Jury Rejects Sarah Palin’s Libel Case Against The Times
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A jury rejected Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times on Tuesday, finding that there was insufficient evidence to prove the newspaper had defamed her in a 2017 editorial that erroneously linked her political rhetoric to a mass shooting.
The jury’s verdict, which First Amendment advocates applauded as a victory for the longstanding legal precedent that considers an occasional journalistic mistake a necessary cost of discourse in a free society, was the second time this week that Ms. Palin’s case was dealt a significant setback. On Monday, the presiding judge in federal court in Lower Manhattan, Jed S. Rakoff, reached a similar finding as the jury. He said that he would dismiss the case if the jury found in her favor because she had not demonstrated The Times acted with the level of recklessness and ill intent required to meet the high constitutional burden for public figures who claim defamation.
Ms. Palin is expected to appeal.
The case set up a high-stakes test of First Amendment law and the extremely high legal bar that the Supreme Court has set for proving a defamation claim against journalists. Lawyers for Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, argued that the longstanding legal protections in place to shield journalists from liability for almost any error that wasn’t intentional are outdated and overly broad. A public figure like Ms. Palin has to prove that a news organization acted with “actual malice” in publishing false information, meaning it displayed a reckless disregard for the truth or knew the information was false.
The Times has not lost a libel case in an American courtroom in at least 50 years.
“It is gratifying that the jury and the judge understood the legal protections for the news media and our vital role in American society,” a spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said in a statement, adding that the verdict upheld “a fundamental tenet of American law.”
Ms. Palin’s lawyers may get another chance to argue why those protections should be pared back on appeal. Legal experts said that one avenue for asking an appeals court to reconsider the case is to ask that the courts revisit the broad manner in which the law defines a public figure.
Ms. Palin’s suit claimed that The Times defamed her with an editorial that incorrectly asserted a link between her political rhetoric and a mass shooting near Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress. Ms. Giffords’s district had been one of 20 singled out on a map circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee underneath digitized cross hairs. There was no evidence the shooter had seen or was motivated by the map.
The editorial was published on June 14, 2017, the same day that a gunman opened fire at a baseball field in Virginia where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people, including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. The headline was “America’s Lethal Politics,” and the editorial asked whether the Virginia shooting was evidence of how vicious American politics had become. The Times corrected the editorial the morning after it was published after readers pointed out the mistake.
On the witness stand, the former Times editor who inserted the erroneous wording into the article, James Bennet, testified that the incident left him racked with guilt and that he had thought about it almost every day since. “It was just a terrible mistake,” he said.
Ms. Palin and her lawyers attempted to convince the jury that Mr. Bennet had acted out of animus toward her and, regardless of any contrition he later showed, was reckless in rushing to judgment about her.
Judge Rakoff rejected those claims in his ruling on Monday, saying that Ms. Palin had not produced evidence to support the idea that Mr. Bennet disregarded the truth either willfully or through his own recklessness. The ruling came in response to a routine procedural motion by Times lawyers to rule in its favor, which defendants have a right to do after the plaintiff has presented all of its evidence to the jury.
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President Biden’s plans to reshape the Federal Reserve were complicated on Tuesday as Republicans delayed a key vote on his five nominees for its Board of Governors.
Republicans did not show up for a committee decision on Tuesday that would have advanced the nominees to the full Senate for a confirmation vote. Because the Senate Banking Committee’s rules require a majority of members to be physically present for such votes, their blockade effectively halted the process.
The unusual maneuver, spearheaded by Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, was driven by Republican opposition to Mr. Biden’s pick for the top bank cop.
The president has renominated Jerome H. Powell as Fed chair and has tapped Lael Brainard, a current Fed governor, as vice chair. He also has nominated the economists Lisa D. Cook and Philip N. Jefferson as Fed governors. But it is Sarah Bloom Raskin — a longtime Washington policymaker and lawyer whom Mr. Biden has picked as vice chair for bank supervision — who has garnered the most opposition.
In order to prevent her advancement, Republicans held up the vote on all five nominees.
Democrats and the White House decried the Republican boycott while scrambling for a solution that could get the picks through to confirmation. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio and chair of the Senate Banking Committee, on Tuesday shot down the idea that he would separate Ms. Raskin from the other nominees to allow the rest of the White House’s picks to advance. Ms. Raskin might face tough odds of passing, especially on her own.
By nominating five of the Fed’s seven governors and all of its highest ranking leaders, Mr. Biden had a chance to shake up the institution. While some of his picks — like Mr. Powell — represented continuity, together they would have made up the most racially and gender-diverse Fed leadership team ever.
Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University who co-wrote a book on the politics of the Fed, said Democrats would need to come up with a strategy for overcoming the Republicans’ block or the nominees could get stuck in limbo.
“It is really a delay — it might yet scupper Raskin,” she said, noting that Democrats could break the nominations up or could try to garner enough support among the full Senate to override committee rules, though that might be a challenge. “It’s pretty unchartered, and they’re going to have to find a way.”
Tuesday’s maneuver was the latest step in an opposition campaign Mr. Toomey has waged against Ms. Raskin, who would serve as arguably the nation’s most important bank regulator if confirmed.
Mr. Toomey has criticized Ms. Raskin for past comments on climate-related regulation, worrying that she would be too activist in bank oversight. More recently, he has pressed for more information about her interactions with the Fed while she was on the board of a financial technology company that was pushing for a potentially lucrative central bank account.
“Until basic questions have been adequately addressed, I do not think the committee should proceed with a vote on Ms. Raskin,” Mr. Toomey said in the statement.
The White House blasted Mr. Toomey’s move.
“As Chairman Brown has said, some Senate Republicans are playing politics with the American economy by blocking a vote on the chairman of the Federal Reserve and an entire slate of well-qualified nominees,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, calling Mr. Toomey’s questions about Ms. Raskin’s background “false allegations.”
Mr. Toomey and his colleagues have said that Ms. Raskin, a former Fed and Treasury official, contacted the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City on behalf of Reserve Trust, a financial technology company where she served as a board member. Reserve Trust managed to secure a strategically important account at the Fed while she was on its board: To this day, it advertises that it is the only company of its kind with what’s known as a “master” account.
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Ms. Raskin had said in written responses to Mr. Toomey’s questions early this month that she did “not recall any communications I made to help Reserve Trust obtain a master account.” But Mr. Toomey said in a subsequent letter that the president of the Kansas City Fed had told his staff that Ms. Raskin had called personally about the account in 2017.
While the Kansas City Fed has insisted that it followed its protocol in granting Reserve Trust’s master account, and nothing Ms. Raskin did was obviously in breach of government rules, Mr. Toomey has continued to push for more information.
“Important questions about Ms. Raskin’s use of the ‘revolving door’ remain unanswered largely because of her repeated disingenuousness with the committee,” Mr. Toomey said in his statement Tuesday.
Mr. Brown said ahead of the vote that he did not know what the next steps would be if Republicans boycotted. During the committee session, as a dozen Republican chairs sat empty and no formal vote was taken, he pledged to reschedule. Democrats did take a vote to show support, but it was not binding.
“Few things we do as senators will do more to help address our country’s economic concerns more than to confirm this slate of nominees, the most diverse and most qualified slate of Fed nominees ever put forward,” he said, chiding Republicans for skipping out.
“They’re taking away probably the most important tool we have — and that’s the Federal Reserve — to combat inflation,” he later added.
The Fed presently has four governors, and Mr. Powell already has been serving as chair on an interim basis, since his leadership term officially expired earlier this month.
In any case, Ms. Raskin may struggle to pass the full Senate. Winning confirmation would require her to maintain full support from all 50 lawmakers who caucus with Democrats and for all those lawmakers to be present unless she can win Republican votes. Senator Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, has been absent as he recovers from a stroke.
“The Republicans are playing hardball because they can,” said Ian Katz, the managing director at Capital Alpha Partners. “At the least, it delays her confirmation. It could have the ultimate effect of killing it.”
Stocks rose and oil prices sank on Tuesday, after Russia took a step back on its military standoff over Ukraine, easing concerns over disruptions in global energy supplies.
The S&P 500 rose 1.6 percent, rebounding from a drop of 4 percent in the previous three days. Stocks in Europe were also higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 1.4 percent.
Concerns about a potential conflict, which have been growing since Russia amassed troops on Ukraine’s border, have been most evident in energy markets. Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers, and any conflict could disrupt the global oil supply as well as natural gas exports through Ukrainian pipelines that flow to Europe.
Energy prices slid on Tuesday, after the Russian Defense Ministry said it would withdraw some troops from Ukraine’s border but added that some military exercises were continuing. Brent crude, the international standard, fell more than 3 percent on Tuesday, to above $93 a barrel. The price had climbed above $96 on Monday, its highest since 2014. Along with oil prices, shares of energy companies tumbled.
The rising tension in Europe added to an already jittery mood on Wall Street caused by fast-rising prices and the prospect for interest rates increases by the Federal Reserve. The central bank is gearing up to raise borrowing costs to combat persistent inflation, winding down the accommodative policies that have pushed the prices of riskier assets like stocks higher for much of the last two years. Higher-than-expected inflation readings have fueled speculation that the Fed will have to lift interest rates more frequently than previously forecast. The central bank is widely expected to start raising rates in March, at the Fed’s next policy meeting.
Government bond yields have also swung in recent days. On Tuesday, the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose six basis points, or 0.06 percentage points, to 2.05 percent.
“This is only the beginning of a Fed hiking cycle, and investors should expect rate volatility to continue,” Lauren Goodwin, an economist and portfolio strategist at New York Life Investments, wrote in a note. “If inflation remains too high, the Fed will have little choice but to hike faster, but it seems too soon for it to have decided it is moving in that direction.”
The two factors investors are focused on — Ukraine and inflation — aren’t completely disconnected: Rising oil prices have been a major contributor to global inflation. Though investors got a small reprieve on Tuesday, analysts said the worries hanging over them could continue to result in big swings in financial markets for the foreseeable future.
“Risk appetite is still headline-driven over Ukraine and Russia news, and that won’t change for a while,” said Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at OANDA. “Uncertainty over how aggressive the Fed will be over the next couple of policy meetings should keep equities somewhat vulnerable.”
Other factors were at play in Tuesday’s rally, too. Marriott International reported that its profit rose to $468 million in the three months that ended in December, compared with a loss of $164 million a year earlier. The company said that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus caused a temporary setback in its global demand recovery in January, but that new bookings were rebounding to levels seen before the variant’s emergence.
The news lifted Marriott’s shares by 5.8 percent, while other travel and leisure companies were among the best performers in the S&P 500. Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Line were up more than 6 percent, American Airlines rose 8.1 percent, and United climbed 7.6 percent.
Cryptocurrencies, which have remained volatile over the last several months, were trading higher on Tuesday, lifting shares of companies tied to the sector. Bitcoin rose about 4.7 percent to $44,177.04, according to CoinDesk. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, rose 7 percent. HIVE Blockchain Technologies climbed 10.5 percent.
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With tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine — a key transit country for Russian gas — showing few signs of easing, Germany’s new minister for the economy and climate change, Robert Habeck, has begun to raise an issue that was unthinkable just a year or two ago: looking beyond Russia for the country’s natural gas needs.
The government is reviving plans for building a terminal for liquefied natural gas on Germany’s northern coast, Melissa Eddy reports for The New York Times. That proposal, long pushed by Washington, was previously shelved as being too costly. But in recent months, liquefied natural gas, arriving via giant tankers from the United States, Qatar and other locations, has become a vital source of fuel for Europe as supplies piped in from Russia have dwindled.
Europe has more than two dozen L.N.G. terminals, including ones in Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium, but the one proposed for Germany’s coast would be the country’s first.
The government is also considering rules that would require energy companies to maintain a base level of natural gas in reserve.
These moves are in addition to efforts to build more renewable sources of power, such as expanding wind and solar capacities.
Natural gas is an increasingly critical source of energy for Germany. Last year, it accounted for nearly 27 percent of the energy consumed, according to government figures, an increase from 2020 that is expected to continue when the country shutters its last three nuclear power plants in December and works to phase out coal-burning power plants by 2030. And two-thirds of the gas Germany burned last year came from Russia.
Even as Germany tries to become more independent of Russia, Nord Stream 2 is a continuing reminder of a tight relationship. READ THE FULL ARTICLE →
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Tyson Foods, one of the first national employers to mandate Covid vaccines for its workers, is moving to ease mask requirements for its employees as the number of coronavirus cases in the United States falls.
The meatpacking giant said on Tuesday that fully vaccinated workers at “some facilities” could begin to remove their masks at work. It joined companies like Walmart and states like New York that have moved to loosen restrictions in hopes of achieving a new normal in the absence of revised national guidelines.
“Due to our many efforts and, most importantly, our enterprisewide vaccinated status, we’ve seen lower rates of Covid-19 infection, as well as extremely low rates of serious illness at Tyson,” Tom Brower, the company’s senior vice president of health and safety, wrote in a memo to employees.
“And in recent weeks the number of active cases at Tyson has declined significantly,” he added.
A spokesman for Tyson said the company has “had productive and ongoing conversations with union representatives about the policy change.”
Tyson has 120,000 workers in more than a dozen states. The long hours they spend working in tight quarters make them particularly susceptible to the virus. And the company was criticized early in the pandemic for failing to do enough to protect its workers from the coronavirus, which killed more than 100 of its employees.
Slaughterhouses became hot spots for the coronavirus as it spread, posing a serious challenge to meat production. In April 2020, President Donald J. Trump said the slaughtering and processing of beef, chicken and pork was “critical infrastructure,” allowing the plants to remain open despite a growing number of deaths among their workers. The order followed weeks of industry lobbying led by Tyson.
A recent congressional report said that at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, inspectors had observed that many employees were working with “saturated” masks. At a pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, dozens of workers fell ill and three died. Local officials, including the county sheriff, said the company initially refused their requests to shut down the plant in the spring of 2020.
Tyson says it has spent more than $810 million on coronavirus safety measures and new on-site medical services. It conducted plantwide coronavirus testing and hired its first chief medical officer.
In August, the company announced a vaccine requirement for its packing houses and poultry plants, many of which are in the South and Midwest, where resistance to the vaccines has been high. By November, more than 96 percent of its work force was vaccinated.
Tyson defines fully vaccinated as two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson shot, Mr. Brower said Tuesday. The company has hosted more than 100 clinics offering booster shots, he said, and it continues to “strongly encourage” booster shots for employees.
The number of coronavirus cases has declined about 80 percent nationally since its peak in January, to a national average of 155,000 per day, about the same as it was in late December.
Tyson’s easing of its mask rules is conditioned on local and other applicable laws, as well as federal regulations, which require the continued use of masks at certain facilities, depending on the transmission rate, Mr. Brower said. Tyson plans to inform employees soon which plants and offices will be affected by the change.
It is also reviewing — and considering adjusting — guidelines for social distancing and testing.
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In an inconspicuous fashion — via a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, disclosed on Monday that he gave nearly $6 billion worth of the company’s shares to charity last year, instantly propelling him into the upper ranks of philanthropic donors.
But the document gave little information about where he directed his wealth, the DealBook newsletter reports.
Mr. Musk donated just over five million shares in November, according to the filing. Based on the average price of Tesla shares on the days he sold, that is worth roughly $5.7 billion. That would make him the second-biggest donor last year, behind only Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates and their $15 billion in giving, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
In November and December, Mr. Musk sold more than $16 billion worth of shares, much of which was meant to cover tax obligations after he exercised stock options. At the time, he wrote on Twitter that he was likely to pay more than $11 billion in taxes, one of the biggest individual bills in U.S. history. The stock donation could be useful in defraying that bill.
The question is where those shares went. The donation came as Mr. Musk argued with populist lawmakers like Senators Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, about wealth inequality and taxes. Several observers noted that weeks before his donation, Mr. Musk tweeted that he would give $6 billion if the United Nations could prove that money could help solve world hunger. Days afterward, the U.N.’s World Food Program outlined how it would spend $6.6 billion to help avert famine.
Mr. Musk’s other disclosed philanthropic efforts include millions in gifts to Texas municipalities and a $100 million prize for developing technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
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Hosting the Winter Olympics is costing China billions of dollars.
But Beijing has long relied on heavy investments in building railway lines, highways and other infrastructure to provide millions of jobs to its citizens and reduce transportation costs.
With the 2022 Games, it also hopes to nurture an abiding interest in skiing, curling, ice hockey and other winter sports that could increase consumer spending, particularly in the country’s chilly and economically struggling northeast.
Perhaps most important of all to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the Olympics are a chance to demonstrate to the world his country’s unity and confidence under his leadership, Keith Bradsher reports for The New York Times.
“For China’s international image, prestige, and face, as the Chinese would say, nothing is too expensive,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Still, with China’s economy already slowing, and a dimming outlook for global growth, as well as concerns that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus would lead to more shutdowns and choking of global supply chains, Beijing has been wary of spiraling costs. Even Mr. Xi acknowledged the event had to be streamlined, saying last year that the aim was to hold a “simple, safe, splendid” event.
China has set a budget of about $3 billion, a figure that includes the building of competition venues, but not projects like a $1 billion high-speed rail line and a $5 billion expressway.
The pandemic is making the Games even more expensive. The bill for last summer’s Olympics in Tokyo included $2.8 billion in coronavirus prevention costs alone. China’s “zero Covid” strategy, which focuses on eradicating outbreaks, has meant infection control measures are much more elaborate.
China’s concerns about the pandemic have dashed hopes that the Games would draw tourists. READ THE FULL ARTICLE →
Intel said on Tuesday that it had agreed to buy Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion, a deal aimed at accelerating the Silicon Valley giant’s plan to manufacture chips for other companies.
Tower, founded in 1993 and based in Israel, operates chip manufacturing services using factories in that country, the United States, Japan and Italy. It specializes in older production technologies, including those needed to make components used in radio applications.
Intel, by contrast, operates some of the most advanced factories that have mainly produced the microprocessors that the company designs. But under Patrick Gelsinger, who became chief executive last year, the company announced a major push to also manufacture chips designed by others.
That effort is in part a response to surging demand for chips and a global shortage of the components, which has idled car plants and hurt other companies’ production plants. In many cases, the hardest chips to find have been those built in aging factories.
In a conference call, Mr. Gelsinger said adding Tower’s abilities could help the new unit, called Intel Foundry Services, serve a broader array of customers.
“This is an important milestone in our journey as a company,” he said.
With Mr. Gelsinger at the helm, Intel has announced other manufacturing expansions, most recently a move to spend at least $20 billion on a new site in Ohio.
The Tower deal is expected to close in 12 months, the companies said. The Wall Street Journal reported that the companies were in deal talks on Monday.
Regulators are investigating how big banks handle large stock transactions.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent subpoenas to Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to examine their practices around block trades, four people with knowledge of the matter said. They requested anonymity to discuss an active inquiry.
Federal prosecutors in New York are also looking into the practice, three of the people said.
Companies typically arrange block trades via banks when they want to buy or sell a large amount of stock quietly, hoping to minimize sharp price movements. Banks look for buyers or sellers for that big slug of stock, pocketing a fee for their role as middlemen.
The authorities are looking into whether hedge funds or other traders approached by the banks to buy big blocks of stock improperly used the knowledge of that impending trade to make their own trades. In particular, they are investigating whether hedge funds used the information to “short” the shares, one of the people said.
To short a stock is to bet that a stock will decline in price, and make money when it does. While short-selling is legal, using inside information to make the bet is not. Since block trades flood the market suddenly with a large amount of shares, they can depress a stock’s price, even if only temporarily. Prior knowledge of a block trade, therefore, is of concern to authorities.
But proving any wrongful intent in the trading of block shares can be difficult, as banks rarely ask the hedge funds they approach to sign agreements that they won’t act on the information.
The Wall Street Journal reported the news of the investigation on Monday. The Journal reported that securities regulators had been looking into block trading by Goldman, Morgan Stanley and other firms since at least 2019.
Block trades briefly garnered attention last spring when banks made significant transactions on behalf of Archegos, a $10 billion family office, as it imploded. Although prosecutors and securities regulators have been looking into the collapse of Archegos for more than a year, it’s unclear if the latest investigation into block trading is connected to that.
Spokesmen for the S.E.C. and the Department of Justice declined to comment.
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Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide writes that Linus Sebastian is among the online personalities who have figured out that putting their names or faces on products is increasingly a ticket to cashing in on fame.
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The Super Bowl on Sunday night drew the best ratings in five years for the game, with an average of 112.3 million viewers across television and streaming, according to NBCUniversal, which aired the event.
Viewers tuned in for a matchup that had the Los Angeles Rams narrowly prevailing in the final minutes in their home stadium over the Cincinnati Bengals. The halftime show, which highlighted hip-hop for the first time at the event, attracted a bigger audience than the previous year.
Last year’s Super Bowl, which appeared on CBS, tallied 99.7 million viewers across multiple platforms — the smallest audience in years. This year’s game was shown on NBC, Telemundo, Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, NFL Digital platforms and Yahoo Sports. Television viewership on NBC peaked at 104.4 million midway through the game but averaged 99.2 million, up 4 percent from last year.
The halftime concert, with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent, averaged 103.4 million viewers, a 7 percent increase from last year’s performance by the Weeknd. The average ad — there were 81 spots in the national broadcast — reached 106 million viewers, according to data from iSpot.
As more people seek outlets for their pandemic fatigue, National Football League games have accounted for 48 of the 50 most-watched broadcasts in the 2021 regular season, even as the league battles criticism about racism and player injuries.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/15/business/stock-market-economy-news
