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📝 Good afternoon and welcome to Notes on the News. It's Sunday, May 15. Here's what we're watching this week: the investigation into the Buffalo mass shooting, Janet Yellen's push for a global minimum tax, and congressional primaries including a high-profile GOP race in Pennsylvania. Catch up on the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine war in the special section below. Let us know what you think by replying to this email. Thanks for reading. |
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1. Investigators seek answers in wake of Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket shooting. Officials are investigating Saturday's mass shooting, which killed at least 10 people and wounded three, as a possible hate crime—citing a document police have linked to the accused shooter that details plans for a similar attack with the goal of killing as many Black people as possible. Follow the latest updates here. |
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2. Janet Yellen seeks to win European support for global minimum tax. The Treasury secretary wants to clinch the European Union's approval of a proposed 15% minimum tax on the profits of large corporations, hoping to smooth out Poland’s objections to approving the plan in meetings this week. But the larger threat to the agreement’s future may rest in Congress, which hasn’t yet approved the plan. |
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3. Investors stay put, because they can't think of better options. Crypto is imploding, cash is getting eaten away by inflation and even bond prices are tumbling, leaving some investors to wonder if anything counts as a haven asset right now. In the week ahead, traders will be parsing data on housing sales and consumer spending for clues on the economy—and where the market might go next. Individual investors step back from options bets |
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5. A “blood moon” total lunar eclipse takes place tonight. For about 85 minutes, the moon will be completely covered by Earth’s shadow, NASA says. As long as clouds don’t get in the way, the total lunar eclipse will be visible in its entirety in South America, most of North America, western Africa and western Europe and parts of Antarctica and the east Pacific. |
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| PHOTO: Adrienne Surprenant /MYOP for The Wall Street Journal |
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Follow the latest developments here. Russian soldiers shot three brothers and threw them in a grave. One survived. After Mykola Kulichenko was taken from his village in Ukraine, interrogated, beaten and left for dead, he still had to get back home. His account is among many war-crimes cases Ukrainian prosecutors are building against Russia. |
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Finland said it would seek parliamentary approval to join NATO in the coming days. Its addition to the alliance would roughly double the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's land border with Russia. Sweden, another longtime holdout, is also expected to apply for membership soon. |
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Could your new jewelry be funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? In theory, U.S. and European sanctions have outlawed the sale of gold and diamonds from Russia. In practice, Russian gems and precious metals are likely still entering Western markets, often via a hard-to-police global web of middlemen. |
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$14.7 million — The median pay package for chief executives of the biggest U.S. companies in 2021, setting a sixth-straight annual record as strong profits and robust markets boosted performance measures. $12.4 million — The price fetched for the 1924 photograph “Le Violon d’ Ingres” by the surrealist Man Ray at Christie's. The sale capped a strong series of Christie’s auctions that topped $1.3 billion, surpassing its own expectations and despite volatility in the broader financial markets. $29,948 — Average price of a used car in April, about $21 less than what it was in December, according to data provided by Edmunds. Rising used-car prices, which have been a big contributor to inflation over the past year, are starting to ease with dealers saying buyers are pushing back on what they are willing to spend. |
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| What Everyone Wants to Know |
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| ILLUSTRATION: JAMES STEINBERG |
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At tech companies, the rebellion against the return to the office is getting serious. Some of the economy’s most in-demand employees are about to find out how much power they have over where and how they work. After months of return-to-work starts and stops, many tech companies, including Google, Apple and Microsoft, are telling remote workers it’s finally time to come back for good, or at least show up part of the week. Employees who fled the Bay Area and other high-cost tech hubs earlier in the pandemic—or who just prefer to work from home—now face hard choices: move back, try the super commute, or hold out for a concession or new job elsewhere. How the emerging power struggles play out will be a telling indicator of how much leverage remote-work converts in other sectors have as more employers call staff back to offices. A competitive job market, plus the relative ease with which businesses adjusted to work-from-home over the past two years, has emboldened many professionals to try to say goodbye to offices permanently. |
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Stocks are way down. They’re still expensive. U.S. stocks are off to their worst start to a year in more than a half-century. By some measures, they still look expensive. Wall Street often uses the ratio of a company’s share price to its earnings as a measuring stick for whether a stock appears cheap or pricey. By that metric, the market as a whole had been unusually expensive for much of the past two years, a period when especially easy monetary policy turbocharged the popular view that low interest rates gave investors few alternatives to stocks. Worries about inflation and the path of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases have spurred the recent turmoil in markets and provoked vigorous debate over the appropriate valuations for stocks in today’s environment. |
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| PHOTO: JENNY HUANG FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, FOOD STYLING BY SEAN DOOLEY, PROP STYLING BY CATHERINE PEARSON |
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Go cook: Quick, delicious shrimp. This recipe includes a simple yet game-changing trick: Save the shells and use them to make a rich compound butter. It brings intense umami flavor to this quick shrimp sauté showered in fresh herbs. |
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