Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-No end in sight to war in Ukraine. Russia, Ukraine and the West face daunting challenges in moving forward, with no clear sense of what an attainable victory might look like.
-Protests and defiance mark a year of Russia’s war on Ukraine. On the anniversary of the invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed victory if Ukraine and its allies remained united “as one strong fist.”
-Biden reaffirms support for Ukraine amid concerns about Russia-Iran ties. The Biden administration announced new measures targeting Moscow and supporters of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war.
-Rare and dangerous: Southern California faces blizzard conditions. snow, high winds and intense rain hit parts of the state Friday. Blizzard warnings were in effect until Saturday afternoon in four counties.
-Nearly 600,000 still without power in Michigan after snowstorm. Customers in the Upper Midwest were in the dark on Friday evening after snow and ice hit the region this week, resulting in one death.
-Murdaugh hammered by prosecutor over where he was on night of killings. The intense cross-examination of Mr. Murdaugh, who is charged with killing his wife and son, came as he concluded his testimony in his own defense.
-12 States Sue FDA, Seeking Removal of Special Restrictions on Abortion Pill. The suit argues that rules applying to mifepristone unnecessarily limit patients’ access to medication abortion.
-Vice CEO’s departure signals fallen hopes for digital media. Nancy Dubuc is leaving the media company, which is exploring a sale of some or all of the business, after nearly five years there.
-In town where train derailed, lawyers are signing up clients in droves. Attorneys have poured into East Palestine, Ohio, filing more than a dozen lawsuits so far on behalf of residents.
-Canada saw a deadly derailment. A decade later, little has changed. In 2013, a train loaded with oil jumped the tracks in Quebec, killing 47 people. But despite repeated calls for an inquiry, none was ever convened.
-Doctor describes and denounces CIA practice of ‘rectal feeding’ of prisoners. In a hearing at Guantánamo Bay, an expert gave a graphic public depiction of torture after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
-Cambodia investigates after father and daughter infected with bird flu. Two family members were infected with H5N1; the daughter died. Eleven contacts, some with symptoms, have tested negative, according to the WHO.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-US President Joe Biden has said he did not think China would send weapons to Russia to help its military campaign in Ukraine, in comments that appeared to undercut claims from his top officials that Beijing was considering the idea.
-Stephen Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone Group, received record income of nearly $1.3B in 2022, as assets under management and profits rose at the world’s largest private equity firm.
-Shell, ExxonMobil and the Dutch government earned €429B from exploiting the Groningen gasfield, but left thousands of residents with cracked homes and health issues, a parliamentary investigation has found.
The geological destabilization caused by drilling at Groningen, Europe’s largest natural gas reserve, resulted in 1,594 earthquakes and damaged more than 85,000 buildings, a Dutch parliamentary report concluded on Friday.
-Trafigura failed to require analysis certificates, ignored incorrect customs codes and missed other “red flags” that alarmed its bankers on nickel shipments it later discovered to be fraudulent, according to court documents obtained by the Financial Times on Friday.
-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is already in a precarious position: the Conservatives trail the Labour opposition by about 20 points in the polls, his party is fractious, his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, are agitating in the wings, and a general election must be called by the end of next year.
-When the US drugs company Abbott Laboratories acquired a small division of the German chemicals group BASF for $6.9B 23 years ago, its shares fell on fears that it had overpaid. But the deal was an amazing bargain. Humira, the promising medicine that came with it, is now the industry’s biggest blockbuster, with cumulative revenues of more than $200B. The anti-inflammatory drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and a range of other autoimmune conditions, is very expensive, costing more than $80,000 a year per patient in the US.
-Nigerians will on Saturday go to the polls to elect their next president, marking the end of a draining election campaign notable for the emergence of a credible alternative to the country’s two dominant political parties. The main candidates have spent five months crisscrossing Africa’s largest democracy as voters prepare to elect a replacement for President Muhammadu Buhari, who is standing down after eight years in power.
-Penguin Random House has announced that it will publish the original versions of Roald Dahl’s books alongside updated editions following an outcry over changes to the celebrated stories that were branded “absurd censorship”. Puffin, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was accused of censoring the classic children’s books after its “Roald Dahl books for young readers” edition was edited to rewrite or remove language deemed offensive, such as descriptions of obesity.
-Bosses at Europe’s largest companies received “surprisingly high” bonus levels for meeting goals to cut carbon emissions in 2022, easily achieving their targets despite inadequate progress on global warming, the latest executive pay expert report finds.
More than three-quarters of Europe’s 50 largest companies now include some form of carbon target in their executive pay packages, a new report from PwC and the London Business School said.
-The US will make “no apologies” for prioritizing American jobs in its push to lead the global clean energy contest, the White House official responsible for the $369B green funding drive has said. In an interview with the Financial Times, John Podesta, Joe Biden’s senior clean energy adviser, pushed back at criticism that the US Inflation Reduction Act would divert investment and undermine the EU economy. He argued allies who have hit out at the IRA should “welcome US leadership”.
NY POST
-As he prepared to board Marine One for a weekend getaway to Delaware on Friday, President Biden told reporters that he has no plans to visit East Palestine, Ohio — and that he hasn’t been invited amid rancor over the administration’s handling of the toxic train derailment. “At this moment, no,” Biden, 80, responded outside the White House when asked if he had any plans to visit the town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, where dangerous chemicals spilled onto the ground and toxic smoke billowed into the air after a Norfolk Southern train derailed on Feb. 3.
The toxic spill and ensuing fire forced the evacuation of roughly 5,000 panicked residents. Tens of thousands of animals in the area have also reportedly died in the weeks after the derailment, troubling residents.
-Meta Platforms said Friday it was releasing a new large language model based on artificial intelligence aimed at the research community, becoming the latest company to join the AI race.
The battle to dominate the AI technology space, which until recently existed in the background, kicked off late last year with the launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and prompted tech heavyweights from Alphabet to China’s Baidu to create their own offerings.