NEW YORK TIMES
Saturday
• New York became one of the first states to take meaningful action to restrict police forces when governor Andrew Cuomo signed bills that ban the use of chokeholds by law enforcement and that repeal a half-century-old law that has kept police disciplinary records secret in the state.
• Whether companies are liable if their workers and customers catch the coronavirus has become a key question as businesses reopen— companies say they face lawsuits, and many are pushing Congress for temporary legal protections.
• US government employees are among what officials say is a backlog of 1.7M Americans waiting for passports after the State Department shut down most of its consular services to protect its staff from contracting the coronavirus.
• Scientists have shown—at least in the tightly controlled environment of a laboratory cell culture—that coronaviruses carrying a particular mutation infect more cells and are more resilient than those without it, but geneticists caution against drawing strong conclusions from this.
• Two years after Trump declared on Twitter that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” classified assessments and experts outside government say the country’s arsenal is far larger than it was when Trump and Kim Jong-un held their historic meeting.
• The Trump administration finalized a regulation that will erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies, part of a broad Trump administration effort across multiple areas of policy to narrow the legal definition of sex discrimination.
• The coronavirus pandemic has sent economies into recession and reduced government revenue, prompting countries such as Nigeria and Tunisia to remove restraints on electricity and petroleum prices, a politically perilous approach.
• +/- HMC: A recent cyberattack that disrupted the automaker’s operations may have been the first time criminals deployed sophisticated software previously known to be used by state agents against the control systems at industrial facilities such as factories.
Sunday
• Epidemiologists, small-town mayors and county health officials who predicted a surge in coronavirus cases once states begin to reopen are being proven correct, as thousands of Americans get sick from the virus in new and alarming outbreaks.
• Despite the pandemic and recession, tech’s largest companies—still wildly profitable and flush with billions of dollars from years of corporate dominance—are laying the groundwork for a future where they will be bigger and more powerful than they are now.
• “In just under three weeks since the killing of George Floyd set off widespread protests, what started as a renewed demand for police reform has now roiled seemingly every sphere of American life, prompting institutions and individuals around the country to confront enduring forms of racial discrimination.”
• Less than 24 hours after a white police officer shot and killed a black man outside a fast-food restaurant in Atlanta, mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that the city’s police chief had resigned and the officer involved in the shooting had been fired.
• Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s rejection of the emerging scientific consensus on how to fight the pandemic and his promotion of unproven drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are factors that helped tilt the country into its current health crisis.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Weekend
• Many protesters say they will continue to target local governments across the nation that are entering budget-planning season to reallocate some funding for policing—often the largest chunk of a city’s operating budget—to social services.
• More than 1,300 Chinese medical-supply companies, many providing masks and respirators in the pandemic, listed on their FDA registrations a US agent without proper contact information, according to a WSJ analysis.
• Wild stock swings have lured large and small investors into the risky world of volatility trading, where they’re wagering hundreds of billions of dollars on a strategy that has grown so big that trading on expected market moves can itself move markets.
• As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates the shift to online shopping, customer-service operations at some big retailers are overwhelmed by shoppers frustrated by delayed shipments and sluggish refunds for returned goods.
• The Federal Reserve said severe disruptions in the US labor market related to the coronavirus pandemic were hitting workers with lower earnings, including minorities, especially hard.
• As confirmed coronavirus cases in the US surpassed two million, driven in part by surges in more than a dozen states, some places were citing the increases as reasons to pause on reopening plans; related stories report that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that as states reopen and large gatherings take place—including protests—people wear masks; and that White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told investors the Trump administration doesn’t expect a second wave of cases, contradicting public-health officials.
• Researchers piecing together how the body’s immune system responds to the coronavirus say some people who have never encountered the pathogen before appear to be able to mobilize parts of their immune system to ward it off.
• Trump has long viewed his stewardship of the world’s largest economy as his administration’s defining legacy, but with less than six months left to campaign, new polls, including a WSJ/NBC news poll, show he has few other advantages in his bid for re-election.
• Trump said he would like to see “a new and updated” Republican party platform, after the Republican National Committee opted to carry over the 2016 plan for this year despite calls for changes on key issues.
• A Chinese government-linked effort to spread pro-Beijing messages through Western social media is clumsy but persistent and is adapting and improving over time, according to a new analysis of Chinese-language activity on TWTR and FB.
• Technologies new and old will soon be appearing in offices, airports, schools, restaurants, retail spaces and sports arenas to counter the spread of Covid-19 and prevent future pandemics.
• The state of California said film and television production can resume Friday, roughly three months after being shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it may take a while before things are up to speed and back to normal.
• The Covid-19 pandemic has revived interest in hoarding aluminum to sell at a later date, a trade that became controversial after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
• H.O.T.S.: After Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold out of airline stocks too early, retail investors started buying them indiscriminately—but both sides may be wrong; UBER might look to acquire a smaller rival such as Postmates as it prepares for a new competitive onslaught in food delivery from GRUB; As long as the economy remains in the grips of Covid-19 crisis, American optimism will face limits.
FINANCIAL TIMES
Weekend
• The European Union plans to spend billions of euros on advance purchase deals with pharmaceutical companies for potential coronavirus vaccines, a sign of growing efforts by wealthy nations to secure supplies of eventual treatments.
• Countries across Europe hope to salvage their summer holidays by easing some of the restrictions used to curb the pandemic, and next week nine countries will reopen their borders in a bid to lure visitors.
• The UK formally rejected an option to extend its post-Brexit transition period beyond the end of the year, leaving companies only a few months to prepare for more restrictive trading conditions with the European Union.
• With malls and jewelry stores closed for business during coronavirus lockdowns, the $80B global diamond industry has ground to a halt, and faces a number of hurdles to regain lost ground.
• Big Read story says that betting on the US managing a quick recovery from the pandemic, a subculture of individual retail investors are driving up some stocks, but many professional fund managers question the fundamentals of the broader rally.
• Lex Column: Pearson’s report card has read “needs improvement” for far too long, and there is plenty of scope for a new leader to make a mark; The amount of UK capital sullied by past ties to slavery can’t be quantified precisely, but “we can be sure it is large”; Buyout firms may be Nestlé’s best hope for a sale of its North American mass-market bottled water business.
• Comment: The dramatic and belated change in attitudes toward racial injustice we are now witnessing will halve an effect on who can be considered tolerable and who is intolerable to memorialize with statues, says the historian Simon Schama.
NEW YORK POST
Saturday
• HTZ stock has soared as mom-and-pop day traders snap it up after the company’s bankruptcy, to the dismay of large investors such as Carl Icahn, who sold sizable stakes after the company collapsed on May 22.
• +/- SBUX: The coffee chain reversed policy and said employees can wear Black Lives Matter-related clothing at work, reversing a dress code that banned political messages on garments.
Sunday
• New York City governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday threatened to shut down Manhattan and the Hamptons again if residents don’t adhere to the state’s social distancing rules.
• The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is rattling nerves in South Korea by threatening military action and accusing activists of sending anti-Pyongyang pamphlets across the border.
• + NKE: In a letter to employees, the sportswear giant said it was adding June 19—known as Juneteenth, the oldest known US celebration of the end of slavery—to its list of annual official days off.