Top story: ‘An outcome where Tesla can operate at its best’
Hello, it’s Warren Murray helping you ease into the news.
Elon Musk has revealed his ambition to take Tesla private and made an appeal to the faithful: “The future is very bright and we’ll keep fighting to achieve our mission.”
The electric carmaker’s stock rose more than 7% and trading was temporarily suspended after Musk tweeted he had funding in place to take the company private at a price of $420 (£325) per share. Shortly afterwards, Tesla published a message from Musk that had been sent to all employees. It appeared to be triggered by a report in the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia has built up a stake in Tesla worth up to $2.9bn.
Musk, who owns 20% of Tesla, has come under pressure from investors over his irascible antics on Twitter and the company’s disappointing financial results. “I’m trying to accomplish an outcome where Tesla can operate at its best, free from as much distraction and short-term thinking as possible.” Analyst Gene Munster, from venture capital firm Loup Ventures, told Bloomberg: “Our guess is there is a one-in-three chance he can actually pull this off.”
* * *
Midweek catch-up – Let’s get across latest developments …
> Theresa May says Boris Johnson should apologise for saying that women wearing burqas were choosing to “go around looking like letter boxes”. The PM said: “It is absolutely that women should be able to choose how they dress.”
> On the Labour side, leaked papers show the scale of the party’s antisemitism problem. About 70 disciplinary cases are believed to be pending. The party says it is moving to fast-track expulsions.
> A diplomatic row between Canada and Saudi Arabia centres on a Canadian government call for the kingdom to free civil society and women’s rights activists. The Saudis expelled an ambassador and halted Canadian flights by their state airline.
> Rick Gates, former Trump campaign apparatchik, had a secret lover and a flat in London, the trial of his ex-boss Paul Manafort has heard. Gates denied he funded it by skimming the shadowy foreign earnings over which Manafort is on trial.
> Kenneth Umezie, 31, has been charged with murdering Sidique Kamara, a 23-year-old drill rapper from Camberwell, south London, who was stabbed to death in August.
> The UK advertising watchdog has ruled McDonald’s Happy Meals can be advertised during children’s TV shows but banned ads for KFC and Kellogg’s Coco Pops for promoting junk food to young people.
* * *
Best drugs for ADHD – Methylphenidate, aka Ritalin, has been deemed the most effective and safest way of treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. The authors of a major scientific review in the Lancet Psychiatry journal say amphetamine-based medications are best for adults. One of the authors, Professor Emily Simonoff, says the perception that children are being overmedicated for ADHD is not accurate. “The problem in the UK is predominantly about undermedication and underdiagnosis,” she said, and the idea of ADHD medications being a “chemical cosh” was “an unfortunate misapprehension”. The drugs aid normal functioning in parts of the brain that are responsible for planning and organising activities, she explained.
* * *
Argentina’s abortion choice – Argentina’s Senate is due to vote today on whether to legalise abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. It would make it the largest country in Latin America to do so. More than 3,000 women have died in Argentina over the past 25 years as the result of unsafe abortion, according to Amnesty. In a survey earlier this year, about 60% of Argentinians said they supported legalisation. The president, Mauricio Macri, has declared himself “pro-life” but said he would not veto the law if approved by the Senate.
* * *
Caught short – Cafes, restaurants, pubs and shops are being urged to open up their toilets for the general public. The number of public toilets in the UK has slumped by more than a third since the year 2000. Some areas – including Bolsover, Milton Keynes, Redditch and Wakefield – are without a single free public toilet. The British Toilet Association (never knew, did you) has launched its “Use Our Loos” campaign asking businesses to put a sticker out showing their toilets are available to non-customers. The Local Government Association says cash-strapped councils were doing everything they could to maintain public toilets and “finding innovative ways of tackling this issue” – a statement that left the Briefing intrigued.
Lunchtime read: ‘A place for millennials to dream’
Since Ebenezer Howard first envisioned the garden city, Britain’s new towns have had their ups and downs. “I left Telford in the 90s for university and never went back to live there,” writes Paul Walsh. “The town has a shopping centre for a soul that sucked the life out of smaller settlements surrounding it … and the ‘town for the motor age’ was a place where pedestrians were king but cars were gods.
“However, equality and material security prevailed for a long time. Jobs, houses and safety nets made it a place worth living. Most people came from somewhere else, making life if not classless, then class-lite.” Today the dream lingers: Telford’s Nuplace scheme offers private but secure rental homes; there’s a 15,000-panel solar farm; and a community bank provides savings accounts and manageable loans to local people. As towns like Telford reach their middle age, Walsh asks: could they be the places where the millennials deserting London in droves gain a foothold?
Sport
In a stadium suffused with history, and on a night broiling with heat and high expectations, Dina Asher-Smith and Zharnel Hughes produced performances for the ages in Berlin to claim double European 100m glory for Britain. While Jonny May acknowledges a 100m sprint between the fastest wings in rugby union is a fanciful if fascinating idea, it is a safe bet the England international would make the podium if it ever were to happen.
The MCC World Cricket Committee has floated the idea of introducing a “shot clock” to the sport that would cut down the amount of time wasted between balls and overs to counter the slowing pace of matches. England cricketer Ben Stokes was behaving like a “football hooligan” as he punched an Afghanistan war veteran to the floor, a court heard. And a rejuvenated Tiger Woods is eyeing a Ryder Cup spot as he prepares for the US PGA Championship at Bellerive, where victory would earn the American an automatic berth on the US team.
Business
The excitement over Elon Musk’s possible Tesla buyout – which would be the biggest leveraged takeover in history at about $82bn – added froth to Wall Street and some of it washed over to Asian markets where tech stocks were among the biggest gainers. It may never happen of course, but it might be designed to prevent a hostile takeover by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which has built a large stake in the electric carmaker.
The FTSE100 is set to open flat while the pound is buying $1.295 and €1.114.
The papers
There are two dominant stories today: Boris Johnson’s refusal to apologise for his comments about people who wear burqas, and the death of a seven-year-old boy in a suspected arson attack.
The Guardian has both stories on its front page, but splashes with “Johnson should apologise for ‘offensive’ burqa remarks – May”. The Telegraph has “Johnson refuses to back down on burkas”. The i places black bars across the photograph of Johnson’s face so only his eyes are visible, as if wearing a burqa himself, and uses the headline “Tory party leaders turn against Boris”. The Sun (“Joel, 7, never got the chance to be a real fireman”) and the Mail (“Enough to break your heart”) both splash on the death of Joel Urhie and use the same picture of the seven-year-old dressed in a firefighter’s costume.
The FT leads with “Musk drops bombshell with call to take Tesla private for $70bn”, the Express has “I’d bet my £3.6bn EU will give us trade deal” and the Times splashes with “Quarter of HS2 workers on pay deals over £100k”.
Sign up
The Guardian morning briefing is delivered to thousands of inboxes bright and early every weekday. If you are not already receiving it by email, make sure to subscribe.
For more news: www.theguardian.com
