Weekend Papers Summary
NEW YORK TIMES
-Allies Fail to Agree on Sending German-Made Tanks to Ukraine. Officials tried to play down the rift. But Germany is insisting it will not be the country to take the first step, for fear of incurring Moscow’s wrath.
-One Saturday in Dnipro, life in Ukraine was almost normal (or it is at times). Then, suddenly, it all changes, as it did after a missile struck an apartment complex.
-The NATO alliance is holding strong on Ukraine. But Fractures Are Emerging. The allies differ on strategy for the coming year and the more immediate question of what Ukraine needs ahead of a major offensive in the spring.
-As tech companies lay off workers en-masse, a generational divide appears. The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for young workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.
-Despite some red flags, the GOP decided to back a candidate now charged in shootings. “We could have picked apart this guy,” one GOP leader in New Mexico said of Solomon Peña, who is accused of organizing attacks on the homes of Democrats.
-The March for Life kicks off in Washington, setting the stage for new ideas. The annual anti-abortion gathering to protest Roe v. Wade was the first since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion.
-A Supreme Court’s inquiry into a leaked draft opinion overturning Roe included interviews with Justices. But they were not asked to sign sworn affidavits, unlike others investigated about the, the court’s marshal said.
-Actors worry after Baldwin charges. The manslaughter charges Alec Baldwin faces after a fatal on-set shooting revived questions about who’s responsible for gun safety on film sets.
-How smart are the robots getting? The Turing test used to be the gold standard for proving machine intelligence. This generation of bots is racing past it.
-The ringleader of the sex cult at Sarah Lawrence College gets 60-year sentence. Ray was convicted of extortion, sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other charges.
-David Crosby, the singer and songwriter, who died this week, created music that helped define an era. On Twitter, David Crosby relished sharing opinions big and small, sparring with fans and dispelling myths.
-He Invested $625,000 With George Santos. Now He Says the Money Is Gone. A wealthy businessman has been in touch with the SEC about Mr. Santos’s dealings on behalf of a company accused in a Ponzi scheme.
-British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been fined for not wearing a seatbelt. The police levied the fine after Mr. Sunak, the British prime minister, posted a video on Instagram that showed him riding in a car, unbuckled.
-The Justice Department is investigating troubled infant formula plant. Abbott shut down production at the plant last year amid “shocking” sanitation lapses, touching off a disruptive infant supply formula shortage.
-Chris Hipkins appears to be poised to rplace Jacinda Ardern as New Zealand’s prime minister. Hipkins, a household name in New Zealand for his role overseeing the country’s response to the pandemic, was nominated to succeed Ms. Ardern who resigned on Thursday.
-The police and paramedics accused in Elijah McClain killing plead not guilty. The 23-year-old Black man died in 2019, days after being placed in a chokehold and injected with a powerful sedative.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-Germany dashed its allies’ hopes that it would approve the dispatch of battle tanks to Ukraine on Friday when a high-profile defense ministers meeting failed to reach an agreement. Many western countries argue that the German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks would greatly help Kyiv mount a counteroffensive against Russia, but Berlin has yet to agree, despite weeks of intense pressure from its allies.
-The annual gathering of business, economic and political elites in Davos divides opinions. But it is an ideal place to take the global temperature on economic sentiment — and the consensus view seemed to be that conditions had bottomed out and were becoming more positive. Many had expected 2023 would bring a lasting hangover from Russia’s war in Ukraine, continued Chinese economic weakness and the devastating effects of high energy and food prices on living standards across the world.
Instead, delegates came to the mountains to cheer three new developments that improve the outlook.
-Since OpenAI launched the ChatGPT language-generation model before Christmas, New York’s public schools have banned pupils from using it. In Australia, universities are planning a return to supervised pen and paper examinations to evade the chatbot fakes. Teachers are rightly concerned that they won’t be able to help pupils who are falling behind if they can’t spot faked assignments. But one reason these bots pose such a threat is that so much of our education remains fixated on being able to elegantly regurgitate information.
-When FTX imploded, nervous investors rushed to pull their money from Genesis. The broker was unable to meet clients’ $827M worth of withdrawal requests, forcing it to suspend withdrawals from its lending business. On Friday, Genesis’ lending unit filed for bankruptcy.
-Lawyers for FTX have accused Sam Bankman-Fried of trying to disrupt the bankruptcy process of his crypto empire through an “assault by Twitter”. In recent weeks, Bankman-Fried has in numerous tweets and blog posts accused Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm representing FTX in its Chapter 11 proceedings, of putting him under pressure to rush the companies into bankruptcy, including the US arm of FTX, which the former billionaire claims was solvent. The firm has denied those claims.
-Elon Musk disputed that his frequent Twitter posts necessarily moved Tesla’s stock price, as he began testifying on Friday in a trial over whether his 2018 “funding secured” tweet illegally manipulated the electric-car maker’s value.
Wearing a dark suit and tie, Musk was called to the witness stand late on Friday, the third day of a closely watched trial in a federal court in San Francisco scrutinizing the impact of Musk’s 2018 tweets saying he had the necessary funding to take Tesla private. No deal ever materialized, prompting shareholders to sue Musk, Tesla and the company’s board of directors at the time.
-Rentokil, the world’s biggest pest control group, is planning to annihilate the pesky rodents by using facial recognition to track their habits. Rentokil said its surveillance service, which live streams video of the vermin to its “central command center” for real-time analysis using artificial intelligence, can help decide where and how to hunt the fast-breeding undesirables. The UK-based group acquired the technology in a spree of hundreds of deals that has boosted its pest control capabilities.
-A governor on the board of the Federal Reserve has backed the US central bank further slowing the pace of its interest rate increases to a quarter of a percentage point at its upcoming policy meeting, even as he warned of further monetary tightening ahead.
-Chris Hipkins, the country’s education minister, had been regarded as a likely successor to Ardern, who announced this week she would step down as prime minister by February, ending her five-year term as leader. The 44-year-old was named in a Labour party statement on Saturday morning, local time, after his bid for the leadership of the party was unchallenged.
-President Emmanuel Macron promised to boost French defense spending to the end of 2030 to reinforce the country’s capabilities in response to new global threats after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The new conflicts of our century will not be of our choosing,” Macron said in a new year speech on Friday at the Mont-de-Marsan air force base in south-west France. “There is no more peace dividend because of the aggression of Russia against Ukraine.”
-Steven Cohen’s Point72 has finally won approval to operate directly in the UK, a decade after the US trader’s previous firm pleaded guilty to insider trading and paid a record $1.8B in fines. Point72, a former family office that opened to outside investors in 2018 and which manages $26.7B in assets, succeeded in its years-long attempt to receive regulatory authorization last week, according to the Financial Conduct Authority’s website.
-Drinks group Diageo’s $1B deal for George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila brand brought plenty of Hollywood glamour but was also met with skepticism. “The stars must line up perfectly for this deal to create value,” one analyst cautioned when the acquisition was announced in 2017. More than five years later, it is clear they have.
NY POST
-Ivana Trump, who passed away last July after falling down the staircase of her Manhattan home, carefully divvied up her estate before her death. Probate records reviewed by Insider show that the 73-year-old left most of her estate to her three children — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka and Eric — a $1M Miami Beach, Florida apartment to her former nanny, and zilch for her ex-husband, the former president.
-A box labeled “Important Doc’s + Photos” was left unsealed on a table ahead of a child’s birthday party in the Delaware home where the 80-year-old president has been discovered to have stashed sensitive government records, a photo from his son’s laptop, discovered by The Post Friday reveals.
Another image on the infamous laptop reveals that Hunter Biden apparently made more than 160 trips to the sprawling, lakeside house in just 52 days during the same time he was involved in controversial business dealings with a Chinese energy conglomerate — and while the home contained the discovered classified documents.
-Security guards at the theft-plagued pharmacy chain Walgreens have been instructed not to confront the shoplifters when they walk out without paying, according to a company executive. Walgreens, which operates 240 stores in the Big Apple, including Duane Reade, has been riddled by robberies to the point where the stores have had to put items like toothpaste behind lock and key. The chain hired unarmed guards and off-duty cops — but they haven’t been much of a deterrent. “[Security guards] are not there to protect the product,” said Joseph Stein, director of asset protection solutions for Walgreen, “They are there to de-escalate [a situation] and to protect the customer and the employees,” he added.