TheChek News Flow

* NYT (Saturday): Investigators at the Ethiopian Airlines crash site have found new evidence that points to another connection to the earlier Lion Air disaster involving the same BA Max 8 jet—namely the fact that stabilizers were tilted upward, pushing the nose down; As FDA head Scott Gottlieb prepares to depart at the end of the month, a host of lobbyists from the tobacco and retail industries are swooping in, trying to make the case to Congress and the White House that sales of e-cigarettes shouldn’t be restricted to only adults; North Korea threatened to suspend negotiations with the Trump administration over the North’s nuclear arms program and said leader Kim Jong-un would soon decide whether to resume nuclear and missile tests; Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska sued the U.S. government, demanding it lift sanctions that he claimed have cost him billions of dollars, made him “radioactive” in international business circles, and exposed him to criminal investigation and asset confiscation in Russia; Trump issued his first veto, rejecting legislation to overturn his declaration of a national emergency to fund a wall along the southwestern border despite the bill’s significant Republican support in Congress, a rare departure from partisan solidarity; China’s premier Li Keqiang delivered the clearest acknowledgment yet from a top Chinese official that the country’s economy is slowing and faces a series of difficulties; (Sunday): Following a massacre that left 50 people dead at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the country’s government is looking at a range of legislative checks on guns, from buybacks to restrictions on magazines for semiautomatic rifles; Recycling, long a reflexive effort in the U.S. to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country, mainly because China, Thailand, India, and other countries have stopped buying recycled materials, or imposed new restrictions on what allow in; +/- BA: One area of focus following the Ethiopian Airlines crash involving a Boeing 737 Max jet is whether the training procedures on the plane, greenlighted by the FAA, left pilots unprepared to deal with software that was part of newer models; Sunday Business: Contracts with so-called restrictive covenants are now common in medicine, though some states limit their use, but what may be good for business can be bad for patient care—and certainly disquieting for those whose doctors seem to simply disappear.

* WSJ (Weekend): Front page story reports the SEC charged Volkswagen and its former chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, with defrauding U.S. investors in connection with the emissions-cheating scandal that the auto maker is trying to put in the rear view mirror; +/- FB, GOOGL, TWTR: Scenes of the mosque massacre in New Zealand were streamed live on Facebook and posted on YouTube and Twitter, a gruesome example of how social-media platforms can be used to spread terror, and though the companies scrambled to remove the video, it continued to reappear; A new study led by researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine found a link between higher consumption of dietary cholesterol and a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and death; U.S. manufacturing output declined for the second consecutive month in February, a fresh sign that a long-predicted slowdown is hitting the U.S. economy, with output at U.S. factories down 0.4% in February after dropping 0.5% in January; Lawmakers in Washington are considering policies that could curtail the influence of wealth in college admissions following the admissions bribery scheme revealed this week in a federal indictment; The Pentagon failed to deliver on a promise by acting defense secretary Pat Shanahan to provide senators with a list of military construction projects that stand to be affected by Donald Trump’s emergency declaration, angering lawmakers; +/- AMZN: Officials in Northern Virginia’s Arlington County are expected to approve the last part of a $2.5B deal for the retailer’s second headquarters, but critics of the subsidies plan to seek a delay at a public meeting, potentially creating a hurdle for the proposal; Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, said that China’s government doesn’t ask companies to spy on its behalf and pledged not to do so in the future, part of an effort to respond to the U.S.’s spying allegations against telecom giant Huawei; +/- BA: Company is wrangling with air-safety regulators over how much pilot training will be required in conjunction with a software fix for a flight-control feature at the center of the global grounding of the company’s 737 MAX jets; Friday marked a quarterly collision that traders call “quad witching,” when equity and index futures and options expire—in this case just as dozens of S&P indexes were scheduled to rebalance their holdings at the end of the day; + AMZM: E-commerce giant tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, a sign of its growing aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products, including its own house brands; Chinese investment in U.S. startups has remained resilient in recent months despite new legislation that some thought could severely hamper deal flow, according to a new report from Rhodium Group; H.O.T.S.: “With emerging stock and bond markets having matured over the past 30 years, their supposed diversification benefits are harder to see—investors should seek out other ways to bundle their assets”; Recent problems with the new model of the Chevrolet Corvette, including an engine so powerful it warped the car’s frame, amount to the sort of advertising for GM that money can’t buy; Volkswagen’s emissions fraud has cost it more than $30B , but has also sparked invaluable change at the automaker.