Financial Times – Felicia Schwartz and Leila Abboud / Joe Biden says he is prepared to speak to Putin about ending Ukraine war

• US president Joe Biden has said he is “prepared to speak with” Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine if Russia’s leader shows an interest in bringing the nine-month conflict to an end. 
• “I am prepared to speak with Mr Putin if in fact there is an interest in him deciding he is looking for a way to end the war,” Biden said, adding that he would only do so after consulting Nato allies. 
• The remarks, made at a press conference in Washington, DC, during a bilateral summit with French president Emmanuel Macron, mark the furthest Biden has gone in expressing openness to discuss the war with Putin. 
• The US president said he had “no immediate plans” to contact Russia’s leader, adding that he had not seen any indications from Putin that he was willing to bring the war to an end.

Politico – Clea Caulcutt / Trade war averted? Macron gets Biden to ‘tweak’ his industrial subsidies

• French President Emmanuel Macron snatched an unexpected win from his U.S counterpart during a visit to Washington on Thursday, getting Joe Biden to suggest that European companies could benefit from a controversial American subsidies package.
• Fury has been boiling over in Europe after it became clear that Biden's Inflation Reduction Act — a $369 billion package for green industry — could drain investment out of the EU and into the U.S. Big car-making nations like France and Germany had complained that the U.S. law was potentially illegal for discriminating against foreign companies in the electric vehicle sector and encouraging consumers to "Buy American."
• Macron’s visit to the U.S. had been trailed as a doomed last-ditch effort to secure a truce over Washington's largesse before the EU and U.S. would lurch into a subsidy race or full-blown trade war with countervailing tariffs.
• Europeans have been pressing to receive the same rights as Mexicans and Canadians to benefit from the green cash bonanza, but with little prospect of success. For weeks, the French have been campaigning for European partners to agree to their own rival subsidy package, including a “Buy European” component.
• Politico – Mark Scott and Stuart Lau / European Commissioner Thierry Breton pulls out of EU-US summit

The Washington Post – Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett / Trump Mar-a-Lago special master struck down by appeals court

• A federal appeals court panel on Thursday halted an outside review of thousands of documents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, ruling that a lower court judge was wrong to appoint an expert to decide whether any of the material should be shielded from criminal investigators.
• Trump sought the outside arbiter, known as a special master, after the FBI executed a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club, on Aug. 8, retrieving more than 13,000 documents related to Trump’s time in the White House.
• About 100 of the documents were classified, and some contained extremely sensitive government secrets, according to court records.
• The appeals court decision was an emphatic win for the Justice Department, and the latest legal loss for Trump, who has gone to court multiple times to try to stop the government from getting access to records or personal information.
• The Guardian – Martin Pengelly / Democrats get Trump tax returns as Republican House takeover looms

Financial Times – Thomas Hale, Edward White, William Langley and Eleanor Olcott / China’s Covid tsar says fight against virus entering ‘new stage’

• China’s top zero-Covid enforcer says the fight against the virus has entered a “new stage” while state media have downplayed its risks, bolstering expectations that Beijing is easing its anti-pandemic approach just days after a wave of unrest. 
• Vice-premier Sun Chunlan said on Wednesday that the Omicron variant was becoming “less pathogenic” and pointed to higher vaccination rates, even as China recorded tens of thousands of new cases from its biggest outbreak. 
• Sun did not mention the term “dynamic zero-Covid”, a policy that has for nearly three years sought to eliminate all infections through mass testing, quarantine and lockdowns. 
• While the government has stopped short of any explicit policy change, Sun’s comments — which were followed by softer language about the virus in state media on Thursday — build on a decision to ease lockdown restrictions in parts of the southern city of Guangzhou despite high case numbers.
• The Economist / Xi Jinping’s zero-covid policy has turned a health crisis into a political one

Our longer reads for the weekend:

• Foreign Affairs / The Best of Books 2022
• Foreign Policy – Agathe Demarais / Sanctions on Russia are working. Here’s why.
• Project Syndicate – Harold James, Peter Singer, Andrés Velasco, Kenneth Rogoff, Jonathan Levy / The crypto emperor’s new clothes
• Foreign Affairs – Stephen Pomper and Michael Wahid Hanna / How to end Yemen’s forever war