Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Paul Pelosi, 82, underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture after an intruder searching for Speaker Pelosi entered the couple’s home and assaulted him. The police said the man would be charged with attempted homicide and are investigating a motive. The attack heightened fears of violence ahead of the midterms.
-Elon Musk starts putting his imprint on Twitter. The billionaire began his tenure as Twitter’s new owner by announcing a content moderation council and meeting employees.
-An antisemitic campaign tries to capitalize on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. The campaign appeared to start after Mr. Musk had officially taken control of the company.
-Scarred by War, Ukraine’s children face years of trauma. Countless Ukrainian children who have suffered serious physical harm or the loss of a parent now face a challenging path forward.
-Fall rains have turned the earth in Ukraine to sludge, slowing, but not stopping, military advances.
-Russia ended the military draft that brought the war closer to ordinary citizens.
-Activists can stake out ballot boxes in Arizona, US judge rules. The judge said the activists’ actions did not constitute a “true threat” and that their right to assemble in public spaces is constitutionally protected.
-Obama to Georgia Democrats: ‘Resist the Temptation to Give Up:’Former President Obama is hitting the campaign trail to try to help Democrats energize voters and regain momentum in key Senate races.
-Senator Michael Bennet and Joe O’Dea battled over abortion and guns in a Colorado Senate debate.
-Ex-Capitol police officer found guilty of obstruction in Jan. 6 case. A jury found that the man had deleted Facebook messages in which he offered advice to a Jan. 6 rioter about how to avoid getting caught, prosecutors said.
-After years of ‘hell’ in ISIS detention camp, 17 Australians return home.
Dozens more Australians, many of them children, are still being held in Syria, but there is hope that the government will soon sponsor more releases.
-In retrial, man who helped run border wall charity is convicted. Timothy Shea was the only one of four defendants in the federal case to face a jury. Steve Bannon faces similar charges in state court.
-Kanye West faces costly fallout: a timeline: The entertainer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for a series of antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Elon Musk’s drawn-out acquisition of Twitter, which he launched in April but attempted to abort in July, has closed just as a decade-long boom in the digital advertising that fuels social media grinds to a halt, bringing share prices crashing down across Silicon Valley.
-The change in ownership at Twitter has been welcomed by those who view the billionaire entrepreneur as the man to overhaul a struggling business they believe never reached its full potential. Already, the self-declared “Chief Twit” has outlined grand plans to inspire a faster pace of product innovation and shift into new revenue streams, while transforming to a leaner operation. On Thursday, he began cleaning house, firing top executives including chief executive Parag Agrawal and head of safety, Vijaya Gadde.
-A decade-long era of breakneck growth in social media advertising has come to an abrupt halt. Who killed the boom? As the blame game began in Silicon Valley, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai used earnings calls this week to point to the unmistakable storm clouds gathering over the global economy.
-Former Citigroup executive Michael Klein is set to combine his boutique advisory firm with Credit Suisse’s investment bank and is hunting for investors, after the Swiss lender entrusted the business to its former board member as part of a radical restructuring.
-After a spectacular crash earlier this year, the crypto industry’s most popular tokens have gone to sleep, suggesting amateur investors have fallen out of love with the once thrilling asset class and big funds have decided to keep their distance.
-Once Asia’s biggest manufacturer of aluminum extrusions, Zhongwang Holdings thrived in the 2000s as China’s booming property sector created strong demand for its products in construction. Then, as the economy cooled, its business started to collapse, a victim of its own overexpansion and leveraged asset buying.
-Financial market regulators in Europe’s main fund hubs have stepped up surveillance of derivative-linked funds used by UK pension schemes in an effort to prevent a repeat of the turmoil that roiled the gilt market last month. The Central Bank of Ireland has begun asking asset managers running so-called liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies for UK pension schemes to tell regulators before they do anything that would increase the leverage in those funds.
-ExxonMobil’s chief executive dismissed calls for a windfall tax on the oil industry and criticized European efforts to cap energy prices as the US supermajor reported a record quarterly profit of nearly $20B on Friday. The largest US oil company’s results were echoed at rival Chevron, whose bumper third-quarter profit of $11.2B was just shy of record earnings reported in its previous quarter, continuing a run of strong industry earnings on elevated oil and gas prices.
-Norway’s Equinor and Italy’s Eni have become the latest energy companies to report bumper earnings as the oil and gas industry heads towards its most profitable year ever. State-controlled Equinor said it would raise its special dividend by $0.20 to $0.70 a share for the third quarter after it achieved record adjusted pre-tax earnings of $24.3B for the three months to September, up from $9.8B a year earlier.
-Russia’s central bank has warned that the country’s large-scale military draft could lead to higher inflation, as it opted to keep its key interest rate unchanged for the first time after months of successive cuts.
-There must be no peace with Russia as long as Russian troops remain within Ukraine’s borders, Germany’s president said on Friday, in an impassioned state of the nation speech about Berlin’s foreign policy.
“In the face of evil, goodwill is not enough,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s ceremonial head of state, said in a public address outlining his country’s place in the world.
-Rishi Sunak pushed for a deal on Friday to counter small boat crossings of the English Channel by migrants in his first call with Emmanuel Macron, president of France. The new UK prime minister adopted a conciliatory tone, describing France as “our neighbor and ally” in contrast to his predecessor Liz Truss who at one point during her successful bid for the leadership of the Conservative party declined to answer whether Macron was a “friend or foe”.
NY POST
-Paul Pelosi managed to call 911 and alert the dispatcher to his dire situation without his eventual attacker even knowing. Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, discreetly called the emergency line when a hammer-wielding maniac broke into his San Francisco home at 2AM Friday.
The alleged attacker, David DePape, didn’t realize Pelosi had dialed his phone or understand that Pelosi was speaking in code.
-Donald Trump said Friday he’s glad Twitter is now in Elon Musk’s “sane hands” — but didn’t mention any prospect of returning to the platform as he touted his own social networking app Truth Social. “I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country,” the 45th president wrote in his Truth Social post. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter after the rioting at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but Musk has previously vowed to reinstate the account.
-A robust, broad-based rally sent Wall Street stocks surging on Friday, as encouraging economic data and a rosier earnings outlook buoyed investor risk appetite ahead of next week’s much-anticipated two-day policy meeting of the Federal Reserve.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by more than 800 points while the NASDAQ rallied more than 300 points. The S&P 500 ended the day up more than 2%. The rally led to a fourth straight week of gains, pushing the Dow to nearly 33,000, up 14% for the month. The index closed out its best month in more than 30 years.
-A substantial plunge in US home prices is likely “just beginning” as decades-high mortgage rates cause a downturn in the housing market, a prominent economist cautioned Friday. The warning from Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson followed more dismal data that showed a slowdown in housing activity. Pending home sales — a measure based on signed contracts — plunged 10.2% in September, according to the National Association of Realtors.