Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-A fire erupted on the sole bridge linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland, and part of the 12-mile crossing collapsed into the sea.
President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and the bridge is a vital supply route for Russian troops.
-A distracted Russia is losing its grip on its old Soviet sphere. Russia’s domination of Central Asia and the Caucasus region is unraveling as the Kremlin focuses on the war in Ukraine — and border violence is flaring.
-On Vladimir V. Putin’s 70th birthday, his faltering military continued to show that it could use its advantage in long-range munitions to rain death and destruction far from the battlefield.
-Hurricane Ian has been linked to the deaths of at least 119 people after it hit Florida. More than half of the victims were at least 60, and dozens died by drowning.
-Herschel Walker urged woman to have a 2nd abortion, she says. The Georgia Senate candidate’s ex-girlfriend said he wanted her to terminate a pregnancy in 2011. She chose to have their son instead.
-Ron Johnson and Mandela Barnes clash in Wisconsin senate debate. Mr. Johnson, one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Republicans, faced Mr. Barnes, the lieutenant governor, in the first of two scheduled debates.
-US job growth eases, but is too strong to suit investors. The gain of 263,000 was shy of recent monthly totals but still robust. Stocks fell on fears of a harder, longer Fed campaign to fight inflation.
-The Supreme Court’s latest portrait was released on Friday. For more than 150 years, the class photos told a story. Here’s how to see it.
-The new limits on the sale of semiconductors to China aim to cripple Beijing’s access to technologies needed for supercomputing and guiding weapons.
-Columbia University to pay $165M to victims of former doctor Robert A. Hadden, a gynecologist, pleaded guilty in 2016 to abusing 19 women, but got no prison time. He is currently facing federal charges.
-Covid defies china’s lockdowns, creating chaos ahead of top meeting.
Tourists are stranded, residents confined at home. Covid flare-ups and the accompanying lockdowns are causing disruptions ahead of a key Chinese Communist Party meeting.
-Judges in Ohio and Arizona temporarily block states’ abortion bans. The decisions offered a window into which legal arguments might be working in the broader strategy to re-establish abortion rights through state courts.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Ukrainian troops have reported outages of their Starlink communication devices on the frontline, hindering efforts to liberate territory from Russian forces, according to its officials and soldiers.
-US president Joe Biden warned the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” was at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and said he was trying to decipher Vladimir Putin’s “off-ramp” to avoid further escalation.
-A decade-long party for homeowners is coming to an end. The cost of servicing mortgages in the UK, Europe and the US has spiraled at the same time as disposable incomes have been squeezed, and predictions of a downturn or even a house price crash are now common.
-High petrol prices have continued to serve as the Republicans’ main weapon on the campaign trail despite an overall decline in recent months. But the Federal Reserve’s steep interest rate increases this year have given them additional ammunition by triggering a swift rise in mortgage rates to levels not seen since the 2008 housing-led financial crisis.
-As Russian troops continued their retreat in southeastern Ukraine, the Kremlin-appointed “governor” of the Russian-occupied Kherson region made a suggestion to Russia’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu. “A lot of people are saying that a defense minister who let things get to this state could shoot himself, like an officer,” Kirill Stremousov said on Thursday.
-The robust pace of US jobs growth cooled in September but the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped, firming expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates by another 0.75 percentage points at its next meeting in November.
-The $500M-plus sale of Pink Floyd’s music catalogue has hit a wall, with the auction delayed by months of arguing between band members over tax, assets, and bassist Roger Waters’ claims that he is on an assassination hit list in Ukraine.
-On Wednesday, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Saudi Arabia and its oil allies — which now include Russia in the OPEC+ group — moved to upend the world’s energy order again. Their decision to slash 2M barrels a day from production targets, or 2% of global supply, might sound modest. But doing so while Brent crude was trading at a lofty $90/bbl — almost twice its long-term historical price — is a threat to a global economy stalked by inflation and mounting consumer anxiety about energy prices and shortages.
-In corporate boardrooms as well as defense ministries, concern is growing that mutually assured economic destruction may not keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait. Multinational businesses have invested many billions of dollars in both Taiwan and China on the assumption that war is simply too costly. Even corporate leaders who see the risk of war as remote can’t ignore more immediate policy changes driven by the US-China microchip war. The US continues to tighten its chip choke, rolling out new restrictions limiting China’s access to chip-making software and equipment.
-The US has warned that Hong Kong risked becoming a haven for Russian oligarchs after the Chinese territory said it would not enforce western sanctions on a superyacht owned by billionaire Alexei Mordashov that has docked in the city’s waters. The US state department also said Hong Kong’s business outlook could be further clouded by its government’s inaction as the former British colony’s “reputation as a financial center depends on adherence to international laws and standards”.
-Carmakers Renault and Nissan are embarking on talks to break a deadlock over intellectual property, which could potentially pave the way for a historic reshaping of their alliance within weeks. Renault chief executive Luca de Meo has jetted into Tokyo for a weekend of talks with Nissan boss Makoto Uchida in a move that will kick off a month of negotiations including examining the possibility of Renault reducing its stake in Nissan from 43% to 15%, said people familiar with the matter.
-Catalonia’s governing coalition shattered on Friday night as disagreement over how hard to push for independence prompted one member of the alliance to quit in disgust.
-In early September, Mark Zuckerberg rushed to a Meta lab in Pittsburgh, sat before more than 100 high-resolution cameras and prepared to prove his metaverse critics wrong. The photo shoot was designed to generate a more realistic avatar in the Meta chief executive’s likeness, as the social media giant scrambled to demonstrate that its $10B a year bet on a futuristic 3D digital world known as the metaverse was not a flop.
-Handling the irrepressible and mercurial Elon Musk is not something any adversary would sign up for. That Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO, faced down the world’s richest man and this week appeared to be on the brink of victory is likely to be the highlight of his stint at the top. But the low-key engineer who has suffered the indignity of Musk’s public insults is now facing likely ejection from his post — albeit with a $60.1m golden parachute strapped to his back.
NY POST
-It had been months since Mayor Adams first sounded the alarm about an influx of migrants coming from the southern border and pushing our city’s homeless shelter system to its breaking point. Yet since then, while his administration has scrambled to house, feed, and care for these thousands of new arrivals and place their children in our schools, not one leading Democrat in this state or this country has offered New Yorkers anything but lip service. Nothing. Not even an acknowledgment that a crisis actually exists. Until Friday, when Mayor Adams finally said the words: state of emergency.
-CNBC’s Jim Cramer unloaded on Elon Musk on Thursday, arguing the billionaire had no choice but to reverse course and buy Twitter after miscalculating his ability to back out of the deal. Musk proposed buying Twitter this week at the original price of $44B, or $54.20/share. The Tesla CEO’s proposal came just days before Musk and Twitter were set to face off in Delaware Chancery Court – with many legal experts predicting he was likely to lose the case.