Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-The Jan. 6 panel after 8 hearings: where will the evidence lead?
The House committee has set out a comprehensive narrative of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. But it’s unclear if that will be enough to achieve its legal and political goals.
-Steve Bannon found guilty of contempt in case related to capitol riot inquiry. He is the first close aide to former President Donald J. Trump to be convicted as a result of one of the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack.
-Russia agrees to let Ukraine export grain, easing world food shortage.
Ukraine and Russia signed a deal to lift Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports, which has worsened a global food crisis — their most important agreement since the war began.
-The NBA has kept a low profile in public campaign to free Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who has been detained in Russia since February. The NBA which founded the women’s league in 1996, has said it is working behind the scenes to help Griner.
-President Biden’s new economic scorecard is the price at the pump.
President Biden has grown fond of boasting about a streak of falling gas prices, a move wrapped in risk and irony, our correspondent writes in an analysis.
-The pandemic isn’t over, but most U.S. states have formally said that it’s no longer a health emergency. Get Covid news.
- GOP assails NY bail laws after the suspect in Zeldin attack is released
the suspect was released without bail hours after the attack against Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor.
-Health officials in Rockland County offered polio vaccinations and urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread.
-Some Republican-led counties are refusing to certify election results — a move that could throw American democracy into chaos if it becomes widespread.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Volkswagen’s chief executive Herbert Diess, the architect of the German carmaker’s multibillion-euro push into electric vehicles, will leave the company within weeks after being forced out by union leaders and shareholders. The 63-year-old, who took over in the years following the VW emissions scandal, will be replaced by Porsche chief executive and former VW manager Oliver Blume from the start of September. His departure follows a vote by VW’s supervisory board, which is controlled by a loose alliance of workers’ representatives and the state of Lower Saxony, the company’s second-largest shareholder.
-The Spanish government has said that the EU’s proposal for blanket targets to cut gas use ahead of a winter supply crunch is “not efficient, fair or equitable” as bickering between member states over the plan increases. Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, minister for ecological transition, complained that Brussels’s plan to ask countries to cut gas demand by 15% starting next month and over the winter was not discussed with member states before its announcement on Wednesday.
-Since January 6 2021, Liz Cheney has been focused on a single goal: making sure Donald Trump never again occupies the Oval Office. On Thursday she came a step closer to achieving that ambition as she wrapped up the last in a series of live hearings investigating last year’s attack on the US Congress and whether the former president played a role in stoking it.
-US Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell has expressed deep admiration for Paul Volcker, his legendary predecessor who defeated the high inflation that plagued the US economy from 1965 to 1982. Then, as now, Volcker was fighting more than a decade of loose monetary policy, combined with supply shocks stemming from geopolitical turmoil. But though he extols the man, Powell is deviating from Volcker’s methods. This is perhaps why inflation continues to accelerate, now topping 9% in the US and spreading rapidly throughout the world.
-Kyiv and Moscow have struck a deal aimed at averting a global food crisis, agreeing a “de facto ceasefire” on cargo ships that will collect millions of tonnes of stranded grain from Ukrainian ports. At a signing ceremony on Friday in Istanbul, UN secretary-general António Guterres hailed it as a “beacon of hope on the Black Sea”.
-This April, after a five-year absence in which he flirted with a run for the US presidency, Schultz returned to the company he built into the world’s largest coffee chain, taking his third turn as its chief executive.
“Love and responsibility brought me back to Starbucks,” he told analysts in May. At the same time he warned that major changes in customer behaviour during the coronavirus pandemic had put the business under “significant pressure”.
NY POST
-Google has fired a senior software engineer who claimed that the company had developed a “sentient” artificial intelligence bot, the company announced Friday. Blake Lemoine, who works in Google’s Responsible AI organization, was placed on administrative leave last month after he said the AI chatbot known as LaMDA claims to have a soul and expressed human thoughts and emotions, which Google refuted as “wholly unfounded.”
-The accusations against Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin’s alleged attacker are grave enough for a more serious charge that could have gotten him held on bail, said legal experts. Troubled Army veteran David Jakubonis was charged with attempted second-degree assault, which led him to be automatically sprung from custody under New York’s controversial bail-reform law. But former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Bederow said the details in the felony complaint against Jakubonis — who’s accused of swinging “a set of self-defense knuckles which had two sharp pointed ends” at Zeldin’s throat after threatening, “You’re done” — make a case for attempted first-degree assault, which is eligible for bail.
-Jay Carney, the Amazon executive who vastly expanded its lobbying and public affairs operation after a stint as White House press secretary, is joining Airbnb as policy and communications head, the home rental startup said on Friday. Carney, who worked at Amazon for seven years as Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs, will start at Airbnb in September and report to co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky.