Trump ally Angela Stanton-King loses Georgia House race with less than 15% of the vote

Nikema Williams defeated Angela Stanton-King with almost 84% of the vote for the seat once held by the late Rep. John Lewis

Stephanie Guerilus,
TheGrio•November 4, 2020

Nikema Williams defeated Angela Stanton-King in a landslide victory in the race for the late Congressman John Lewis’ seat in Georgia.

Williams won the seat with 85.1% of votes to Stanton’s 14.9%, The New York Times reports. The landslide victory was by a margin of 71%. It wasn’t a close contest despite the oversized importance it had after Lewis‘s death in July from pancreatic cancer at the age of 80. The Georgia lawmaker had served in the House of Representatives since 1987.

Democrats chose Williams to run for the 5th Congressional district after Lewis passed. Georgia’s 39th district senator campaigned on a platform of “good trouble,” invoking Lewis’ creed and promising to “protect his legacy.” She vowed to fight for Medicare for All, universal family care, and against rampant voter suppression tactics.

(Credit: Georgia State Senate, Getty Images and Stanton-King)

“I’m committed to fighting for you and I’m committed to bringing your voices with me to the halls of Congress,” she said in a campaign ad she tweeted to supporters last month

Stanton-King, a staunch Republican and founder  of the American King Foundation, blasted the Democrats for what she believed was poor leadership. She pilloried the party for fostering an environment of lawlessness and accused Williams of feeling “entitled” to the seat. Stanton-King’s platform prioritized a pro-life agenda and her support of President Donald Trump.

Both women were less than impressed with the other, resulting in no debates taking place between them. Williams said she wouldn’t agree to one as she believed that Stanton-King was spreading lies on social media.

“I’m not going to give her a platform,” Williams said in October. “I’m not going to legitimize her candidacy.”

Stanton-King blasted Williams for being “afraid to face me.”

Ultimately, voters resonated more with Williams’ message and helped her rout Stanton-King on Election Day.

“WE DID IT! Thank you for your support — I would have never been able to do it without you,” the Georgia state senator tweeted Wednesday.

“This seat does not belong to me, it belongs to the people. And I’m ready to fight #OutLoudAndOnPurpose for the people of #GA5! Now let’s get in some #GoodTrouble y’all!”

Stanton-King acknowledged her loss but cast blame on the media and possible cheating for her defeat.

“I’m grateful for the love & support shown to me on this campaign Woman running I was in an uphill battle from the start. But even w/ bias media, an opponent refusing to debate, & a water main break in the only room that holds the ballots, the world still knows my name! The fight continues,” she tweeted.

Senator Nikema Williams

@NikemaWilliams

US House candidate, GA-5

1/2 I am the little girl who grew up in rural Alabama in a home with no indoor plumbing and no running water. I am a mom, a wife, a State Senator, and your next Congresswoman.

9:32 AM · Oct 9, 2020

510

137 people are Tweeting about this

Senator Nikema Williams

@NikemaWilliams

US House candidate, GA-5

WE DID IT! Thank you for your support -- I would have never been able to do it without you. This seat does not belong to me, it belongs to the people. And I'm ready to fight #OutLoudAndOnPurpose for the people of #GA5! Now let's get in some #GoodTrouble y'all!

11:28 PM · Nov 3, 2020

1.5K

268 people are Tweeting about this

Angela Stanton King 

@theangiestanton

US House candidate, GA-5

I know the world hears him

ANGELA STANTON KING I love the support this man and his administration has given me over the last year! This is truly what makes America Great! @realdonaldtrump is My forever President

#stantonkingforcongress

10:49 AM · Nov 2, 2020

729

The post Trump ally Angela Stanton-King loses Georgia House race with less than 15% of the vote appeared first on TheGrio.

REACTIONARY EXTREMIST

Bannon's lawyer drops him after comments suggesting Fauci should be beheaded

Brendan Morrow,
The Week•November 6, 2020


President Trump's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who was arrested over the summer for alleged fraud, has lost his lawyer after suggesting that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.

Lawyer William Burck on Friday "abruptly moved to drop" Bannon as a client after the former Trump strategist suggested violence against Fauci and Wray, The New York Times reports. Burck reportedly did not provide an explanation as to why he was doing so. A judge will have to approve change, the Times notes.

"Mr. Bannon is in the process of retaining new counsel," a letter to the court reportedly said.

The move came after Bannon said during his online show that Trump should fire Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Wray, director of the FBI, at the start of a second term should he win re-election, and then suggested he would like both to be killed.

"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England," Bannon said. "I'd put the heads on pikes. Right? I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

Twitter has also permanently suspended Bannon's show's account over the remarks, while YouTube removed a video of the comments for violating its policy against "inciting violence," CNN reports.

Bannon was arrested and hit with charges in August for allegedly defrauding donors to an online "Build the Wall" fundraising campaign. He has pleaded not guilty.

Fauci has spoken out about receiving death threats against him and his family during the COVID-19 pandemic, telling 60 Minutes in October that the "very fact that a public health message to save lives triggers such venom and animosity to me that it results in real and credible threats to my life and my safety" is "sad."

Wisconsin Republicans caught apparently encouraging voter fraud in Pennsylvania

Jeva Lange,
The Week•November 6, 2020


President Trump raged on Wednesday that he wants "all voting to stop." But emails obtained by The Daily Beast and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed Friday that it was Republican Party officials in Wisconsin who have allegedly been urging their volunteers to call Pennsylvanians and implore them to send in late — and therefore illegal — votes. "That would be exactly what the president and his campaign are accusing Democrats of doing," one legal expert observed to The Daily Beast.

The email was sent by a group called Kenosha For Trump around 5 p.m. on Thursday. "Trump Victory urgently needs volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots," the email read. The scheme seemed aimed to take advantage of a ruling in the state that said absentee ballots received by 5 p.m. on Friday must be counted — so long as they were properly postmarked by Election Day.

"[B]allots received by that point without postmarks, or with illegible postmarks, will be considered to have been mailed in time 'unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day,'" the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, adding that "in Pennsylvania, postage is prepaid on some ballot envelopes. These prepaid envelopes are not automatically postmarked." The idea appeared to be to slip votes through by the Friday deadline in order to swing margins in the state back in Trump's favor, although Ben Geffen, an attorney at the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, mused to The Daily Beast, "I wonder if they’re doing this in hopes of slipping one through and then waving it around as an example of the flawed process."

Either way, experts agreed the plan was exceedingly dumb. "This seems deeply stupid as it seems to be a solicitation to commit voter fraud," Richard Hasen, an elections law specialist, told the Journal Sentinel. "It's hard to believe this is real."

Report on disgraced ex U.S. cardinal McCarrick out Nov. 10: Vatican

U.S. Cardinal McCarrick arrives for a meeting at the Synod Hall in the Vatican

By Philip Pullella Reuters•November 6, 2020

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican said on Friday that its long-awaited report into disgraced ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick will be released on Tuesday.

Vatican sources told Reuters on Thursday that the report was imminent and would be released before the start of the annual meeting of American bishops Nov. 16-17

Pope Francis expelled McCarrick from the Roman Catholic priesthood last year after a Vatican investigation found him guilty of sexual crimes against minors and adults and abuse of power.


The report, which is several hundred pages long, is expected to show how McCarrick managed to rise through the ranks even though his history of sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians was an open secret.

In 2018, the pope ordered a thorough study of all documents in Holy See offices concerning McCarrick. The four U.S. dioceses where he served - New York, Metuchen, Newark, and Washington, D.C. - carried out separate investigations to feed into the Vatican report.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said on his website that the report "could be another black-eye for the Church ... but better that the story come out, in all its awful detail."

Dolan, whose archdiocesan review board in 2018 was the first to find that allegations against McCarrick were "credible and substantiated," said he hoped the report will "bring some measure of peace to the victim-survivors, as well as serve as a lesson on how to prevent a similar recurrence in the future".

Horrified by deadly attacks, French Muslims protect church

ANGELA CHARLTON,
Associated Press•November 6, 2020

This photo take on Oct. 29, 2020 shows a group of Muslim volunteers protecting the Saint-Fulcran cathedral In Lodeve, southern France. A group of French Muslims stood guard outside the Saint-Fulcran Cathedral in Lodeve for the All Saints' holiday, to protect it from eventual violence and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers. Many welcomed the initiative, organized by local residents as a gesture of peace after a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in the French city of Nice. (Alain Mendez via AP)


PARIS (AP) — As a French-born Muslim, Elyazid Benferhat’s stomach turned when he heard about a deadly Islamic extremist attack on a church in Nice. Then he decided to act.

A self-described man of peace and pragmatism, Benferhat and a friend gathered a group of young Muslim men to stand guard outside their town's cathedral for the All Saints’ holiday weekend, to symbolically protect it and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers.

Parishioners at the 13th-century church in the southern town of Lodeve were deeply touched. The parish priest said their gesture gave him hope in a time of turmoil.

Benferhat, speaking with a distinctive southern French accent, identified himself as “more French than anything.” While his mother was born in Algeria, he was born in France and grew up speaking only French. “But I am also Muslim ... and we have seen Islamophobia in this country, and terrorism,” he told The Associated Press.

“In recent years, I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” because every time Islamic extremist violence strikes France, he said, French Muslims face new stigmatization, even though “we had nothing to do with it.”

He called the beheading of a teacher near Paris last month — targeted because he showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for a debate on free expression — an act of “unbelievable, unprecedented cruelty.”

Then when three people were killed last Thursday in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice, Benferhat said he was so sickened that he wanted to do something “so that everyone wakes up.”

Benferhat, who works for French oil company Total and coaches at a local football club, talked to a Muslim friend who was in Nice that day, “and we had this idea. We needed to do something beyond paying homage to the victims. We said, we will protect churches ourselves.”

They recruited volunteers among their friends and at his football club, and guarded the church that night and again for Sunday Mass. He said they also coordinated with local police, after France’s government promised to increase security at sensitive religious sites.

“It’s very good, these young people who are against violence,” the cathedral’s priest, the Rev. Luis Iniguez, told the AP.

When a local newspaper published a photo of parishioners posing with their Muslim guards, Iniguez hung it inside the Gothic cathedral, which serves as an anchor for town life. “People were happy to see that,” he said, especially amid recent concerns about tensions between France and the Muslim world, on top of ongoing fears of the virus.

The small-town gesture drew national attention, and with it, online invective from some far-right voices.

But Benferhat said the response has been “90% positive.”

His group is considering how to take the idea forward, and would like to do it again for Christmas, and for other towns to follow Lodeve’s lead. But for now all religious services in France are banned at least until Dec. 1 to try to slow fast-rising virus infections.

Whatever he does next, he says, “it will come from the heart.”

Attacks in France Point to a Threat Beyond Extremist Networks

Norimitsu Onishi, Constant Méheut and Layli Foroudi,
The New York Times•November 6, 2020

A makeshift memorial at the the Notre-Dame basilica the day after a Tunisian migrant killed three people there with a knife before lunging at police officers while yelling, "Allahu akbar," in Nice, France, Oct. 30, 2020. (Mauricio Lima/The New York Times)Less

PARIS — All were unknown to police intelligence officials. None pledged allegiance to a terrorist group, and no group claimed them as members. None stated any political agenda. Signs of radicalization, if at all visible, were expressed on social media. And they came armed with little more than knives.

The three young men behind recent terrorist attacks that have shaken France present a difficult challenge to French authorities — isolated, self-radicalized individuals rather than Islamist extremist networks — raising tough questions about whether the broad measures the government has taken in response are the right ones.

Unattached to any group, harder to track and with an often obscured, hair-trigger propensity for violence that needs just the right spark, they are a far cry from the well-orchestrated and synchronized assaults in the wave of terrorism that swept France a half-decade ago. Involving sophisticated planning and weapons, the past attacks killed and injured hundreds and were claimed by the Islamic State group and an al-Qaida affiliate.

They were also different from this week’s attack in Vienna, which was carried out in the name of the Islamic State by an Austrian national already convicted of trying to join the organization in Syria.

“It’s a personal jihad, religious and without demands,” said Bernard Squarcini, a former head of the French domestic intelligence services, adding that France was confronted with “a new generation” of Islamist extremists.

In the past year, all seven Islamist extremist attacks in France, including the most recent three, have been carried out by individuals unknown to the intelligence services, who used unsophisticated weapons and had no clear links to terrorist groups, said Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research organization.

The latest, Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, arrived late last month in the southern city of Nice just weeks after leaving Tunisia with other migrants on a boat from his hometown, the port city of Sfax. Armed only with a knife, he killed three people at the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice before lunging at police officers while yelling, “Allahu akbar.” Hospitalized with serious wounds and also suffering from COVID-19, he has yet to be interrogated.

In his hometown, family and friends said that Aouissaoui migrated to Europe looking for better opportunities. After dropping out of school, he did odd jobs, went to clubs, drank and smoked hashish. In the past year, he grew more serious and started to pray, though family and friends said he showed no signs of radicalization.

“He spoke like everyone else in the neighborhood. He is not someone politicized. He didn’t talk about political parties or anything,” said Karim Hamzi, a friend of Aouissaoui. “He would just say, ‘This country is going into a wall. The best thing to do in this country is to leave.’”

Following the collapse of the Islamic State in Syria, this new generation of extremists has emerged in a “jihadist atmosphere” prevalent on some social media sites and around some European cities, said Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist who is an expert on Islam and the Arab world.

In an environment that emphasizes “cultural ruptures” — pitting a radical, Salafist Islam against the West but also against moderate brands of Islam — these young men become radicalized, he said, and will act with the right spark.

“Without this atmosphere, there wouldn’t be a spark,” Kepel said. “Without a spark, there wouldn’t be an attack, either.”

In the recent attacks, the spark was the republication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which led to huge protests overseas, including in Pakistan. Kepel said that videos showing protesters “brandishing enormous knives” appeared to have influenced the man behind the first attack.

According to French authorities, Zaher Hassan Mahmood, a 25-year-old man who arrived in France from Pakistan several years ago to look for work, repeatedly watched such videos before buying a butcher knife and stabbing two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Sept. 25.

News of the stabbing appeared to push into action an 18-year-old refugee of Chechen descent, Abdoullakh Anzorov, who grew up in France and in recent months had become active on extremist social media sites. On the same day of the stabbing, Anzorov began looking for the addresses of individuals who had offended Islam, according to an analysis of his deleted Twitter account by Le Monde.

Eventually, he settled on a middle school teacher whose showing of Charlie Hebdo caricatures in a class on freedom of expression had angered many Muslim parents and students. Armed with a knife and two pellet guns, he beheaded the teacher, Samuel Paty, on Oct. 16.

“In these last three attacks, there’s an absence of political demand but just a religious demand,” Wassim Nasr, a journalist specializing on the jihadi movement and an author of a book on the Islamic State, said, adding that the assailants were “fanatics” rather than “jihadists.”

The religious anger, stemming from the republication of the caricatures, has enlarged the pool of potential terrorists, Nasr said, adding that it played into the jihadi movement’s narrative that all Muslims are concerned by their fight.

But instead of acknowledging the exclusively religious fanaticism behind the attacks, the French government has given them a political dimension, he said.

“That becomes counterproductive,” he said.

The French government has said that the main threat comes from “Islamist separatism,” what it describes as a homegrown radical Islamist network that has mounted a challenge to France’s strict secularism. In response to the recent attacks, French authorities have cracked down on Muslim individuals and organizations they have described as Islamist.

Olivier Roy, a political scientist at the European University Institute in Florence and a specialist in Islam, said that the French government’s response was inappropriate given the new nature of the threat.

“The government’s mistake is to think that this type of radicalization, which seems almost mystical to me, is the result of a religious indoctrination,” he said.

But Brisard of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism said, “They act alone, but they’re not disconnected.”

To fight this new wave of terrorists, France must eradicate extremist networks, which are “natural and logical intermediaries in the process that leads to violence,” and widen France’s intelligence-gathering capacity by involving the local police and officials, he added.

Squarcini, the former head of domestic intelligence, said that tracking individuals with no links to terrorist groups posed a new challenge to the country’s intelligence services, adding that they must now try to understand signals mostly on social media.

“We need to sort it out intelligently and perform a finer analysis,” he added. “We’re less good at doing that.”

It was not clear how Aouissaoui, the Tunisian behind the attack in Nice, arrived in France.

After leaving Sfax on Sept. 19 on a boat with other migrants, he spent several weeks on a ship used by Italian authorities to quarantine arrivals to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, family and friends said.

Ahmed Tahri, 25 and from Sfax, shared a room with Aouissaoui on the ship but was sent back to Tunisia. He said that Aouissaoui mostly kept to himself aboard the ship.

“He would wake up in the morning, pray, eat,” Tahri recalled, adding that Aouissaoui often borrowed his phone to call home, occasionally read the Quran and exercised in their room.

A close friend in Sfax, Ahmed Kiid, said that in calls from the ship Aouissaoui did not speak about politics — only about his plans to go to France, where he said he could find work and other people from Sfax.

“He wanted a car, a smartphone like other people his age,” said his mother, Gamra, who told him not to go.

She and other family members spoke on the veranda of their home in a neighborhood where broken bricks and tiles littered a dusty road. They said that Aouissaoui used to sleep in the living room with several of his nine siblings.

Aouissaoui left Tunisia without informing his family, only calling from Italy. After getting off the quarantine ship, he worked on an olive farm and bought new clothes and the smartphone he wanted so badly, his family and friends said.

On his Facebook account, he posted a photo of himself posing with his new phone. A line above the photo read, “Allah knows that we are not here for this mortal world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M
The Second Breakup of AT&T

Scott Moritz
Fri, November 6, 2020


(Bloomberg) -- AT&T Inc. has been called many things over its 135-year history: Ma Bell, monopoly, media conglomerate.

The company, which traces its roots to the patent rights of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was the dominant phone company for much of the 20th century. So dominant, in fact, that it was broken up in 1982 as part of an agreement with antitrust authorities. But those businesses eventually began to merge, culminating with SBC Communications — one of the so-called Baby Bells — acquiring AT&T in 2005 and taking the name.

That wasn’t the end of it. What followed was a streak of deal-making that turned AT&T into a new behemoth spanning television, media and advertising. After a failed attempt to acquire T-Mobile, the company bought satellite-TV provider DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion, becoming the biggest provider of pay television. It purchased Time Warner in 2018 for $85 billion, making Ma Bell the improbable parent company of HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. and DC Comics. The carrier also made smaller deals, such as the 2018 acquisition of AppNexus, an online ad platform.


And once again, AT&T was too big.

This time around, it isn’t the government pushing to slim down the company — though the Justice Department did unsuccessfully oppose the Time Warner deal — but its own investors and Chief Executive Officer John Stankey.

Stankey took the helm in July, putting him in charge of a company with heavy debt and a media business that was ravaged by the pandemic. AT&T also was shunted to No. 3 in the wireless-phone business this year, following T-Mobile US Inc.’s acquisition of Sprint Corp. The company had just launched HBO Max, an attempt to take on Netflix Inc. and Walt Disney Co. in streaming, but perhaps the most urgent matter was undoing some of the work of his predecessor.

The last CEO, Randall Stephenson, had spent much of his 13-year tenure obsessed with deals. He kept a color-coded roster of potential companies he wanted AT&T to buy, leading to 43 acquisitions.

Now Stankey has his own to-do list: things he wants to sell.

“It’s going to keep us busy for a little bit of time.”

Critics such as activist investor Elliott Management Corp. have urged AT&T to focus on its subscriber services and walk back its go-big-or-go-home M&A strategy by divesting acquisitions, including DirecTV.

“When you look at what’s worked or hasn’t worked in telecom, you see that conglomerates and empire building has not been rewarded by the marketplace,” said Todd Lowenstein, chief equity strategist with the Private Bank at Union Bank.

Stankey, who has spent his entire 35-year career at AT&T, may be an unlikely person to dismantle AT&T’s acquisition empire. He rode shotgun as a top captain during Stephenson’s decade of agglomeration. The executive had a hand in creating some of the current problems and he calls them out directly: Last month, he acknowledged that pay-TV providers like DirecTV will probably face years of cord cutting before they hit bottom.

Now, more than 100 days into the job, he says his plan of attack is to focus on three key growth areas: wireless — particularly 5G — where there’s hope for new consumer and business applications; fiber-optic network connections to accommodate surging data traffic; and HBO Max, the online streaming future of AT&T’s video ambitions.

As for new acquisitions, don’t expect much beyond opportunistic purchases, Stankey said in an interview in September. “Right now this management team is focused on getting execution right and moving the distractions elsewhere,” he said. “It’s going to keep us busy for a little bit of time.”

Last month, AT&T got $1.1 billion for its stake in Central European Media Enterprises. The company has already sold office buildings and a stake in Disney’s streaming service Hulu. It also got nearly $2 billion from the sale of its Puerto Rico phone business earlier this month.

The company is aiming to pay down debt and cut $6 billion in annual costs, partly through slashing thousands of jobs.

But AT&T still has plenty of potential businesses to sell or scale back. The question now is how big an asset sale it wants to have — and who may be interested in buying.

DirecTV

The biggest priority is DirecTV and AT&T’s other pay-TV operations, which have been hemorrhaging customers. AT&T has been exploring options for DirecTV for more than a year, but finding a buyer for the whole business seems unlikely.

A combination with Dish Network Corp., the nation’s other satellite-TV provider, is one scenario. But reducing the industry to a single player would draw antitrust scrutiny, especially since rural customers have few other options. A proposed combination of the two businesses was shot down by the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department in 2002.Instead, AT&T is trying to sell a stake — and possibly control of the business — to outside investors. a move that could take some of the drag off AT&T’s performance. But the ice cube is melting fast: Pay-TV revenue fell by more than $1 billion, or 10%, in the third quarter.

Apollo Global Management Inc. has been in discussions about such a transaction. And Bloomberg News reported this week that former Citigroup Inc. rainmaker Michael Klein could do a deal through his blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp. IV. Ideally, an agreement would let AT&T remove DirecTV from its books while maintaining access to some of its cash flow.

But a deal is expected to value DirecTV at only about $15 billion when final bids are accepted next month. That's less than a third of the price AT&T paid five years ago.

Vrio

AT&T’s DirecTV Latin America business suffers some of the same problems as the U.S. operations, only with an even more erratic political backdrop. The 2015 acquisition of DirecTV included satellite businesses in South America and the Caribbean — an entity that was renamed Vrio. The unit’s biggest problem was its Venezuela pay-TV business. During the country’s political turmoil, the service was shut down after getting caught between U.S. restrictions and the local government.

AT&T tried but failed to spin off part of Vrio in an initial public offering. Then, after reducing the size and price of the offer, AT&T abandoned the move. For the past two years, the falling value of the satellite-TV business has made prospects of unloading the business even dimmer.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Unlike some of its businesses, AT&T’s video-game division would be a prized asset for a number of potential buyers. The company has reportedly explored a sale of the operations, which are estimated to be worth $4 billion. But AT&T recently pulled the business off a list of noncore assets that it's willing to part with.

The unit, whose video games include titles like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Mortal Kombat 11, attracted interest from several major companies. But with the gaming industry booming during the pandemic — and AT&T facing the complications of wanting to retain licensing rights — the company may have decided the division was worth keeping for itself.

Crunchyroll

The animation video service was the first step in AT&T’s massive pivot to media six years ago. Crunchyroll was acquired through the company’s newly formed joint venture with the Chernin Group, called Otter Media. The name is derived from the abbreviation OTT, for content delivered via the internet “over the top” of a traditional platform. Since then, just “streaming” has become the more popular term.

AT&T bought out the remaining stake in Otter Media from the Chernin Group in 2018. More recently, the telecom giant has had second thoughts. Last week, the Nikkei business daily reported that Sony Corp. was in final talks to acquire the service in a deal worth close to $1 billion.

CNN

CNN is one of the more controversial businesses that AT&T acquired when it absorbed WarnerMedia in 2018, with the president regularly assailing the cable-news network on social media. It's also been the source of takeover speculation, with Jeff Bezos seen as a potential buyer. But Stankey said in September that CNN was one of the pieces of the WarnerMedia structure that are “more tightly wound together than they were before.” In other words, selling it would seem less likely.

Xandr

AT&T had high hopes for the AppNexus digital advertising unit it acquired for $1.6 billion in 2018. Named in a nod to Alexander Graham Bell, Xandr was going to be an advertising network that all pay-TV providers could use. Ad-industry veteran Brian Lesser was hired to run the operation, and Stephenson told investors that the business would bring in $2 billion in new revenue by using customer data to deliver targeted ads.

Those fortunes didn’t materialize. Lesser left, and now it’s up for sale as new WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar brings in another ad team.

Regional Sports Networks

AT&T has four regional sports networks, or RSNs, which include rights to teams such as hockey’s Pittsburgh Penguins, basketball’s Houston Rockets and baseball’s Seattle Mariners.

Though live sports are still the closest thing to must-see TV these days, owning RSNs has increasingly become a headache. Sports leagues have sought ever-increasing sums for rights to their games, and subscribers aren’t as reliable as they once were. Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. just wrote down its RSNs by $4.23 billion, an admission that it overpaid for the cable channels, which it only acquired last year.

Looking for cash to pay down debts, AT&T had hoped to sell its RSNs and cash in on their $1 billion in estimated value. The company sought bids last year, but a buyer didn’t materialize. This year, with sports still trying to bounce back from Covid-19, a sale seems even less likely.

Digital Life

In a bold attempt to take on home-security giant ADT Inc., AT&T launched its own “smart home” security and monitoring venture in 2013. While the effort was intended to explore opportunities beyond its wireless service, the timing and model may have been wrong. Homeowners were already moving away from expensive security services and buying do-it-yourself systems or products like Ring from Amazon.com Inc. or Nest from Alphabet Inc. Four years into the venture, AT&T started looking for ways to get out.

AT&T Mexico

Stephenson crossed borders and ended a decadeslong friendship with his onetime mentor Carlos Slim by becoming a direct competitor for mobile customers in Mexico. AT&T bought wireless carrier Grupo Iusacell SA for $2.5 billion in 2015 and expanded the service to cover most of Mexico by 2018. But Covid-19, foreign-exchange rates and the dominance of rival America Movil in Mexico has kept the investment unprofitable and difficult to justify.

“It’s going to keep us busy for a little bit of time.”

So what does Stankey do now? Holding out to get top dollar for some of these assets might not be the right approach, said Colby Synesael, an analyst at Cowen.

Stankey just needs to “rip the Band-Aid off and move on,” Synesael said. In other words, take what he can get.

“I think it has become obvious to him that he needs to do it. And the sooner he does it the better,” Synesael said. “He doesn’t want to spend his entire CEO tenure undoing what he and Randall did in the past. Get it done now so he can concentrate on other initiatives.”


©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Shell to Shut Louisiana Refinery After Failing to Find a Buyer

Barbara Powell
Thu, November 5, 2020, 



(Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc will begin shutting its Convent refinery in south Louisiana mid-month while it continues to seek a buyer for the facility, part of a plan to reduce its global sites and focus on combined oil refining and chemical plants.

With global demand and profits stung by the spread of Covid-19, the shutdown of 53-year-old Convent, which has about 675 employees, is part of Shell’s larger strategy to shrink its portfolio to six facilities from 14 by 2025, Shell said in a statement. The remaining sites will have integrated oil refineries and chemical plants.

Shell plans to “invest in a core set of uniquely integrated manufacturing sites that are also strategically positioned for the transition to a low-carbon future,” according to a statement Thursday. “A key advantage of these core sites will also come from further integration with Shell trading hubs, and from producing more chemicals and other products that are resilient in a low-carbon future.”


The decision to shut the 211,100 barrel-a-day Convent facility comes amid a spate of refinery closures in the U.S. from operators including Marathon Petroleum Corp. and Phillips 66, with some sites permanently shutting and others being converted into renewable diesel plants. Shell is trying to sell operations in Puget Sound in Washington and Saraland, Alabama. The company completed a sale of its Martinez refinery in the San Francisco Bay area to PBF Energy earlier this year.

In September, Shell said it would retain six facilities that have both an oil refinery and chemical operations, including Norco in Louisiana and Deer Park in Texas, Rheinland in Germany, Pernis in the Netherlands, Pulau Bukom in Singapore and Scotford in Canada.

In Louisiana, Shell will retain its refinery and chemical sites in Norco and Geismar, its midstream infrastructure assets, branded retail presence, Gulf of Mexico operations and offices in New Orleans.

The so-called crack spread, which measures the difference between gasoline and diesel over West Texas Intermediate, was trading around $8.75 a barrel Thursday, down from $14.67 at the same time last year.

U.S. Shale Oil Industry May Never Regain Peak

U.S. crude oil production hit a record high of 13.1 million barrels per day as recently as mid-March, but total output since has tumbled to 11 million bpd. (©Dave Cutler)

GILLIAN RICH 06/25/2020

The biggest-ever shutdown of U.S. shale oil production sets the stage for another historic feat: turning it back on again. But for battered oil stocks, reopening the taps is the tricky part.

Shut-ins, or the closing off of wells, will hit U.S. production for years to come. So will recent halts in new drilling. The immediate fallout is clear. After hitting a record high of 13.1 million barrels per day as recently as mid-March, total U.S. crude oil production has tumbled to 11 million bpd.

Some shale oil industry leaders warn of permanent damage. Geology and Wall Street may determine the long-term effects.

"This is an unprecedented downturn," said EOG Resources (EOG) CEO Bill Thomas in an earnings call last month, a few weeks after oil prices went negative for the first time. "U.S. oil production is in severe decline, and it could take years for domestic production to turn around. We believe that the historic and prolific oil production growth by U.S. shale may have been forever altered."

Shale oil stocks have defied doomsayers before and have helped the U.S. achieve once unthinkable feats. Shale producers boosted U.S. oil production over that of Saudi Arabia and made the U.S. a net oil exporter again.

But massive economic collapse in the global coronavirus recession triggered widespread well shut-ins. The U.S. presidential election is also a concern for independent oil companies. Democratic nominee Joe Biden has outlined aggressive clean energy goals and plans to curtail new fracking permits.

The boom times for shale, and perhaps oil stocks, may be over.

Individual well shut-ins for days and weeks at a time are routine. They usually happen to perform maintenance or to fix a problem with a fracking job. Oil companies also shut in wells in times of low oil prices, such as during the Saudi price war of 1986.

But that was before the shale oil boom. The body of knowledge on prolonged shut-ins of shale wells is thin vs. conventional wells, adding to the uncertain outlook for reopening thousands of wells today.

Moreover, the scale of what's going on now is unprecedented, IHS Markit said in a May report, calling it the "Great Shut-In." The market tracker estimated 1.75 million bpd of existing U.S. oil production would be gone by early June. Other analysts have forecasts above 2 million.

"Not even the United States' huge network of storage facilities and associated infrastructure was enough of a buffer for a crisis on this scale," said Raoul LeBlanc, vice president of financial services at IHS Markit, in a statement. "Negative oil prices and the collapse of WTI futures contracts were a potent signal that stronger measures, namely shut-ins, were needed to curb oversupply."

ConocoPhillips (COP) alone is shutting in more than 2,000 wells. S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that Conoco's shut-in production will total 420,000 barrels per day in June.

The market tracker sees Exxon Mobil (XOM) shutting in 320,000 bpd and Chevron 240,000. Among top shale oil stocks, Continental Resources (CLR) will shut in an estimated 140,000 bpd of production in June, and EOG Resources about 100,000.

IHS expects 500,000 bpd will stay off the market long term, until U.S. oil prices are above $50 per barrel again. That will likely take years. The Energy Information Administration sees U.S. oil prices averaging just $35.14 this year and $43.88 in 2021.

IHS sees most of the rest of the production coming back by the summer and fall. But a timeline of several months means trouble for shale wells.

A short shut-in may help a well come back even stronger. In its Q1 earnings call, EOG Resources said that when wells restarted, oil production increased for an average of 23 days before falling back to a typical decline rate.

But wells can suffer permanent damage in longer shut-ins.

"When you're talking about 30 days vs. 60 days vs. 90 days, there's a problem," Lyle Lehman, founder of fracking consulting firm Frac Diagnostics, told IBD.

Most of the damage during a well shut-in occurs between 30 and 60 days, he says. The geology of U.S. shale fields makes the wells especially susceptible to damage after prolonged shut-ins.

Shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock with very low permeability. That means the liquids and so-called proppants, like sand or ceramics, that are used to crack open shale will remain stuck in the well, causing damage to the rock fractures from which oil normally would flow.

But EOG's CEO was unconcerned when speaking to analysts in May.

"On these shale wells, there's absolutely no damage when you shut them in and bring them back on for ­— whether it's two weeks or two months," Thomas said. "We feel very confident about that."

The good news for shale oil stocks is that the Permian Basin, where the vast majority of U.S. drilling activity is concentrated, has better geologic traits than other formations do.

Lehman says that the Haynesville field in east Texas and southwestern Arkansas has the worst permeability. The Bakken formation in North Dakota is in the middle, and the Permian is near the top.

But none of the plays have such great permeability that damage from shut-ins would be minimal, he warns. Such damage can hasten a well's rate of decline. More oil will be left in the ground and unrecoverable — unless more invasive and expensive methods are used.

In west Texas, the output decline rate on shale wells is already steep, at about 40% a year, according to Lehman. After shut-in damage, a reopened well could see that annual decline rate worsen to 48%.

Because shale oil wells decline quickly, companies must keep drilling new wells just to keep output from falling. During the boom years of shale oil stocks, banks were eager to offer loans, stoking production growth. That's changing now.

"Will money pour back into the sector? It's a very, very capital-intensive sector. And we don't think that's going to be the case," Energy Aspects Chief Oil Analyst Amrita Sen told Bloomberg TV in May.

If lending remains tight, "Shale growth will really never go back to a million barrels per day again," she added, echoing EOG's CEO. "You're going to look at 200,000 to 300,000 barrels per day growth. So it's a paradigm shift for now."

Meanwhile, shale oil stocks are dealing with the hangover from those debt-happy years. Low crude prices and slashed production mean little cash is coming in.

Some producers have already sought bankruptcy protection. In April, Whiting Petroleum (WLL) filed for bankruptcy. And in May, Chesapeake Energy (CHK) and Oasis Petroleum (OAS) warned about their ability to stay in business.

If U.S. oil prices stay at $30 per barrel, 70 companies could file for bankruptcy, Rystad Energy has predicted. And if oil falls to $20 per barrel, that number could double to 140.

Even when U.S. oil prices climb back toward 2019 levels, "very few" shale producers will be able to expand production because of their high debt levels, Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) CEO Scott Sheffield said on an investor call in May.

Some shale production has continued despite low oil prices, especially when companies have lease contracts that require them to continue pumping no matter what. Diamondback Energy (FANG) said in May it's keeping one completion crew active in Q2 to meet its current lease obligations.

Other companies don't want to cut shale oil production before rivals do and help them out, says Ryan Giannotto, director of research at GraniteShares.

"So it's this big game where everyone says, 'If I can just last one day longer than the competition, then I'm all set,'" he said.

With oil prices rebounding and holding above $30 a barrel lately, some shale oil stocks are taking early steps to open the tap again. In June, Parsley Energy (PE) said it will bring back the "vast majority" of the 26,000 barrels per day it shut in just a month prior.

EOG also said in early June it plans to "accelerate our production into what we see as a price recovery in the second half of the year."

That doesn't mean boom times are ahead. While reopening existing wells, Parsley is not doing any new drilling or fracking. EOG is similarly bearish on new drilling.

"We see very little capital flowing into the industry. And we see higher declines from all the shale players throughout the rest of the year," EOG exploration chief Ken Boedeker told an RBC Capital Markets conference. "Starting to drill in the high $30s? I'm not sure I see that."

The Supreme Court heard a case concerning LGBTQ rights and religious liberty about one week after Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench

Kelsey Vlamis,
INSIDER•November 5, 2020

SCOTUS hears case concerning LGBTQ rights and religious liberty about a week after Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench


About one week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case concerning discrimination against LGBTQ people on the basis of religious liberty.

The case involves the right of a Catholic group working as a city contractor to not place foster children into homes with same-sex couples. During arguments today, the court appeared likely to side with the group, CNBC reported.

"This is really as big as they come I think in terms of legal battles," one expert told Insider. He said the case could be "a serious blow to the rights of Obergefell," referring to the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage in the US.

About one week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case concerning discrimination against LGBTQ people on the basis of religious liberty.

Related video: What’s at stake with Amy Coney Barrett as SC justice
https://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-heard-case-concerning-080028722.html

The case involves Catholic Social Services, a group that worked as a contractor for the city of Philadelphia to place children into foster homes, but would not work with same-sex couples. The city of Philadelphia stopped working with the group, saying they were violating an anti-discrimination law, prompting the group to sue the city.

The case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, represents a "legal supernova clash" between the rights of LGBTQ people and the First Amendment right to religious liberty, according to Doron Kalir, professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

"This is really as big as they come I think in terms of legal battles," Kalir told Insider. He said the case could be "a serious blow to the rights of Obergefell," referring to the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage in the US.

It is also the first major Supreme Court case to come before Barrett, whose record has raised concerns among LGBTQ advocates. During today's arguments, Barrett, along with other conservative-leaning justices on the court, appeared likely to side with Catholic Social Services, according to CNBC.

"If we are honest about what's really going on here, it's not about ensuring that same-sex couples in Philadelphia have the opportunity to be foster parents," Justice Samuel Alito said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "It's the fact that the city can't stand the message that Catholic Social Services and the archdiocese are sending by continuing to adhere to the old-fashioned view about marriage."

Alito's remarks were among other doubts raised by conservative justices, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh who said the city was "looking for a fight," and Barrett who proposed a hypothetical where the government takes over hospitals and asked whether it could then force doctors to perform abortions, CNBC reported.

The court's liberal-leaning judges raised different concerns. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the case could severely weaken laws against discrimination, including against people of a different faith or race, The Journal reported.

Kalir said the court is likely to side with Catholic Social Services. But he said for Barrett, it would mean overturning an opinion written by her mentor, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

The 1990 opinion, Employment Division v. Smith, held that when there is a generally applicable rule that is applied neutrally to everyone, the fact that it offends someone's religious belief is not enough to disqualify the law.

He said for the court to rule in favor of Catholic Social Services, it would likely mean the 30-year-old opinion, authored by Scalia, would be overruled.

"It would be very strange if her first case on the court will be overturning one of Scalia's most famous opinions," he said.

He also said there could be political consequences as a result of the case, saying that Democrats could use the outcome to justify increasing the number of justices on the Supreme court.

Kalir said Democrats could say: "Look, religious liberty has run amok, they are now reversing or overruling established precedent by Justice Scalia. That's how much they went to the right, Justice Scalia is too center for them."

He also said the justices may not come to a precedent-setting conclusion, as is what happened in 2018, when the court heard a case about a Colorado baker refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. In that case, Kalir said the court "punted," deciding in favor of the baker but on terms that did not set a precedent for future cases.

A decision is expected in the case before July, CNBC reported.

Read the original article on Insider