May 31 2024
Trump verdict; TikTok; sanctions backfire; Elon Musk; port congestion
1 Trump found guilty on 34 felony counts
2 TikTok working on US clone
3 Western sanctions backfire
4 ELECTION 2024 Elon Musk most powerful CEO in politics
5 Global ocean shipping under extreme stress
5/31/1996 Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister of Israel
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1 Trump found guilty on 34 felony counts
In a humble courtroom in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, a former president and current Republican standard-bearer was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The jury’s decision, and the facts presented at the trial, offer yet another reminder — perhaps the starkest to date — of the many reasons Donald Trump is unfit for office. The guilty verdict in the former president’s hush-money case was reached by a unanimous jury of 12 randomly selected New Yorkers, who found that Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging. Americans may wonder about the significance of this moment. The Constitution does not prohibit those with a criminal conviction from being elected or serving as commander in chief, even if they are behind bars. The nation’s founders left that decision in the hands of voters. Many experts have also expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor, and Mr. Trump will undoubtedly seek an appeal.
NYT***
Twelve New York jurors have found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records, a total of 34 felony counts, in history’s first criminal conviction of a former President. What a volatile moment for the country. Will the judge jail Mr. Trump? Will voters re-elect him in November anyway, in disgust of this concocted case? What if it’s thrown out on appeal? Will Republicans retaliate? The nation might soon regret this rough turn. Thursday’s guilty verdict wasn’t entirely surprising, given the jury pool in Manhattan. If Mr. Trump had lucked out, he might have drawn one or two stubborn skeptics, like the Henry Fonda character in “12 Angry Men,” resulting in at least a hung jury. Instead the fortunate one was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who filed the weakest of the four indictments of Mr. Trump, but who managed to drag his case first over the finish line. Normally a felony conviction would be politically fatal for a candidate appearing on the ballot in five months. But normally a prosecutor wouldn’t have brought this case. Mr. Bragg, an elected Democrat, ran for office as the man ready to take on Mr. Trump. When the new DA didn’t indict shortly after winning office, his top Trump prosecutors loudly quit, increasing the pressure on Mr. Bragg to do, well, something. Even after a guilty verdict, the case he ended up filing looks like a legal stretch.
WSJ***
Will Mr Trump go to jail?
The former president has long argued that the judge is “corrupt” and that the case was “rigged”; he is sure to appeal against the conviction. But first, on July 11th, he will be sentenced. Each count carries a maximum of four years, but a prison term is unlikely for a first-time felon. Even if Mr Trump is sent to jail, he would probably not go until he worked his way through New York’s appeals courts. That could take years.
What about his other trials?
In all, 88 felony charges have been brought against Mr Trump. The proceedings in the New York trial may be over for now, but it seems unlikely that the other trials, in which he is charged with defrauding the country and mishandling sensitive documents, will return verdicts before election day. Learn more in our primer on his criminal trials.
Could a conviction help him in November?
Our leader argues that this verdict is particularly vulnerable to appeal because of the lack of clear precedent for the charges Manhattan’s district attorney chose to bring. Prosecutors are supposed to consider the seriousness of the crime and the public interest at stake. Compared with the other cases pending against Mr Trump, this one always seemed too much of a stretch to command widespread public legitimacy. It has done more to help than hurt Mr Trump’s chances of winning back the White House, and, as the insurrection of January 6th 2021 ought to have made clear, that is a greater hazard to the rule of law than any fraudulent book-keeping.
Economist
Article Source: NYT, WSJ, Economist
2 TikTok working on US clone
TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the efforts. The work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April. The sources, who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the short-form video sharing app, said that once the code is split, it could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of the U.S. assets, although there are no current plans to do so. The company has previously said it had no plans to sell the U.S. assets and such a move would be impossible.
Article Source: Reuters
3 Western sanctions backfire
Western sanctions and export controls were meant to subdue America’s enemies, leveraging the power of the dollar to strong-arm governments into submission without the bloodshed of military force. They have inadvertently birthed a global shadow economy tying together democracy’s chief foes, with Washington’s primary adversary, China, at the center. Unprecedented finance and trade restrictions on Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, China and other authoritarian regimes have squeezed those economies by curbing access to Western goods and markets. But Beijing has increasingly foiled those U.S.-led efforts by bolstering trade ties, according to Western officials and customs data. The bloc of sanctioned nations collectively now have the economy of scale to shield them from Washington’s financial warfare, trading everything from drones and missiles to gold and oil.
The bloc’s trade needs are aligned. On one side of the equation, China gets oil from three OPEC powerhouses—Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—at heavily discounted prices. That is a windfall for the world’s biggest oil importer, which bought more than 11 million barrels of oil a day last year to keep its economy running. Those countries, in turn, then have revenue they can use to buy sanctioned goods from China.
Article Source: WSJ
4 ELECTION 2024 Elon Musk most powerful CEO in politics
Elon Musk has three essential ingredients to unrivaled political power among CEOs: control of a massive social media platform, astonishing personal wealth — and now former President Trump's open and willing ear. That makes Musk arguably the most important business player in modern American politics. He has the power to sway or repel voters — and stands ready to win or lose big, given his companies' deep ties to government. Musk and Trump have begun speaking several times a month since privately meeting in March at the home of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, The Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday. The two men reportedly have discussed an advisory role for Musk if Trump wins back the White House in November — potentially giving the Tesla CEO influence over economic and border policies. Musk, in turn, briefed Trump in March about his plans to invest in a data-driven project devoted to preventing voter fraud, according to the Journal. As owner of the de facto town square, Musk has made no secret about his distaste for President Biden's policies and the excesses of the "woke" left — without explicitly endorsing a candidate for president. With more than 60 posts about Trump and Biden this year, Musk has brought an open ideological tilt to X that few social media executives would dare replicate, according to a New York Times analysis. Musk is one of the world's richest men. Yet he appears unwilling to spend money — at least so far — in his mission to defeat Biden. Instead of writing checks, Musk and like-minded moguls plan to galvanize America's business elite to oppose Biden through dinner parties and salon-style gatherings, according to the Journal.
Article Source: Axios
5 Global ocean shipping under extreme stress
There is no mistaking, on entering the port of Algeciras, at the southernmost tip of Spain, how busy the facility is. The cranes that tower above the port’s two container terminals are nearly all at work, shuttling containers on and off ships. The piles of boxes in the terminals’ yards are mainly stacked the maximum five high. Alonso Luque, chief executive of TTI Algeciras, operator of one terminal, says that this year he has turned away far more requests to handle extra cargo than he has been able to accommodate. “You can see that the capacity is quite limited,” he says, gesturing at the stacked containers. On the other side of the Gibraltar Strait in Morocco, executives at TC3, a container terminal in the Tanger Med port development, face similar challenges. Both ports are feeling the strain of resurgent disruption, congestion and other problems for global shipping following a sudden, forced rejigging of the world’s maritime trade networks. The problems follow many shipping lines’ decisions, at the end of 2023, to reroute voyages away from the waters off Yemen after facing attacks from Iran-backed Houthi militias. Container ship arrivals in the Gulf of Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea, are down 90 per cent on the same period last year according to data from Clarksons, the shipping services provider. Diverting vessels from Asia and bound for Europe around the Cape of Good Hope adds an additional nine to 14 days to voyage times. The diversions are also creating hold-ups in places like Algeciras and Tangier that are suddenly in demand as places to move cargo between ships. The disruption adds to a growing list of challenges facing the world shipping industry. Pirate attacks off Somalia, on Africa’s eastern coast, have increased and there are concerns that Iranian forces might target more vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf, after Revolutionary Guards Corps seized the MSC Aries in April. In the Americas, a drought has forced the Panama Canal Authority to reduce the number of daily transits between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and to set limits on vessels’ draft — the maximum depth of the hull below the waterline. In Europe, many ports that handle vehicle imports are badly congested amid a glut of cars from China. Jan Rindbo, chief executive of Norden, one of the world’s biggest operators of dry bulk carriers and tankers, says the simultaneous problems are “real black swan events” for the industry. “I’ve never in my 30 years in shipping seen anything like this,” he says.
Article Source: FT
5/31/1996 Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister of Israel
Sources
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/opinion/trump-trial-guilty-felony.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb; https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-guilty-verdict-manhattan-trial-alvin-bragg-juan-merchan-stormy-daniels-b982d7d1?st=0i3w1t9yacbeo8r&reflink=article_copyURL_share; https://www.economist.com/in-brief/2024/05/31/trumps-a-felon-now-what
2. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-preparing-us-copy-apps-core-algorithm-sources-say-2024-05-30/
3. https://www.wsj.com/world/how-america-inadvertently-created-an-axis-of-evasion-led-by-china-0a9bc477?mod=hp_lead_pos7
4. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-d6e8c61b-95e6-4bbd-9d67-d251e48ff17a.html?chunk=0&utm_campaign=axios_app#story0
5. https://www.ft.com/content/a03da8f6-b468-4a86-8db5-83838f7d6409
Thanks for reading!
