets just as consumer demand was soaring.
-President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, warned on Sunday that the number of Americans infected with Covid-19 was likely to “go much higher” before easing off in the new year.
-Global supply chain problems have thrown up everything from abandoned containers full of rotten red cabbages to beer kegs and dog blankets.
The stranded, unwanted or delayed goods have created a boom in the business of cargo salvage — and a group of companies rarely in the spotlight that keeps world trade ticking over.
-The United Arab Emirates government has told some of its biggest business families that it intends to remove their monopolies on the sale of imported goods as the Gulf state deepens economic reforms in an effort to attract more investment.
-“During the pandemic, Mainz became the world’s pharmacy,” said mayor Michael Ebling, who pledged to use the funds flowing from BioNTech’s pivotal role in fighting coronavirus to clear the city’s debts. Corporation taxes — some of which can be set by local German authorities — will also be cut in a bid to attract more biotechnology businesses.
-The Solomon Islands are just one of the tiny but strategically important nations of the Pacific that are caught up in a growing geopolitical competition over whether to maintain diplomatic ties with Beijing or Taiwan.
-By amassing tens of thousands of troops on the Ukrainian border, the Russian president has forced the White House into what experts in the region believe is a scramble to formulate a policy on the fly.
“This is becoming the worst crisis in Europe since the end of the cold war,” said Andrew Lohsen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
-For the foreseeable future, most of the world’s population increase will be in Africa. In 1980, one in 10 of the world’s population was African, writes Edward Paice, author of a new book Youthquake and director of the Africa Research Institute.
-Russian President Vladimir Putin said the US and Russia would meet in January in Geneva for talks over Ukraine, which he said were essential to protect Moscow from what he claimed were existential threats from NATO.
-Amazon has reached an agreement with the National Labor Relations Board that could pave the way for its almost 1m US employees to form a union.
-Credit Suisse has launched legal action against SoftBank in an effort to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars it claims it is owed by the Japanese investor, marking a further deterioration in a relationship that has grown increasingly acrimonious following the collapse of Greensill Capital.
THE NEW YORK POST
-Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to misspeak during an interview aired Sunday when she answered “democracy” when asked what’s the biggest national security challenge facing the US.
-Huma Abedin, the former longtime aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said the “final straw” for her came when The Post published a photo on its front page of her husband, disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner, sexting while lying in bed with their young son.
-Noting the city’s profound housing shortage, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) produced a batch of proposals to facilitate large-scale office-to-residential conversions. But they’d require wholesale zoning changes, state-city cooperation to provide tax subsidies, and cultural changes at city agencies such as the departments of Housing Preservation and Development, Buildings, City Planning and Finance.