Your Friday Evening Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/briefing/jobs-herschel-walker-nobel.html

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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.

1. The U.S. labor market stayed strong. For some, that’s a bad sign.

The economy added 263,000 jobs in September — slightly cooler than the previous month, but still robust enough to pose a challenge to the Federal Reserve’s attempt to tame inflation. Wages rose 0.3 percent, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent.

Stocks sank 3 percent on the news. The resilient labor market means the Fed will most likely need to keep increasing interest rates, which will raise costs for companies and home buyers.

Game over? The job market until early 2022 was like musical chairs, offering record opportunities for workers to hop from seat to seat. Now many feel that the music is about to stop.

Fuel up: Gasoline prices in the U.S. are creeping higher — averaging $3.89 a gallon nationally — chipping away at a potent election-year talking point for the Biden administration.

2. Activists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The laureates are Memorial, a Russian organization; the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine; and Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarusian activist. They have emerged as challengers to the widespread misinformation and harmful myths disseminated by authoritarian leaders.

The prize was an implicit rebuke to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, on his 70th birthday. His tenure has been punctuated with violent crackdowns on dissidents and critics at home.

From the front lines, our colleague Carlotta Gall interviewed Ukrainian soldiers who are exulting in their smashing of Russian lines in the northeast. After months in the trenches, Ukraine’s forces have now engaged the Russians up close.

In other Ukraine news, President Biden delivered a blunt warning to a group of donors in New York, saying “the prospect of Armageddon” was the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.

3. The Biden administration issued sweeping new limits on the sale of chip technology to China.

The new rules are intended to slow the progress of Chinese military programs, which use advanced computers to build weapons and surveil dissidents.

The export controls bar U.S. companies from selling computing chips, chip-making equipment and other products to China, unless they receive a special license. Companies anywhere in the world will be prohibited from selling China the chips used in artificial intelligence and supercomputing, if they are made with U.S. technology, software or machinery.

The moves are a clear sign of an increasingly tense standoff between the U.S. and China in the technology sector.

New drone rules: President Biden also signed a classified policy limiting counterterrorism drone strikes outside conventional war zones, tightening rules that President Donald Trump had loosened, according to officials.

4. The Justice Department thinks Trump has more documents.

A top official told Donald Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The outreach prompted a rift among Trump’s lawyers about how to respond: One camp counseled a cooperative approach that would include bringing in an outside firm to conduct a further search for documents after a court-authorized search in August of his private club and residence in Florida. Another group advised Trump to maintain a more combative posture. The more combative camp won out, the people briefed on the matter said.

It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Trump still holds.

5. Herschel Walker urged a woman to have a second abortion, she said.

The woman who has said Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, paid for her abortion in 2009 told The New York Times that he urged her to terminate a second pregnancy two years later. They ended their relationship after she refused. She chose to have their son instead.

The woman also disclosed details about her relationship with Walker, who has anchored his campaign by appealing to conservatives as an opponent of abortion. The woman said Walker had barely been involved in their now 10-year-old son’s life, offering little more than court-ordered child support and occasional gifts.

The former football star publicly denied that he knew the woman and called her “some alleged woman” in a radio interview yesterday.

6. The Major League Baseball playoffs began today and the postseason is evolving — for better or worse.

Under the new Wild Card Series, 12 out of 30 major league teams qualify for the playoffs. Eight teams will take part in four best-of-three series, which the two top teams in each league will sit out.

This new arrangement is a product of the 99-day lockout between M.L.B. and the players’ union that led to a collective bargaining agreement in March. The setup was an easy way to generate more revenue — besides selling ad space on uniforms, a tacky cash grab coming next spring — by creating more content for television.

7. A prized Vermeer painting turns out to be fake.

Art historians have long suspected that “Girl With a Flute,” a painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was not an authentic Vermeer. While the museum was closed during the pandemic, experts used powerful new technology to look beneath the painting.

They concluded that the painting was by an imitator — identity unknown — who left the image with a coarse finish, unlike the smooth surfaces that have distinguished Vermeer as one of history’s finest painters. On Saturday, the National Gallery will change the attribution for “Girl With a Flute.” It is a Vermeer no more.

In other art-related news, tomorrow is the anniversary of the birth, and death, of the man who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

8. Argentina is facing a new crisis: a shortage of World Cup stickers.

Every four years, soccer fans around the globe fall hard for the World Cup and its palm-size collectible stickers, known in Argentina as figuritas. This year, however, they are booming like never before. Prices have soared, counterfeits have flooded the market, and the stickers are exceedingly difficult to find.

The culprit is a confluence of supply-and-demand issues, including a domestic inflation crisis and a surge of expectations that Argentina’s team could contend for the trophy later this year. The country’s government, which is battling sky-high inflation and an increasingly fractious society, recently tried to intervene — only to retreat when its efforts were mocked as a waste of resources.

9. Catching peak foliage will be trickier this year.

A trip to see the brilliant fall leaves will require some planning to choose the best time. This year, the height of leaf-peeping season is arriving later and sticking around for a shorter period of time, because of climate change.

Peak colors in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and northern New York will come late, in mid- to late October. Parts of Oregon and Washington will reach their splendor before the end of the month. And from Missouri to Illinois to eastern Kentucky, the bright colors will actually linger longer than usual, holding past the first week of November.

10. And finally, the perfect way to spend 36 hours in New York.

Our travel guide is not intended to help visitors check landmarks off a list, but rather to offer one slice of life in New York, from a subterranean piano bar to market shopping, and some hyperlocal history to bring you a little closer to feeling the gestalt of the city.

This is the first weekly 36 Hours travel guide in more than two years, since the pandemic shut down nearly all travel. We have more destinations to come.

Hope your weekend is full of discovery.

Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing.

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