Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-A list of files taken from former President Trump’s Florida home includes materials marked as top secret and meant to be viewed only in government facilities.
Agents who executed the warrant did so to investigate potential crimes associated with violations of the Espionage Act and an obstruction law.
-Former President Trump claimed he declassified all the documents at Mar-a-Lago. Even if true, it may not matter.
Three criminal statutes show the inquiry goes beyond classified information.
-The House of Representatives has passed a sweeping Climate, Tax and Health Care Package. The passage of the bill, which appeared dead just weeks ago, caps a Democratic effort to deliver on major components of President Biden’s agenda. It was a victory for Biden, and a bet on America’s future.
-President Biden is poised to deliver the latest in a series of legislative victories that will ripple across the country for decades.
-Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator after being stabbed in western New York. The novelist, who has faced death threats since 1989, was attacked in Chautauqua as he prepared to talk on the US as a haven for exiled writers.
-The Southern Baptist Convention says it faces federal investigation for sexual abuse. Church leaders disclosed that multiple Southern Baptist entities were under investigation and said that all would cooperate.
-The Russian economy contracts sharply as war and sanctions take hold. The country’s gross domestic product from April through June declined 4 percent from a year earlier, new government data shows.
-The shelling of Ukraine nuclear plant raises fears and outrage. President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of “nuclear blackmail” as the two sides traded blame.
-Positive economic signs have sent the S&P 500 higher for four consecutive weeks, but some investors worry about how long the rally can last.
-The detection of the polio virus in NY City’s sewage suggests it is circulating there, New York’s health authorities said.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Donald Trump is under investigation for potentially mishandling information related to US national defence in violation of the Espionage Act, along with other possible violations related to the handling of government documents, according to the FBI’s warrant to search the former president’s home.
-After navigating through the mines in and around the Ukrainian Black Sea ports, the Razoni cargo ship never arrived at its originally stated destination, Tripoli in Lebanon. The shipment’s buyer rejected the 26,500 tonne corn cargo on quality grounds and the vessel remained stranded until new buyers were found and 1,500 tonnes of the grain were unloaded in Turkey.
-Spain has said an additional link in a gas pipeline from the Iberian peninsula to France could be ready within nine months after Germany backed the idea of linking the region to central Europe to improve the continent’s energy security.
-Salman Rushdie, the author who has lived under a death threat from Iran for several decades, was stabbed on stage during a literary event in the US on Friday morning. The Booker Prize-winning author was still in surgery on Friday afternoon, police said.
“The news is not good. Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” Rushdie’s agent Andrew Wylie said in a statement to Reuters on Friday evening. Rushdie, 75, was still on a ventilator, he said.
-Russia has said it will not yet allow international inspectors to access Europe’s largest nuclear power plant despite fears over the state of the Ukrainian facility under Moscow’s occupation. Moscow and Kyiv have traded accusations of targeting the Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine, which has been under Russian control since March following Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
-Five Chinese state-owned companies have announced plans to delist voluntarily from Wall Street before the US forces them out in 2024 over an audit dispute, marking an escalation in the financial decoupling of the world’s two largest economies.
-Swedish manufacturer Volvo AB surprised investors this week by borrowing €500M — a rare deal in Europe’s parched corporate bond markets that are pin-drop quiet even by summertime standards.
-Colombia’s first leftist government in modern history has targeted the country’s wealthiest residents and its commodities exports in a tax proposal that represents a significant shift for the traditionally conservative nation.
The proposed tax overhaul “should not be viewed as a punishment or a sacrifice”, Gustavo Petro, the country’s new president, said during his inauguration speech on Sunday, a day before sending the bill to Congress. “It is simply a solidarity payment that someone fortunate makes to a society that has enabled them to generate wealth.”
-In the year to July 2021, more Americans moved to Florida than any other state — 220,890 of them, according to census data. The influx included billionaires and hedge funds unmoored from their Wall Street offices who flocked to South Florida for its low taxes and year-round sunshine.
NY POST
-Reporting on the documents taken from former President Donald Trump’s property — as well as the release of the search warrant by the judge who approved it — has filled in some more outlines of the story, although there is too much we still don’t know. The quagmire underlines what seems, at the very least, the unbelievable imprudence of the search. If an FBI action is going to be so inflammatory that the attorney general of the United States can’t maintain a judicious silence about the matter more than a couple of days before publicly jousting with the target, it’s a pretty good indication it shouldn’t have been taken to begin with.
-Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has reportedly finalized rules that prevent health care providers from billing the state’s Medicaid program for gender-affirming medical treatments. The agency reportedly added new language to Medicaid program rules stating that it would not cover services for the treatment of gender dysphoria, including sex reassignment surgery, puberty blockers or hormone therapies. This action comes after the state’s AHCA announced in June that it had determined those services were “not consistent with generally accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long-term effects.”
-Pharmacists are in such high demand that Walgreens is offering a hefty signing bonus of up to $75,000. Due to pandemic-related staffing challenges, the signing bonus can reportedly be up to $75,000 in certain markets across the US – usually their range is half that amount.