Investor group sets tough climate blueprint for Big Oil

 

FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed windmill and oil pump jack are seen in front of displayed BP (British Petroleum) logo in this illustration picture


Ron Bousso and Simon Jessop
Wed, September 15, 2021

LONDON (Reuters) - Investors managing more than $10 trillion on Wednesday published an ambitious blueprint for energy companies seeking to tackle climate change, including sharp cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and a winding down of oil and gas production.

The unprecedented initiative - dubbed the Net Zero Standard for Oil and Gas - details 10 required standards to help money managers compare companies' strategies and understand whether they are aligned with United Nations-backed efforts to reduce global carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

Oil and gas companies such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell have published targets and strategies aimed at battling climate change, but the huge variation in scope, definitions and ambition makes analysis and comparison exceedingly difficult for investors.

At the same time, pressure has grown on portfolio managers and banks to ensure that their investments chime with the 2015 Paris accords to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

With the next round of global climate talks taking place in November, concern is growing that too many plans are flaky and unlikely to provide material help by reducing absolute emissions at the rate needed to limit global warming.

"We need to have a level playing field now on disclosure because it's not possible to compare and contrast across the sector," said Adam Matthews, who is head of responsible investment at the Church of England Pensions Board and chaired the investor-company process to develop the new initiative.

Other investors to back the plan include Amundi, Europe's biggest asset manager, along with Britain's Legal & General Investment Management, HSBC Global Asset Management and state-backed Canadian investor Caisse des Depots among others.

Given the fossil fuel industry is responsible for the lion's share of global emissions, the investor group said it is introducing a minimum set of standards to ensure that energy companies' plans are "credible".

NET ZERO TARGETS

Among these is a requirement to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, meeting emissions-reduction targets along the way while aligning capital expenditure and production plans with the net zero target.

The standards also demand commitments to disclose and independently verify strategies.

Shell, Italian company Eni and Norway's Equinor have all set targets to become net zero emissions by 2050, meaning that any emissions they produce will be offset by carbon capture technologies or other solutions, such as reforestation.

Other companies, including BP and TotalEnergies, aim to reduce emissions from part of their operations to net zero by 2025.

The investor group behind the new plan acknowledges that winding down oil and gas production "can be a very legitimate strategy", Matthews said.

Although it has not set a deadline for companies to adhere to the standards, investors are willing to vote against transition plans and the appointment of certain directors if they feel company boards are not doing enough, Matthews said.

The new standard will be piloted by leading energy companies including BP, Shell, Eni, Repsol and TotalEnergies ahead of wider adoption by the sector, the investor group said.

This group said its plan had been developed by the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change with support from the Transition Pathway Initiative and in consultation with Climate Action 100+, non-governmental organisations with specific expertise in the sector as well as oil and gas companies themselves.

For a factbox on Big Oil's climate targets, click

(Reporting by Ron Bousso and Simon Jessop; Editing by David Goodman)

ANOTHER READY MADE FOR CONSPIRACY THEORY

Greece probes crash that killed witness in Netanyahu trial

DEREK GATOPOULOS and LAURIE KELLMAN
Tue, September 14, 2021, 

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Authorities in Greece on Tuesday opened an investigation into the crash of a private plane from Israel that killed a prosecution witness in the corruption trial of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Haim Geron, a former senior official at Israel's ministry of communications, and his wife Esther, were killed in the crash late Monday off the island of Samos. The Israeli Foreign Ministry identified the victims, both 69, adding that consular officials and the ministry were working with the family to return the bodies.

Geron was one of more than 300 witnesses that prosecutors listed for Netanyahu’s trial on corruption charges. He is on trial for allegedly accepting expensive gifts from wealthy associates. Netanyahu, now the opposition leader in Israel’s parliament, has denied all the accusations and mocked the size of the witness list.

Greece's Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Board is investigating the causes of the crash, officials said Tuesday.

The single-engine Cessna 182 took off from Haifa, Israel, and crashed near Samos Airport.

“Shortly before landing, communication with the control tower on Samos was lost and the Civil Aviation Authority informed the search and rescue center about the loss of communication,” the authority said in a statement.

The bodies of the two Israeli occupants were recovered by the coast guard several hours later with the help of divers. Fishing boats as well as vessels from the European Union's border protection agency, Frontex, joined Greek coast guard vessels in the recovery effort.

Witnesses on the island interviewed by local news media said the crash occurred as the plane made an unsuccessful approach to land at Aristarchos International Airport.

As Israel's longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu spent a total of 15 years in office, but recent years were marred by the corruption allegations and a string of deadlocked elections. The trial resumed Monday after a three-month break.

___ Laurie Kellman reported from Jerusalem.

Greece Israel Plane

A coast guard vessel arrives with two bodies at Pythagorio port, on the eastern Aegean island of Samos, Greece, late Monday, Sept. 13, 2021. Authorities in Greece Tuesday opened an investigation into the crash of a private plane from Israel that killed a prosecution witness in the corruption trial of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Haim Geron, a former senior official at Israel's ministry of communications, and his wife Esther were killed in the crash late Monday off the island of Samos. 

(AP Photo/Michael Svarnias)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Corrupt Oil Trader Turns On Colleagues in Massive Africa Bribe Case


Christian Berthelsen, Javier Blas and Bob Van Voris
Mon, September 13, 2021, 10:01 PM·9 min read

(Bloomberg) -- When Anthony Stimler left Glencore Plc in August 2019, he had two big secrets: For a dozen years, he’d paid millions in bribes to African officials and intermediaries. And he was now helping a U.S. Justice Department investigation into the company and numerous former colleagues.

Corruption isn’t exactly unheard of in the extraction and trading of commodities, especially in the developing world. But details of Stimler’s cooperation deal, obtained from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and which haven’t been reported before, offer a rare opportunity to see how it works — the scale, scope and almost routine nature of such transactions.

One aspect is the role of intermediaries, often favored by governments in the region. The so-called briefcase companies act as conduits for traders’ bribes to officials, taking a cut and directing state business back to the traders. Glencore was a dominant player in Nigeria, Chad, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, and says it no longer uses intermediaries as part of a revamped and cleaned-up operation.

“An issue that comes up with trader corruption is agents and intermediaries in the mix,” said Alexandra Gillies, an adviser at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, which seeks to stamp out corruption in emerging market resources. “Clearly it’s the top modus operandi for how these schemes work.”

Glencore of Baar, Switzerland, is one of a handful of firms that dominate global trading of oil, fuel, metals, minerals and food, middlemen who buy from producers and sell to refiners who turn the goods into finished products. It traces its roots to a company co-founded in 1974 by Marc Rich, a legendary trader and financier who fled the U.S. in 1983 to evade prosecution for trading with Iran during the American hostage crisis. It had $142 billion in 2020 revenue.

Before getting caught, Stimler spent years in the game, beginning as early as 2007. And while it sounds like a hard-core business, he offers a mild-mannered profile. Affable and polite, he’s known in his London Jewish community by the Yiddish nickname “Hershy” and served on the board of Camp Simcha, which helps sick children. He took a two-year break in the middle of his tenure to care for his own child, who suffered from leukemia (and subsequently recovered).

His confession in July to foreign bribery and money laundering charges, the first ever by a Glencore trader, makes clear that he knew just what he’d been doing — and that he didn’t act alone. A lawyer for Stimler declined to comment for this article, as did Glencore. Stimler is out on bail in the U.K. and awaiting sentencing at a later date.

“When I made requests for payments to intermediaries, I was aware that other Glencore traders who worked with me were doing the same thing by directing our intermediaries to make bribe payments to government officials,” Stimler told a federal judge in New York, according to a transcript of his guilty plea. “I intended that a proportion of the payment to intermediaries operating in Nigeria were to be passed on to Nigerian state-owned oil company officials. The purpose of the payment was to influence those officials’ decisions regarding the Nigerian government’s allocations of crude oil cargo.

“Your honor, I knew what I was doing was wrong and unlawful,” he continued. “I’m extremely remorseful for my conduct.”

It was conduct that was, nonetheless, handsomely rewarded.

Over a two-decade career that began in 1998, Stimler, now 49, rose through the ranks of the storied Swiss trading house, becoming head of its West African oil trading desk. He presided over a robust expansion of its crude flows and a nearly-doubling of his desk’s annual profits to nearly $200 million in 2017, according to people familiar with internal data.

In that same year, 2017, prosecutors from the Justice Department’s kleptocracy team filed a case in Houston to seize nearly $145 million worth of assets — including an $80 million, 215-foot yacht called the Galactica Star, a $50 million Billionaire’s Row apartment in New York and homes in California — that it said were purchased for the benefit of Nigeria’s oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, with embezzled funds.

Prosecutors said two associates of the minister set up companies shortly after she took office and were awarded contracts to sell large allotments of oil on global markets. The pair were awarded dozens of crude cargoes worth about $1.5 billion, according to the prosecutors. Nigeria received little of the proceeds of those sales, which prosecutors say were diverted for Madueke and her associates.

One of the primary trading houses that stepped up to buy those cargoes, according to prosecutors: Glencore.

They say that over the course of 2013 and 2014, Glencore bought 15 cargoes totaling 7 million barrels from the men, paying more than $800 million. Of that, they contend, roughly a third — $272 million — was diverted into an account at a Nigerian bank used for the purchases for Madueke.

In assembling the case, prosecutors amassed evidence including bank records, emails and witness testimony. At least one recorded conversation showed that the minister worried about the scale of the graft. She chastised one of the associates that such high-profile purchases would attract the attention of authorities.

She was right.

A court filing in Stimler’s case makes reference to a “Foreign Official 1,” a high-ranking Nigerian from 2010 to 2015, who had demanded and received bribery payments. According to people familiar with the matter, Madueke is Foreign Official 1.

 Lawyers for Madueke didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As prosecutors in the Houston case were going through the effort to seize the homes and yacht, Glencore received a Justice Department subpoena in July 2018 for documents related to Glencore’s business in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela dating back to 2007, according to a company disclosure at the time.

Just over a year later, Stimler left Glencore, a move wrongly viewed at the time as part of an executive shake-up following the departure of Alex Beard, Glencore’s longtime head of oil trading and mentor to Stimler, according to a person familiar with them. It was around that time that Stimler began cooperating with prosecutors.

Now Glencore and some of its executives face the prospect of steep fines and prison in a far-reaching investigation of tactics in numerous countries and commodity markets. U.S. authorities pursue such cases because, though they involve events in other countries, the payoffs were made in dollars that pass through the banking system in New York. Other major countries are also increasingly targeting commodity trading. U.S. authorities have gotten increasingly aggressive in enforcing laws against foreign bribery, imposing billions of dollars of fines against companies. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, prosecutors can calculate fines based on how much a company sought to benefit from paying bribes, and then double the amount in imposing the penalty.

Read More: Former Glencore Director Says He Flew the World With Bag of Cash

Glencore says it’s a changed company and is cooperating with prosecutors. It reserved a $216 million charge in the first half of the year for costs related to a specific element of several investigations it is facing.

Gary Nagle, Glencore’s new chief executive, told reporters on a conference call in August that the company has adopted new compliance rules intended to eliminate illicit conduct, and that every person mentioned in Stimler’s case has been disciplined or left the firm. The company is also reducing its business in high-risk jurisdictions, and no longer works with middlemen.

“We don’t have any intermediaries in our oil business,” Nagle said. “It’s a different business model to what we used five to 10 years ago. We don’t plan to use them again in our oil business.”

Glencore makes billions of dollars every year buying and selling commodities — above the money it makes digging metals, pumping crude or harvesting crops. In 2020, the company enjoyed its best trading ever, making $3.3 billion in earnings before interest and taxes, up 41% from the previous year despite the impact of Covid-19 on the global economy.

Stimler’s guilty plea and the deal he cut with prosecutors will rattle fellow colleagues – and the company itself – as the Justice Department investigation continues.

The cooperation agreement requires him to disclose his and all his colleagues’ activities relevant to the case, and agree to testify before a grand jury for the investigation and even serve as a government witness should any cases go to trial. He appeared by videoconference from the U.K. during his plea hearing, during which he told Judge Kevin Castel of Manhattan federal court that he’d been assisting the Justice Department for more than two years.

Stimler has implicated seven others, including at least four Glencore traders, in making bribe payments, and authorities say the scheme started before him. One person named was a top African oil trader at Glencore dating back to the 1990s, Stimler’s superior during his early rise there, according to people familiar with the matter; another worked with him on the West African oil trading during the latter part of the scheme, the people said.

While Stimler began bribing in 2007, often using coded language in emails, the payments appear to have accelerated during Madueke’s time in office, according to the court documents. Stimler agreed in late 2013 to pay more than triple the usual fees to an intermediary company that would be passed on as bribes for favorable grades and loading dates of Nigerian oil, his guilty plea says. Three months later, he and a colleague made another $500,000 payment to be eligible for additional Nigerian cargoes. Stimler “requested and received approval” for a Glencore subsidiary to make the payment, prosecutors said, without specifying who granted it.

Later that fall, he received another request, saying Foreign Official 1 was seeking $300,000 per month from customers of Nigeria’s national oil company, in connection with an upcoming election. Stimler authorized the payment, according to prosecutors.

Madueke left office in 2015 and has been living in London. She has been charged with corruption by Nigerian authorities but has so far successfully evaded extradition, and she is under investigation by U.K. authorities as well. The yacht, the Galactica Star, has since been auctioned off. Its new owner is a shell company called Paxford Ltd., and it has been renamed Illusion. It was last seen docked on the coast of Sardinia, according to Bloomberg ship tracking data.

In May, Nigeria’s national oil company released its new list of trading partners for the coming year, coveted contracts to buy its oil and sell it refined gasoline. Glencore was not among them.

World Faces Growing Risk of Food Shortages Due to Climate Change


Áine Quinn
Mon, September 13, 2021

(Bloomberg) -- Food supplies will struggle to keep pace with the world’s growing population as climate change sends temperatures soaring and droughts intensify, according to a report from Chatham House.

Yields of staple crops could decline by almost a third by 2050 unless emissions are drastically reduced in the next decade, while farmers will need to grow nearly 50% more food to meet global demand, the think tank said. The Chatham House report was drawn up for heads of state before next month’s pivotal United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Food prices are already near a decade high, fueled by supply chain disruptions during the pandemic and extreme weather. Wheat prices surged over the summer due to crop losses in some of the biggest exporters. The Chatham House report suggests climate challenges could keep that trend intact.

“We can expect all basic food staples to significantly increase in price,” the report’s lead author Daniel Quiggin said in an interview. “We would also expect there to be shortages in some reaches of the world.”

Thе proportion of cropland affected by drought will more than triple to 32% a year, the report said. It also predicts nearly 50-50 odds of a loss of 10% or more of the corn crop across the top four producing countries during the 2040s.

Major crops from wheat to soy and rice “are likely to see big yield declines” due to drought, and shorter growing periods, Quiggin said. Severe climate impacts will be “locked in” by 2040 if countries do not reduce emissions, according to the report.

This Texas-based company wants to revive the extinct woolly mammoth. Well, sorta


BEN LAMM,  GEORGE CHURCH


James Hartley
Mon, September 13, 2021

Woolly mammoths, the elephant-like prehistoric beasts that, as their name would suggest, were giant and hairy, went extinct around 10,000 years ago. A Texas-based tech entrepreneur wants to change that. Sort of.

Ben Lamm, the tech entrepreneur whose ambitions might give sci-fi dystopian authors nightmares, hopes to venture down a path “Jurassic Park” (the book, not the movie) author Michael Crichton contemplated in the best-seller 31 years ago. But Lamm’s mission isn’t to open a theme park full of dangerous, extinct predators and a couple of friendly herbivores.

Instead, he hopes to use the reintroduction of extinct species into the world as a way to combat climate change and advance “thoughtful disruptive conservation,” according to a news release.

Lamm wants to “rebuild ecosystems, heal our Earth and preserve its future through the repopulation of extinct animals,” he said in the news release in which he announced the launch of his bioscience and genetics company, Colossal. He hopes Colossal will lead to rapid advancement in the area of “species de-extinction.”

Colossal marks the sixth company Lamm created. Austin-based Hypergiant, a tech company, which is working on artificial intelligence for the likes of NASA, was his fifth.

With this latest venture, Lamm is using $15 million raised by Colossal to work with Harvard Medical School professor George Church to combine the genetics of an elephant with a mammoth “that is genetically engineered with traits to help it survive in the Arctic,” according to the release.

The animals created, if Lamm and Church are successful, won’t be true woolly mammoths. Their genetic code will be different because of the use of elephant genes. But Lamm thinks the success of this mission could open the door for his company to revive other extinct animals, as well as save the more than 1 million animals, plants and fungi the United Nations in 2019 said are at risk of extinction.

When those species go extinct, the ecosystems in which they live begin to collapse and impact the health of humans and our blue marble. Lamm believes that restoring the woolly mammoth could lead to the revitalization of the Arctic grasslands, an area in North America and North Eurasia that contributes to carbon sequestering, methane suppression and light reflection, according to the release.

He hopes that reviving this ecosystem could help combat climate change.

And Church, a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, agrees. He said in the news release that the company has the potential to impact ecological conservation and other climate change issues.

While Colossal is fronting the money, the research into this venture would be the responsibility of Church and his lab at Harvard. The technology that exists isn’t ready to create a (sorta) woolly mammoth, but Colossal thinks his research could “create technology leaps in multiplexed genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and other emerging areas,” according to the release.

“Technologies discovered in pursuit of this grand vision – a living, walking proxy of a woolly mammoth – could create very significant opportunities in conservation and beyond, not least of which include inspiring public interest in STEM, prompting timely discussions in bioethics, and raising awareness of the vital importance of biodiversity,” Church said in the release.

GENERATION INTERNATIONALIST

Raducanu: US Open champion celebrated in China for her heritage

Sun, September 12, 2021

Social media users in China can't get enough of Emma Raducanu

Social media users in China are celebrating British tennis star Emma Raducanu - not just for her historic US Open win, but her Chinese heritage.

Raducanu was born in Canada to a Romanian father and Chinese mother, before moving to London aged two.

Many on Chinese site Weibo praised the 18-year-old, calling her a "Dongbei girl" - a reference to her mother's ancestral home.

A video of her thanking her fans in Mandarin also went viral.

"She speaks just like a 'Dong Bei (north-east Chinese) girl'. How amazing!" a Weibo comment read.

Raducanu has previously spoken openly about her mixed heritage in previous interviews, something Chinese netizens have taken pride in.

"She said she visits China regularly, and that one of her idols is Li Na. I'm so moved," a Weibo user wrote, referencing a celebrated former Chinese tennis player.

Others likened her in looks to a Taiwanese pop star. "We must support the Rainie Yang of the tennis court," another person said.

But some users chose to keep some distance: "She's British - why are all of you now trying to claim her as your own?"

In interviews, Raducanu has paid tribute to her mum and that side of the family.

"They are so mentally resilient - it's like nothing can bring them down. I would say I take a big part of my inspiration from her. My mum has worked very hard," she said, adding that she learned about discipline and respect for other people from her.

The teenager, who visits her mother's ancestral home of Shenyang during the holidays, has also said that she loves nothing more than binge-watching Taiwanese television shows.

On Saturday, Raducanu beat Canadian teen Leylah Fernandez in straight-sets at the US Open to become the first British woman in 44 years to win a Grand Slam final.

Teen tennis sensations Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu are both of mixed heritage

Given how Fernandez is also of mixed heritage - her father is Ecuadorian and mother Filipino - social media users in the Philippines were equally intrigued and expressed their pride.

One said on Facebook: "Nice to see the Philippines finally get someone in the tennis world to cheer for."

While she has confessed in an interview to not knowing much about the Filipino culture, she said she loves Filipino cuisine.

"I don't know much about the Filipino culture but I do know that my Lolo (grandfather) - he cooks amazing, so when I get back to Canada in Toronto when I visit, he's gonna make really nice food, especially Filipino dishes because I do miss it," she said in a post-game interview.

Her father and coach Jorge, a former footballer, also told reporters: "I truly appreciate the Filipino community backing up Leylah. She's got Filipino blood in her. It's so beautiful."
You may also be interested in:

Young tennis players have been inspired by Emma Raducanu's US Open win.

Stanford professors urge

 U.S. to end program looking 

for Chinese spies in academia

Jane Lanhee Lee

Mon, September 13, 2021

(Reuters) -A group of Stanford University professors has asked the Justice Department to stop looking for Chinese spies at U.S. universities, joining an effort by human rights groups to end a Trump administration program they said caused racial profiling and was terrorizing some scientists.

The "China Initiative," launched in late 2018, aimed to prevent U.S. technology theft by China but has since "deviated significantly from its claimed mission," according to a Sept. 8 letter https://sites.google.com/view/winds-of-freedom signed by 177 Stanford faculty members and made public by them on Monday.

"(I)t is harming the United States' research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling," the letter said.

That letter is now being supported by about 140 University of California, Berkeley professors who have signed on since late last week, according to Randy Schekman, Berkeley professor and Nobel prize winner for physiology or medicine.

Asked about criticism of the China Initiative, Justice Department spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle said the government was "dedicated to countering unlawful (Chinese) government efforts to undermine America's national security and harm our economy," while acknowledging the threat of hate crimes against Asia Americans. "We take seriously concerns about discrimination," he said.

The Justice Department has published details of at least 27 cases related to the initiative, with results including some guilty pleas, some cases dropped and some ongoing.

Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University were among those charged, as were five Chinese scientists who were visiting scholars last year - although those charges were dropped in July.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Tennessee acquitted https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.tned.93460/gov.uscourts.tned.93460.141.0.pdf a professor accused of hiding Chinese ties in his NASA research grant application, saying prosecutors failed to provide evidence he intended to defraud the government.

"I think what the FBI's done in most cases is to scare people - investigating people and interrogating them. And it's harmful to the country," said Peter Michelson, Stanford's senior associate dean for the natural sciences and an organizer of the letter.

Another organizer, Stanford physicist Steven Kivelson, said he became involved because he saw his colleagues of Chinese origin suffered from the hostile environment they were subjected to due to the initiative.

Former U.S. Energy Secretary and Nobel prize winner Steven Chu, a professor at Stanford, said that rather than help protect U.S. advantages in technology and understanding, the program risked undermining America's lead in science.

"We were the brain gain for half a century," he told Reuters in an interview. "You really want to throw this away?"

(Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Peter Henderson, Daniel Wallis and Steve Orlofsky)

In Racist Attack, Virginia County GOP Suggests Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar Go Work For Taliban

Ryan Grenoble
Tue, September 14, 2021

In a racist tweet Monday that was promptly ratioed into the shame museum, the Arlington County Republican Committee in Virginia suggested that two Democratic congresswomen of color should retire and go work as lobbyists for the Taliban.

The remark, directed at Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), came in response to a BBC report on the Taliban’s dire financial situation ― resulting in an apparent desire to hire a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

The Arlington GOP responded by tweeting: “Well, if @AOC or @Ilhan retire from Congress, there’s a revolving door opportunity for them.”

The tweet drew immediate criticism, prompting the Arlington GOP to defend itself by pointing to an opinion piece in The Washington Post about Omar not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. That article was written by Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“This tweet isn’t about race ― it’s about the Squad’s constant support for anti-American sentiment abroad,” the Arlington GOP tweeted, using the nickname for the group of House Democrats that also includes Rep. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (Mo.).

Tempting as it may be to pass the tweet off as a terrible joke ― a line Republicans employed unconvincingly and often during Donald Trump’s term in the White House ― stoking this kind of hate has very real consequences.

Ocasio-Cortez told Vanity Fair last summer she receives all manner of threats, often seeing a swell after far-right lies and attacks are amplified by conservative media.

“I used to wake up in the morning and literally get a stack of pictures that were forwarded by Capitol police or FBI,” she told the magazine. “Like, ‘These are the people who want to kill you today.’ ”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.




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Men Need Not Apply to World’s Largest E-Scooter Factory



Saritha Rai
Mon, September 13, 2021,

(Bloomberg) -- Ola Electric Mobility Pvt’s new electric-scooter factory aims to build 10 million two-wheelers annually, or 15% of the world’s e-scooters by 2022, in an operation run and managed entirely by women.

Led by Bhavish Aggarwal, the e-mobility business is a follow-up to ride-hailing startup Ola, which is expected to make its debut on public markets next year. The vision for his newest venture is to provide the world “clean mobility, a carbon-negative footprint, and an inclusive workforce,” the founder said. The first group of workers started this week at the factory in Krishnagiri, about 2.5 hours southeast of Bangalore, which will cost $330 million to complete. “At full capacity, Futurefactory will employ over 10,000 women, making it the world’s largest women-only factory and the only all-women automotive manufacturing facility globally,” he wrote in a blog on Monday.

Backed by SoftBank Group Corp. and Tiger Global Management, Ola Electric looks to roll out a scooter every two seconds after completing a planned expansion next year. The factory will be substantially automated and include 3,000 robots working alongside the all-female workforce.

Aggarwal’s goal is to eventually assemble a full lineup of electric vehicles including three-wheelers and cars. Ola’s inaugural S1 e-scooter will be priced at 99,999 rupees ($1,360) to compete with traditional two-wheelers in India. Exports are to begin later this year.

“Enabling women with economic opportunities improves not just their lives but that of their families and indeed the whole community,” Aggarwal said. Women’s participation in the local manufacturing industry stands at just 12% and “for India to be the world’s manufacturing hub, we must prioritize upskilling and generating employment for our women workforce,” the founder said in the blog.

 WAY BEFORE DAN BROWN OR HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL

1972