'Special Counsel'
What You Need To Know
Today’s posts that caught my eye:
Debris collected from the site of the ruptured Nord Stream gas pipelines have revealed evidence of explosives.
U.S. existing home sales fell for a ninth straight month in October as the highest mortgage rates in more than a decade pushed buyers out of the market.
Extreme lake-effect snow pummels western New York with 5 feet possible.
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The World
Attorney General Merrick Garland will appoint a special counsel to determine whether former President Donald Trump should face charges stemming from Justice Department probes, according to a person familiar with the matter. A formal announcement, which is expected by Friday afternoon, would come three days after Mr. Trump announced another bid for the presidency and would mark the naming of the third independent prosecutor in five years to examine issues involving Mr. Trump. The exact scope of the special counsel’s remit and who it would be couldn’t be determined. (Wall Street Journal)
The State Department requested the Justice Department file a "suggestion of immunity" for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Hatice Cengiz's lawsuit over the killing of her fiancée Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The State Department said it is conforming with "longstanding and well established principles" in international relations, even though U.S. intelligence officials determined last year that the crown prince had signed off on the plan to lure Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Turkey and kill him. (Axios)
Qatar Bans Beer Sales at World Cup Stadiums: The about-face on alcohol could violate a multimillion-dollar FIFA sponsorship agreement, and signaled that soccer’s governing body may no longer be in full control of its showcase event. (New York Times)
Debris collected from the site of the ruptured Nord Stream gas pipelines have revealed evidence of explosives, indicating an act of “gross sabotage,” Swedish prosecutors said, backing up European authorities’ earlier assertions that blasts had deliberately targeted the critical infrastructure. A series of undersea explosions ripped holes in the Nord Stream pipelines in late September, damaging the links built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany and rendering them unusable. The statement from the Swedish prosecutors provides the first public forensic confirmation that explosives were found at the site. (New York Times)
Alexei Navalny Says He Has Been Placed in Permanent Solitary Confinement. (New York Times)
Macron says China’s ability to pressure Russia is ‘extremely useful’: Xi able to use partnership with Putin to warn him against nuclear option in Ukraine, French president claims. (Financial Times)
Billionaire contributes $740M to rebuild Ukraine, says it will become ‘highest growth economy in Europe without any doubt.’ Ukraine will enter into a “golden era” after the current conflict with Russia and become the “highest growth economy in Europe without any doubt,” according to an Australian mining billionaire. But Andrew Forrest isn’t just making rosy predictions—he’s contributing a whopping $740 million from his personal fortune to a fund that will help rebuild the nation. (Fortune)
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt delivered a grim forecast for the nation's economy, saying household incomes will fall 7% over the next 18 months as taxes rise and government spending falls to combat inflation. The new budget, which overturns much of the so-called minibudget that helped crash Liz Truss' premiership less than two months ago, includes increased payments for the most vulnerable, but critics say the proposals will put yet more pressure on middle-income households. (BBC News)
Talks at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt may be nearing a breakthrough after the European Union proposed creating a fund to help poor countries recover from climate-related disasters via monetary assistance from a broad donor base of emissions-emitting countries. The proposal, which comes on the final day of the U.N. conference, has engendered a flurry of activity to hammer out several controversial elements, and the gathering may be extended in order to accommodate an agreement. (Reuters)
Tech war: China calls for ‘open’ semiconductor system as chip players debate strategies after US export controls. At the World Conference on Integrated Circuits, hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Anhui provincial government, members of the so-called Hefei Initiative urged global chip industry players to promote free trade and investment, and deepen cooperation in capacity, capital, talent and intellectual property rights in a “friendlier” ecosystem. Executives from US giants such as Intel, Qualcomm and AMD, are on the participant list of the three-day semiconductor conference in Hefei. (South China Morning Post)
U.S. lawmaker Hakeem Jeffries launched a bid to become Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. Jeffries, 52, would be the first Black House Democratic leader, representing both the party's diverse voter base and a new generation of leadership. No challengers to Jeffries have yet to emerge. (Reuters)
Pramila Jayapal is running for reelection as Congressional Progressive Caucus chair. Jayapal had also sounded out a potential leadership bid but opted against it. (Politico)
How Rick Caruso spent $104M and still lost the LA mayor’s race. (Politico)
Fox News significantly decreased its volume of violent crime coverage in the week of the midterm elections, down 63% from the week prior. (Political Wire)
The U.S Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling that blocked President Joe Biden's plan to cancel billions of dollars in student debt in a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. The government asked the high court to vacate a Nov. 14 decision by the St. Louis, Missouri-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to grant a request by Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina for an injunction against the plan. (Reuters)
Keeping indoor humidity levels at a “sweet spot” may reduce spread of Covid-19. In a study appearing today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the MIT team reports that maintaining an indoor relative humidity between 40 and 60 percent is associated with relatively lower rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths, while indoor conditions outside this range are associated with worse Covid-19 outcomes. To put this into perspective, most people are comfortable between 30 and 50 percent relative humidity, and an airplane cabin is at around 20 percent relative humidity. (MIT News)
‘We were right all along:’ For Japanese drugmaker Eisai, success against Alzheimer’s has been a long time coming. A once-in-a-generation medicine was built on more than two decades of regret. In 1997, Eisai launched Aricept, a revolutionary treatment for the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, invented and developed by the company’s scientists in Japan. The arrival of the drug was a galvanizing moment for Eisai — a blockbuster product for a company on the rise and the first of what was expected to be a string of medicines to slow or even reverse the effects of the disease. (STAT News)
Extreme lake-effect snow pummels western New York with 5 feet possible: The National Weather Service is describing the episode as ‘crippling’ and ‘paralyzing’. (Washington Post, Buffalo News)
Economy
U.S. existing home sales fell for a ninth straight month in October as the highest mortgage rates in more than a decade pushed buyers out of the market. Sales of previously owned homes declined 5.9% in October from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.43 million, the weakest rate since May 2020. October sales fell 28.4% from a year earlier. The streak of declines is the longest on record. (Wall Street Journal)
The section of the U.S. Treasury yield curve that most accurately predicts economic downturns has "inverted," or gone negative. This part of the yield curve — the difference between yields on 10-year Treasuries and 3-month bills — has accurately predicted every U.S. recession since 1955. When it has gone below zero, a recession followed over the next two years. (Axios)
Employers are planning pay increases of 4.6% in 2023, slightly above this year’s 4.2%, study shows. (CNBC)
UK faces biggest fall in living standards on record. The government's forecaster said that household incomes - once rising prices were taken into account - would dive by 7% in the next few years. It also expects the number of people who are unemployed to rise by more than 500,000. It came as the chancellor said the UK was already in recession and set to shrink further next year. (BBC)
UK mortgage rates are set to stay close to 5% for the next five years as the era of low interest rates comes to an abrupt end. Home loan rates will rise steadily before peaking in the second half of 2024, according to the latest forecasts for the UK’s economy. The Office for Budget Responsibility said mortgage rates will then stay above 4.5% through 1Q28. (Bloomberg)
The wildest parts of FTX's bankruptcy filing: its token holdings are worth $659K, Alameda loaned SBF $3.3B, SBF auto-deleted messages about decisions, and more. Meanwhile, FTX CEO John Ray III, who ran Enron's bankruptcy process, slams SBF's “unprecedented” management, describing a “complete failure of corporate controls.” (Bloomberg, CoinDesk)
New England ‘importing European prices’ in looming gas supply crunch: Approach of winter brings energy security warnings for US region dependent on global LNG market. (Financial Times)
Technology
Hundreds of employees say no to being part of Elon Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter: Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company. And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack. (The Verge)
Twitter disables badge access and shuts down offices until November 21, reportedly fearing “sabotage”, after a large number of staff chose to resign. (Daily Beast)
Elon Musk softens his remote work stance and tries to convince colleagues to stay, as more than anticipated opt to leave following his 5pm ET deadline. (Bloomberg)
A Twitter HQ seating chart shows Elon Musk's top five special projects: Blue verified, Blue for business, encrypted DMs, tips on tweets, and longform notes. (Platformer)
Recently-departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live based on current staffing levels, mass resignations overnight, and the morale of the few who remain. (MIT Technology Review)
US tech companies laying off employees serves as a wake-up call for Ireland, a longtime European hub for Big Tech, which has added 24,000 IT jobs since Q1 2021. (Financial Times)
10,000 Google employees could be rated as low performers. As layoffs spread across Silicon Valley, Google has stood out by not cutting employees so far. But as outside pressure builds on the company to improve the productivity of its workers, a new performance management system could help managers push out thousands of underperforming employees starting early next year. Managers could also use the ratings to avoid paying them bonuses and stock grants. Under the new system, managers have been asked to categorize 6% of employees, or roughly 10,000 people, as low performers in terms of their impact for the business, according to people with knowledge of the system. In the previous performance review system, managers were expected to put 2% of employees in that bucket. (The Information)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says layoffs will continue into next year. (CNBC)
Cisco plans to lay off employees and shrink its real estate footprint in the coming year in an effort to “rebalance” its business, the company said in a filing Wednesday. The layoffs will impact 5% of Cisco’s 80,000 employees, meaning roughly 4,000 people will be affected. (The Information)
Carvana Plans to Lay Off 1,500 Employees. (Wall Street Journal)
EV battery makers race to develop cheaper cell materials, skirting China. U.S. and European startups are racing to develop new batteries using two abundant, cheap materials — sodium and sulfur — that could reduce China's battery dominance, ease looming supply bottlenecks and lead to mass-market electric vehicles. (Reuters)
The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next. Generative AI has had a very good year. Corporations like Microsoft, Adobe, and GitHub are integrating the tech into their products; startups are raising hundreds of millions to compete with them; and the software even has cultural clout, with text-to-image AI models spawning countless memes. But listen in on any industry discussion about generative AI, and you’ll hear, in the background, a question whispered by advocates and critics alike in increasingly concerned tones: is any of this actually legal? (The Verge)
Smart Links
Fed’s Collins expresses hope that inflation can be tamed without hitting jobs. (CNBC)
Law School Accrediting Panel to Consider Making LSAT Optional. (Wall Street Journal)
Thanksgiving Holiday Travel Surge Brings Higher Fares, Fewer Flights. (Bloomberg)
California Regents Set December Showdown for U.C.L.A.’s Big Ten Move. (New York Times)
The best and worst airports of 2022. San Francisco and Sacramento top The Wall Street Journal’s rankings for large and midsize airports. (Wall Street Journal)
Facebook plans to remove religious views, political views, addresses, and “Interested in”, which indicates sexual preference, from user profiles on December 1. (Gizmodo)
Beyoncé and Jay-Z now tied for most Grammy nominations. (CNN)
Good News
In Qatar, one of the World Cup’s first female refs will live an ‘impossible dream’: Kathryn Nesbitt, who left her analytical chemistry position to pursue officiating full time, is one of six women in FIFA’s pool of referees for the World Cup. (Washington Post)
Stephen Colbert joked that he assumed Pelosi made the call to become “the next host of ‘The Daily Show.’” Colbert: “But it turns out, this doesn’t mean Pelosi’s resigning from Congress. She plans to take an emeritus role that would allow her to offer counsel to her colleagues. Yes, she’ll remain a mentor to the younglings. She’s Obi-Wan Pelosi.” (New York Times)
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