Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-A key panel backed President Biden’s plan to overhaul the Democratic primary, removing Iowa as the first presidential nominating state in favor of South Carolina.
-The fight over Senator Raphael Warnock’s record comes down to a new electric car plant in Georgia.
-With major Republicans largely steering clear of Georgia’s runoff, Herschel Walker is stressing his roots there.
-the US sees little prospect for Ukraine talks with President Putin after President Biden’s offer to talk. US officials said that Vladimir Putin was not prepared to negotiate in good faith, and Russia’s demands remain unacceptable to Kiev and President Biden.
-Ukraine’s President Zelensky proposes barring Orthodox Church that answers to Moscow. Volodymyr Zelensky pushed to ban an ancient branch of the Orthodox Church, led by an ally of Vladimir Putin, from operating in Ukraine.
-Ukraine’s allies have agreed to impose a price cap of $60 a barrel for Russian oil.
-Twitter keeps missing its advertising targets as woes mount. Under Elon Musk, the company has cut its financial expectations as some advertisers request discounts and are offered incentives.
-Advertising accounted for more than 90 percent of Twitter’s $5.1B in revenue last year.
-Prosecutors presented a document at the Trump Organization trial that they said showed former President Trump had sanctioned tax fraud.
-New York’s State’s Attorney General’s Top Aide has resigned after sexual harassment claims. Ibrahim Khan had worked as a chief of staff for Letitia James for close to a decade.
-At President Biden’s state dinner, held to celebrate the relationship between the U.S. and France, guests mingled over drinks (until the glassware ran out) and stayed until past 1:00 AM.
-As President Emmanuel Macron loses his sheen at home, a harmonious U.S. visit has been “regenerative.”
-Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy.
The Infowars broadcaster has been ordered by courts to pay about $1.5B in damages to Sandy Hook families hurt by his promotion of conspiracy theories.
-President Biden is happy the jobs engine is running hot, but Fed officials want to see more signs of slowing growth amid a campaign to tame inflation.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Shipping broker Braemar estimates Moscow, which relies heavily on foreign tankers to transport its crude, has added more than 100 ships this year, through direct or indirect purchases. Energy consultancy Rystad says Russia has added 103 tankers in 2022 through purchases and the reallocation of ships servicing Iran and Venezuela, two countries under western oil embargoes.
-UniCredit is seeking to boost the pay of chief executive Andrea Orcel after he told colleagues he wants a bigger reward for turning round the Italian bank. Milan-based UniCredit is trying to reconcile the expectations of shareholders and Orcel, a star investment banker whose pay demands have previously caused controversy.
-Wall Street is bracing for huge bonus cuts after a dismal year in which dealmaking has dried up and investment banking revenues dropped by half. Final decisions have not been made at most banks, but it is clear that last year’s bumper payouts will not be repeated. At that time, the big banks were flush with profits from record dealmaking and struggling to retain staff.
-At a revamped rail yard warehouse on the east side of Atlanta, former president Barack Obama delivered a jolt of his campaign flair in a bid to help Democrats win the final contest of the US midterm elections. Democrats performed far better than expected in congressional races across America last month, but one pivotal contest in Georgia remains in limbo, pitting incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock against Republican former American football star Herschel Walker, with a run-off election to be held on Tuesday after neither candidate topped 50% on November 8.
-Coinbase’s stock and bonds have been knocked by the collapse of FTX, which has sparked renewed concerns about the outlook for the US-listed cryptocurrency trading venue.
Over the past month, Coinbase’s bonds maturing in 2028 have tumbled by about a tenth in price, with investors demanding an elevated 14% yield to purchase the debt. The bonds are now priced at 59 cents on the dollar, a big discount compared with 93 cents at the start of 2022.
-US president Joe Biden’s offer to fix provisions in his flagship climate package to help US allies is a “breakthrough” that will help mollify European anger over potential damage to its own green technology companies, said French finance minister Bruno Le Maire.
-This week Hakeem Jeffries made history of his own when he was unanimously elected as House Democratic leader. He becomes the first black person to lead a political party in Congress and the successor to Nancy Pelosi. Speaking on Capitol Hill, Jeffries invoked the memory of his predecessor. “I stand on the shoulders of people like Shirley Chisholm and so many others as we work to advance the ball for everyday Americans,” he said. “Because that is what Democrats do.”
-Alex Jones, founder of the far-right US website InfoWars, has filed for bankruptcy after being ordered to pay almost $1.5B in damages to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. The families sued the media host for his repeated false claims that the 2012 Connecticut massacre, in which 20 children and six teachers were killed, was a hoax.
In his personal Chapter 11 filing in Houston, Jones estimated his assets to be worth between $1M and $10M and liabilities ranging from $1B to $10B, with 50 to 99 creditors to be paid.
NY POST
-Twitter “just freelanced” its baseless decision to censor The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop scoop in the run up to the 2020 election — with top-level workers at the social media giant agreeing that controversial decision was “f–ked,” damning insider communications released by CEO Elon Musk Friday reveal. The chaos at Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the October 2020 Hunter Biden story show that a small group of top-level execs decided to label the Post’s story as “hacked material” without any evidence — behind the back of then-CEO and founder Jack Dorsey. Musk tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi shortly after 6PM, who shed light on Twitter’s shady censorship decision by posting what appeared to be redacted emails between Twitter employees. The decision to censor The Post’s story was made “at the highest levels of the company,” according to Taibbi, but without Dorsey’s involvement.
-One of the high-level Twitter executives who reportedly played “a key role” in the company’s decision to censor The Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden’s laptop has a long history of being accused of suppressing conservative voices.
Twitter’s former top lawyer Vijaya Gadde was singled out in an explosive Twitter thread on Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who purportedly obtained communications between top officials at the social media company in the wake of The Post’s October 2020 story on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
-Republicans ripped into Twitter on Friday night for what they called the company’s “collusion” with members of the Biden administration over the social media giant’s shady decision to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden scoop.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, Sens. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley, and the House Republicans’ official Twitter account all called out the company after Elon Musk shared the so-called “Twitter Files” — detailing the platform’s faulty rationale to block the Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 expose.
“We’re learning in real-time how Twitter colluded to silence the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop just days before the 2020 presidential election,” tweeted McCarthy.
- FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried — an alum of the vaunted university — gave a bizarre explanation for an $8B budget shortfall that helped force the doomed cryptocurrency platform into bankruptcy last month — claiming he had simply “misaccounted” the cash.
Bankman-Fried scrambled to explain what happened at FTX during an interview with Bloomberg from his luxury penthouse in the Bahamas. During the interview, the broke crypto bro pulled out a spreadsheet detailing the bad math he used while approaching investors for a potential last-second bailout of FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research.
-The launch of New York’s legal cannabis industry is turning into a bad trip — even before the first official marijuana stores have opened for business, social justice critics claim.
A group advocating for the first licensed marijuana storefront sellers with prior weed convictions said Friday they’re being set up for failure. The Cannabis Social Equity Coalition said the first sellers will be required to buy cannabis products from NY hemp farmers of “questionable quality and safety,” are not being adequately trained for the market and will face a mountain of debt.
-More than 1,000 union employees at the New York Times have pledged to walk out if the news publisher does not agree to a complete and fair contract by Thursday, according to a tweet by the union on Friday. The NYT NewsGuild has sought wages that “keep up with inflation” as well as to preserve and enhance health insurance and retirement benefits that were promised during hiring, according to a letter signed by 1,036 members.