Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-President Biden Meets With German Chancellor Amid Concerns Over Ukraine and China. President Biden said he and Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, would work in “lock step” to provide military support to Ukraine.
-As Ukraine Clings to Bakhmut, What’s Its Strategy and What’s at Stake? Ukraine is determined to hold the eastern city for as long as it can. What might force its withdrawal? And what would a retreat look like — and mean?
-The US attorney general meets with Zelensky during a surprise visit to Ukraine. The major topic of talks was how to hold Russia accountable for any war crimes committed over the past year.
-In Southern California, Snow Has Trapped People for Days. A week of intense snowfall in the San Bernardino Mountains has left residents and tourists trapped in cabins, rationing food and pleading for help.
-Stranded in California’s Heavy Snow. Back-to-back storms left many people stuck as snow piled high. More is still in the forecast.
-Condemning Murdaugh’s ‘Lies,’ Judge Sentences Him to Life in Prison. The sentence was the maximum that the judge could hand down for the murders of Alex Murdaugh’s wife and son, since the death penalty was not sought.
-Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has maintained his political organization and is open about his ambitions. For now, he says, they don’t include the White House.
-Lawmakers Clamor for Action on Child Migrant Labor as Outrage Grows. Federal and state enforcement agencies began a crackdown on companies that employ underage migrants following a Times investigation on migrant child labor.
-In Chernobyl’s Stray Dogs, Scientists Look for Genetic Effects of Radiation. A new study is the first step in an effort to understand how exposure to chronic, low-level radiation has affected the area’s dogs.
-Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News. Even in today’s highly partisan media world, experts said, the lack of coverage about the private comments of Fox’s top executives and hosts stands out.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Amazon has paused construction on its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, in the latest cost-cutting effort at the ecommerce and cloud giant. Amazon has about 8,000 employees based at the site in Arlington, working in an already-completed phase 1 of the new campus called Met Park. Construction on a second phase, known as PenPlace, had been due to begin this year. That site comprises three office buildings and the “Helix”, a 350-ft corkscrew-shaped tower that was due to be the architectural centerpiece of the new office hub — its largest outside Amazon’s home city of Seattle.
-Volkswagen said on Friday that it would open an assembly plant in Columbia, South Carolina, to produce electric models for its revived Scout brand. It is also searching for a site for a new battery factory in North America, which offered “huge potential” for the company, VW’s finance chief Arno Antlitz said on Friday. “We are strong in Europe and China and want to keep that strength?.?.?.?but it is really important to increase that third pillar in the US.”
The company’s $2B investment in the South Carolina plant will create about 4,000 jobs in the area.
-Lacking official backing and unlikely to be adopted, the ideas Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (which begins today) are a relatively freewheeling part of the meetings in Beijing, which start on Saturday with the opening of the nation’s top advisory body. While the CPPCC is largely a talkfest, markets will pay close heed to the accompanying National People’s Congress, which starts on Sunday and rubber stamps Communist party decisions. The government will release a “work report” that will set an economic growth target for the year — expected by analysts to be 5% or more — and will detail the civil and military budgets.
-Ukraine has appealed to the EU to send Kiev 250,000 artillery shells a month to ease a critical shortage that it warns is limiting its progress on the battlefield. In a letter to his counterparts in the 27 member states on Friday, obtained by the Financial Times, Ukraine’s defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov writes that his country’s forces are only firing a fifth of the rounds they could because of lack of supplies.
-For the past six weeks an otherworldly land of swamps and wild hogs in Hampton County, South Carolina has horrified, fascinated and utterly gripped much of the US. Hampton is home to the Murdaugh family, a feudal dynasty that has somehow existed beneath the bustle of modern American life. On Thursday, a jury found Alex Murdaugh, 54, a prominent local attorney, guilty of the 2021 murder of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, after a six week trial that, as national spectacle, has approached OJ Simpson levels of hysteria.
-Germany and Italy have blown apart an EU plan to ban internal combustion engines by 2035, as the European car industry’s heartlands mount a fightback against ambitious carbon goals. The two countries, the homes of Volkswagen, Fiat and Ferrari, are demanding exemptions for cars that run on synthetic fuels, potentially cushioning the blow for established industries. Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini described the delay as “a great signal” that rewarded efforts by his League party. “The voice of millions of Italians has been heard,” he wrote on Twitter.
-ByteDance, are again at the center of a gathering geopolitical storm as governments in North America and Europe launch fresh restrictions and consider outright prohibitions on its use over fears it could be used to gather data on behalf of the Chinese state. In the US, national security concerns have been simmering since ByteDance paid $1B for the popular app Musical.ly in 2017, merging it with its TikTok platform to cater to its youthful American user base.
-Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has led an investment of more than $200M into generative artificial intelligence chatbot company Character.ai, marking the early internet pioneer’s first significant foray into the booming sector.
-A Saudi prince whose palatial London residence is on the market for £250M after it was repossessed is being sued by a second lender over alleged missed payments on a private Boeing 787 jet. An Irish subsidiary of China Minsheng Bank is claiming at least £30mn in unpaid bills and interest on the business jet leased by a Bermuda-based company in 2017 under a personal guarantee from Prince Khaled bin Sultan Al Saud. The lender is seeking to enforce the judgment against The Holme, a Regent’s Park mansion, arguing the prince is among its true beneficial owners.
-The Pentagon denied a request from the Air Force in Alaska to shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon last month before it flew across North America, according to the state’s Republican senator.
-US companies are starting to cut their reliance on Chinese supply chains and seek out alternative shipping routes in Asia as relations between the two superpowers deteriorate, according to the head of one of the world’s biggest container companies.
-The boss of Harrods said he was confident that the luxury department store would prosper in an economic downturn because “the rich get richer in a recession”. Managing director Michael Ward, who described the retailer as a “shop window to the world”, said the business was now “trading ahead of 2019 [levels]” after it was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic and a lack of tourists in London during lockdowns.
-Republicans have stepped up their attacks on Democrats and the White House over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, after a new assessment by the energy department and comments from the FBI bolstered the theory that Covid-19 sprung from a Chinese laboratory.
-Shell’s stock rallied 37% last year as it made a record $40B in profits from the turmoil in energy markets unleashed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But Exxon and Chevron have risen even further, widening an already yawning valuation gap between Shell and its US rivals that Sawan wants to close.
-Dozens of kidnapped police officers and oil workers in Colombia have been released after they were taken hostage by protesters who raided an oilfield demanding better road infrastructure, the government has said. The announcement of the release was made by President Gustavo Petro on Friday evening.
-Washington has put 28 Chinese groups on a trade blacklist for allegedly breaching US sanctions by sending technology for nuclear and missile programs to third countries or procuring banned products for China’s military. The commerce department placed the groups on its “entity list”, which in effect prohibits US companies from supplying them with technology produced in America. Some of the companies were blacklisted for providing technology to an Iranian entity previously targeted by US sanctions.
-The London Metal Exchange faces the prospect of hefty fines and censure after the UK’s top financial regulator launched an enforcement investigation into the company over the decision to freeze nickel trading during last year’s market mayhem.
NY POST
-Texas’ woke capital, Austin, is in the midst of a policing crisis with over 300 vacancies and cops quitting because they feel disrespected, multiple sources tell The Post. “We’re right there with Portland and Seattle and San Francisco as being one of those places where if you’re at all conservative or in law enforcement, it’s become a hostile place,” Lt. Brian Moon, who retired last month, told The Post of the city he protected for 23 years.
- Former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley was heckled by supporters of Donald Trump Friday after the 2024 presidential hopeful delivered a speech at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference. “We love Trump, we love Trump!” a crowd started chanting as Haley wandered the halls of the National Harbor, Md., hotel hosting the annual gathering of conservatives after her speech.
-Russian oil and gas revenues, the mainstay of state coffers, rose 22.5% in February, but were still down 46.4% from February 2022, Finance Ministry data showed on Friday. Tax and customs revenue from oil and gas sales had fallen in January to its lowest level since August 2020.
- Critics of CNBC anchor Jim Cramer’s stock analysis now have a way to attempt to monetize their skepticism.
Cramer has emerged as a polarizing figure during his lengthy career at CNBC — with detractors often gleefully pointing out instances in which his predictions about specific stocks or the overall economy backfire. A pair of exchange traded funds linked to Cramer’s stock pics launched Thursday via Matthew Tuttle, the CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, Bloomberg reported.