Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Ukraine’s president complained about “acute and burning” warnings from the Biden administration, saying it was needlessly spreading alarm.
The tensions came even as a new Pentagon assessment said Russia was now positioned to go beyond a limited incursion and invade all of Ukraine.
-The French President Emmanuel Macron is determined to engage with Russia, wants to shape a new European security order from crisis — and win the April election.
-Russian troops mass in Belarus, where the Ukraine Border is largely undefended. From the border, it’s a fast 140 miles down a newly paved highway to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but only a few troops stand guard.
-Getting more young, school-age children vaccinated is crucial for ending the pandemic, public health officials say. Many are focusing on that group.
-The battles of the recent past will no doubt extend into the battle over President Biden’s choice to replace Justice Stephen Breyer.
-President Biden believed pressuring the court’s oldest justice to retire might backfire. A chorus of liberals took a different approach.
-The beliefs underpinning last year’s meme stock phenomenon have given rise to a movement of investors who believe they can use the markets to fight for financial change.
-The Islamic State may no longer be able to control territory, but it has shown in Syria and Iraq that it can still pull off opportunistic military operations.
-The Jan. 6 Committee has subpoenaed fake Trump electors.
The panel demanded information from 14 people who were part of bogus slates of electors for President Donald J. Trump, digging deeper into an aspect of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Ukraine has played down Pentagon warnings that Russia has amassed sufficient military assets along the Ukrainian border to launch an invasion, with the deputy defense minister branding reports that blood supplies had been moved close to the border “psychological warfare.”
-Kyiv, jokes one of its residents, is the eye of the hurricane, the calm spot at the center of the storm. Life in Ukraine’s capital carries on as normal. But fears of impending chaos and destruction are closing in.
-Italian lawmakers appear poised to re-elect the incumbent president Sergio Mattarella as head of state, ending a week-long stalemate over the selection and ensuring the survival of Mario Draghi’s government.
The push to reinstall Mattarella for a second-seven-year term comes as Draghi’s fragile national unity government is in growing danger of collapsing, amid escalating tension over the presidential election process.
-Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the national statistical institute after reports of tension between them over the country’s inflation data.
-Oaktree Capital has seized one of Evergrande’s most-prized assets in mainland China, a rare intrusion by a global investor in a domestic crisis caused by the biggest ever collapse of a property developer.
-After the World Health Organization’s regional chief for Europe expressed hope last weekend that the continent could be moving to a “pandemic endgame”, his WHO superiors moved quickly to play down such optimism.
Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus clarified Hans Kluge’s remarks the following day by insisting it was “dangerous to assume?.?.?. we’re in the endgame” of coronavirus while WHO Europe stressed that the “pandemic is not over yet”.
-Prices of meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, cannabis companies and blank-cheque vehicles known as Spacs have all tumbled as the air hisses out of the assets that encapsulated that furious rally, leaving no doubt that the game in markets has changed.
-Prices of meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, cannabis companies and blank-cheque vehicles known as Spacs have all tumbled as the air hisses out of the assets that encapsulated that furious rally, leaving no doubt that the game in markets has changed.
-Joni Mitchell said she would remove her music from Spotify, supporting Neil Young’s revolt against the company over podcaster Joe Rogan, who they accuse of spreading “lies” about Covid vaccines.
-The Chinese ambassador to Washington has warned that the US and China could end up at war over Taiwan, in stark comments illustrating the rising tensions between the powers over the fate of the island.
-Argentina has secured an outline deal with the IMF tamzno restructure $44.5bn of debt from a record 2018 bailout, President Alberto Fernandez said on Friday, removing the threat of an imminent clash with the lender as Buenos Aires tries to bolster its floundering economy.
-Container shipping lines are set for another bumper year of earnings as supply chain snarls show little sign of subsiding, to the misery of just about everyone else. Operationally the shipping crisis has been a disaster for the box carriers that underpin global trade: schedule reliability hit a record low of 32% in December, with vessels arriving over a week later than planned on average, according to Sea-Intelligence, a consultancy.
-Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border, SocGen was one of the banks put on notice earlier this month by the European Central Bank. The Financial Times revealed this week that the ECB had warned lenders with Russian exposure to prepare themselves for the imposition of international sanctions against the country in the event Ukraine is invaded. Along with SocGen, Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank and UniCredit of Italy are among the European banks with the most substantial operations. The trio together account for 3.7% of assets in the Russian banking system, according to JPMorgan.
-Ketanji Brown Jackson is among the frontrunners to become the newest justice on America’s highest court, after the retirement of Stephen Breyer later this year. If nominated and confirmed, Jackson, a federal appeals court judge in the District of Columbia, would be the first black woman to sit on the most powerful bench in the country, after President Joe Biden vowed to make such an appointment.
THE NEW YORK POST
-Table bookings in Manhattan restaurants are down 64% in January 2022 compared to pre-pandemic January 2020 – only San Francisco (-66%) and Cambridge, Mass. (-75%) have fared worse, according to new data released by OpenTable and crunched by celebrity statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.
-Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer David Solomon will get a 27% raise in annual pay, bringing his total compensation for 2021 to $35 million, the bank said on Friday. The news on the Goldman chief’s pay comes after competitor James Gorman, CEO at Morgan Stanley, also raked in the same amount — $35 million — for 2021, Morgan Stanley reported late last week.
-The manager of New York’s $270 billion pension fund is warning Amazon not to interfere in an upcoming union election at an Alabama facility, The Post has learned.
New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who manages the state’s pension fund — which holds more than $3 billion in Amazon shares— fired off a letter to the company this week amid reports that the online seller had been interfering with labor-organizing activities.