Sono Motors signs up new partner for solar car

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Sono Motors has signed up a new partner for its partly solar-powered cars and is sticking to its goal of commercial production in 2023, after abandoning talks with the electric carmaking arm of indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande.

© Reuters/ANDREAS GEBERT FILE PHOTO:

 Alexa Rauscher of German solar-powered electric car startup Sono Motors drives a prototype of their car

Sono said on Tuesday it would produce its first vehicles in Finland with supplier Valmet Automotive, rather than in Sweden as originally envisaged.

The company had said in 2019 its production partner would be National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS), the Swedish electric vehicle unit of Evergrande Group, but a binding agreement was not signed.

NEVS was in talks with venture capital firms late last year to find new owners as its Chinese parent struggled under more than $300 billion of debt.

Sono, founded in 2016 in Munich, is developing a fully-electric vehicle with solar cells integrated into the body, boosting the car's range by an average of 112 kilometres per week beyond the 305-kilometre range of its battery.

Valmet Automotive, whose largest shareholders include China's battery cell manufacturer CATL, also produces cars for Mercedes-Benz and makes battery modules at two plants in Finland, with a third opening in Germany this year.

Sono, which began trading on the NASDAQ in November to try to attract early-stage investors after finding itself on the brink of insolvency, is currently working to validate its mass production plans with vehicles being built in Germany.

It expects to produce a low four-digit volume of cars in its first year, with a view to ramping up to 43,000 a year, it said.

The net price of Sono's vehicle, currently 23,950 euros ($26,271), will rise to 25,126 euros once the company hits 18,500 reservations from the around 17,000 registered so far, it said, citing rising manufacturing costs.

The company aims to keep costs down by offering just one model, relying on third-party production and using off-the-shelf components from suppliers including Vitesco and Hella GmbH, it said in a November regulatory filing.

($1 = 0.9117 euros)

(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee; Editing by Madeline Chambers and Mark Potter)

World’s Biggest Solar Firm Sees Profits Cut by Power Price Hike

Dan Murtaugh, Bloomberg News

BC-World’s-Biggest-Solar-Firm-Sees-Profits-Cut-by-Power-Price-Hike , Dan Murtaugh

(Bloomberg) -- Longi Green Energy Technology Co., the world’s largest solar company, said its profits will be cut by higher power costs at one of its key manufacturing hubs in China.

Yunnan province, home to 54% of the company’s wafering capacity, canceled the preferential electricity prices it had been offering Longi since 2016, the firm said in an exchange filing Tuesday. Wafers are the ultra-thin slices of polysilicon that get wired up and assembled into solar panels, and Longi is the world’s biggest producer of them, according to BloombergNEF. 

Longi didn’t say how much higher its power bill will be now that it has to pay market rates in the province. Electricity accounts for about 12% of wafer productions costs, and Longi enjoyed a 50% discount on power prices over one of its main rivals, BNEF said in a March 2020 report. 

Higher costs for Longi are coming in the midst of a rare period of inflation for the solar supply chain. Wafers are about 76 cents a piece, up from 30 cents in the middle of 2020. Still, solar power cost increases have been small compared to ballooning coal and gas prices, and new solar installations in China tripled in January and February compared to last year.

Electricity prices in China have been under pressure since last year, when a shortage of coal forced grids to curtail power to industrial users throughout most of the country. The government used the crisis to push through market reforms that allows utilities to charge more to large factories when coal prices rise. 

Longi also said that Yunnan’s decision on power rates risks changing the company’s plans for expansion in the province. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

World's fossil fuel assets risk evaporating in climate fight


As much as $4 trillion in fossil fuel assets could goe up in smoke by 2050 in the fight against climate change, according to UN experts (AFP/INA FASSBENDER) (INA FASSBENDER)

Julien MIVIELLE
Tue, April 5, 2022, 9:04 AM·4 min read

Oil platforms, pipelines, coal power plants and other fossil fuel assets could lose trillions of dollars in the battle against climate change in the coming decades, experts say.

The warning was issued in a 3,000-page report by UN experts who said fossil fuel assets must be retired and replaced with clean energy faster to mitigate financial losses.

Such assets will become "stranded" and worth less than expected because they may never be used since fossil fuel demand must fall in the near future to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Limiting warming to the aspirational 1.5 degree Celsius target in the Paris Agreement, or the more conservative 2C goal, "will strand fossil-related assets", said the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report Monday.

"The combined global discounted value of the unburned fossil fuels and stranded fossil fuel infrastructure has been projected to be around 1–4 trillion dollars from 2015 to 2050 to limit global warming to approximately 2C, and it will be higher if global warming is limited to approximately 1.5C," the IPCC said.

Any move to alleviate the impact of climate change means using less fossil fuel, thus rendering assets obsolete as companies are under pressure to move away from harmful energy production.

The IPCC said that if current oil, gas and coal energy infrastructure were to operate for their designed lifetime -- without technology to capture and store carbon -- capping global warming at the 1.5C target would be impossible.

It said nations should stop burning coal completely and cut oil and gas use by 60 and 70 percent respectively by 2050 to keep within the Paris deal goals, noting that both solar and wind were now cheaper than fossil fuels in many places.

The idea of "stranded assets" dates back to the 2010s and was put forward by think tank Carbon Tracker.

Companies could be further affected by governments taking decisions such as increasing the price of coal or even banning certain energies.

Consumers could also turn to other products like electric vehicles.

Other assets impacted include infrastructure such as drilling platforms, which have become useless quicker than expected.

Some fossil fuel reserves will become too costly to exploit due to falling prices.

- Risky bets -

For the IPCC, coal-related assets are the most vulnerable before 2030, than those that are oil- and gas-related towards mid-century.

The idea of stranded assets, taken up by both environmentalists and investors, has gained popularity and has been used in shareholder meetings of energy companies such as ExxonMobil or TotalEnergies.

The climate issue has in fact become central to some companies, even if it has taken three decades after the IPCC's creation in 1988.

"It's really the financial risk that originally created this spark, which took a long time," said Hugues Chenet, research associate at Polytechnique and the University College London.

That "convinced financial actors there was a problem."

The idea of "stranded assets" -- which Chenet prefers to call "obsolete" -- has made it possible to pinpoint a "contradiction".

There is one "path that says we must live without fossil fuels, facing an economy that is rather more geared up to do the opposite".

Lucie Pinson of NGO Reclaim Finance, who does not find the climate commitments of major companies like TotalEnergies credible, also pointed out the inconsistency.

"We can see that (TotalEnergies) doesn't believe in its own (climate) rhetoric, because if it believed it, it would not develop projects which have no future," she added.

- Revenue losses -

It's decision time for countries which get revenue from fossil fuels.

From Azerbaijan to Angola to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, oil producers risk losing a significant amount of their revenue over the next 20 years, warned Carbon Tracker.

But "if they continue to invest, you're betting on the failure of policy action on climate but you're also betting on the failure of renewables and other low carbon technologies to displace oil and gas", said Carbon Tracker's Mike Coffin, who calls on countries to diversify.

Another risky bet would be to ignore acting against climate change, hoping to make profits from oil and gas.

But "you'll lose way more on all your other assets when you've got forest fires, global migrations, famine," he said.

jmi/cho/ico/oaa/raz/lth

More Than Half of the Working Day Is Spent Kinda, Sorta Working

Matthew Boyle, Bloomberg News

BC-More-Than-Half-of-the-Working-Day-Is-Spent-Kinda-Sorta-Working , Matthew Boyle

(Bloomberg) -- The pandemic has forever altered many aspects of work, but there’s one thing it hasn’t changed -- how much time we spend just shuffling paper around.

White-collar workers devote more than half their day to “work coordination,” which includes following up on things, searching for information and communicating about work, according to a survey by business software maker Asana Inc. While there are regional differences -- Germans devote a bit less of their day to such mundane tasks than Americans -- the results are broadly similar across the globe: Only about a third of the workday is spent doing what we were actually hired to do, and that hasn’t changed much since 2019.

“The workday has become complex enough that we have to spend more time just managing work and a host of competing priorities rather than actually doing work,” said Melissa Swift, U.S. transformation solutions leader at workforce consultant Mercer. “Many, many meetings are wholly performative.” 

The global survey of more than 10,600 so-called knowledge workers -- data analysts, graphic designers and the like -- also found that the amount of time spent on strategy, or planning ahead, declined to 9% last year from 13% in 2019. That’s due in part to the difficulties of getting disparate, often asynchronous teams together at the same time, Asana said.

But it could also be because many companies found long-term forecasting difficult amid a global pandemic and its impact on office life.

“The decline in strategic work was striking,” Anne Raimondi, Asana’s chief operating officer, said in an interview. “Leaders have been much more in reaction mode lately.”

While more than half of the working day is soaked up by nonessential tasks, variations do exist around the globe. Germans devote more of their day to doing their actual job than other nationalities, but they also spend the least amount of time on strategic planning. Workers in Japan and Singapore, meanwhile, led the pack with 10% of their time going to strategy, but those two nations also spent the most time coordinating work.  

Swift, the Mercer consultant, said companies have tried to reduce the amount of time spent on coordination, without much success. The number of meetings, for example, increased by 70% during the pandemic, according to Reclaim.ai Inc., which makes an app that syncs calendar programs. Neither Mercer nor Reclaim.ai was involved in the Asana survey.

“It’s tricky,” Swift said. “Folks are genuinely loath to admit they’re doing performative work with literally zero value.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

EU Push For Global Minimum Tax Falters Again As Poland Blocks

William Horobin, Bloomberg News

European Union (EU) flags fly outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, Dec. 18, 2020. Britain’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, warned progress in the talks has been “blocked and time is running out” as leaders from both sides played down expectations a deal will be reached. Photographer: Olivier Matthys/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The European Union stumbled again in its attempt to quickly implement a global deal for a minimum corporate tax at 15% as Poland continued to block progress. 

The Polish government is increasingly isolated in its opposition to an EU directive on the matter. That’s after Sweden and Estonia dropped their opposition at a meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday after winning some concessions on implementation and flexibility. 

Speaking at the meeting, Poland’s secretary of state and head of the revenue administration Magdalena Rzeczkowska said there still isn’t a legally binding mechanism to tie the implementation of the minimum tax to the other part of the global deal, which is related to the treatment of multinational technology firms. 

“We must sustain our goal of fully introducing the global two-pillar solution,“ Rzeczkowska said. “We do not support separation of the two pillars in the EU.”

Poland has in the past threatened to wield its veto powers. It did so most notably over the EU’s plan to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions, after Brussels refused to approve its share of post-pandemic stimulus package due to a separate dispute around the country’s alleged democratic backsliding.

The inertia on implementing minimum tax is particularly vexing for France, which has set an objective of getting a deal by the end of its EU presidency in June. French officials have introduced concessions to Poland to make a stronger link in Europe between the two parts of the global deal which around 140 countries including all EU states backed last year. 

“Poland’s criticisms have been taken into account and all member states have made an effort to get to this consensus to make major progress for international tax,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said. “I regret that Poland doesn’t understand this and puts forward arguments that are not convincing.” 

 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Soldiers police Lima curfew after fuel price protests


Carlos MANDUJANO
Tue, 5 April 2022,

Some protesters set fire to toll booths on highways, looted shops, and clashed with police (AFP/Gian MASKO)


Protesters blocked the Pan-American highway, the country's most important transport and traffic artery snaking north to south 

(AFP/Ernesto BENAVIDES)


President Pedro Castillo called for 'calm and serenity' after the sometimes violent protests

 (AFP/Gian MASKO)

Protesters also burnt tires to block key routes 

(AFP/Gian MASKO)

Soldiers patrolled the largely empty streets of Peru's capital Lima Tuesday, monitoring a curfew imposed after widespread protests against rising fuel and toll prices amid growing economic hardship.

Shops and schools were closed and bus services mostly suspended after President Pedro Castillo announced a curfew shortly before midnight Monday for Lima and the neighboring port city of Callao.

But many workers, at hotels or hospitals for example, ignored the shut-down which was widely criticized on social media.

The measure took many in Lima by surprise, given that most of the protests in recent days -- some of which turned violent -- took place far from the capital.

Many had no choice but to take a taxi or walk to their place of work.

"It was a very late and improvised" announcement, complained Cinthya Rojas, a nutritionist who waited patiently for one of the handful of buses still running to get to work at a hospital east of Lima.

A hotel employee told AFP she had to pay the equivalent of $8, a small fortune on her salary, for a taxi to work.

- Soaring food prices -

Castillo announced the curfew would last until midnight Tuesday "to reestablish peace" after countrywide protests against fuel and toll price increases on top of biting food inflation.

Like much of the rest of the world, Peru's economy is reeling from the damages wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.

The country's Consumer Price Index in March saw its highest monthly increase in 26 years, driven by soaring food, transport and education prices, according to the national statistics institute.

In an attempt to appease protesters, the government over the weekend eliminated the fuel tax and decreed a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage from May 1.

But the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP) -- the country’s main trade union federation -- considered the measures insufficient and took to the streets again Monday in Lima and several regions in Peru's the north.

Some protesters set fire to toll booths on highways, looted shops, and clashed with police.

Some also burnt tires and blocked the north-south Pan-American highway, the country's most important artery for people and goods.

The disruptions halted public transport and closed schools on Monday.

"I call for calm and serenity," the leftist president said during his brief late-night TV appearance.

"Social protest is a constitutional right, but it must be done within the law," he said.

- 'Authoritarian measure' -

The protests were the first against the government since Castillo, a 52-year-old former rural school teacher, took office eight months ago.

Two-thirds of Peruvians disapprove of his rule, according to an Ipsos opinion poll in March.

Castillo's announcement of a curfew came just a week after he escaped impeachment by Congress, where opponents accuse his administration of a "lack of direction" and of allowing corruption in his entourage.

It also coincided with the 30th anniversary of a coup staged by ex-president Alberto Fujimori, jailed over his regime's bloody campaign against insurgents.

"The measure dictated by President Pedro Castillo is openly unconstitutional, disproportionate and violates people's right to individual freedom," tweeted lawyer Carlos Rivera, a representative of Fujimori's victims.

Political analyst Luis Benavente added the curfew was "an authoritarian measure" that revealed "ineptitude, incapacity to govern."

"It is like putting an end to traffic accidents by taking vehicles off the roads," he told AFP.

A large proportion of Lima's 10 million residents work in the informal sector, as street sellers and other traders, meaning the curfew left them without income for the day.

A football match of the Copa Libertadores between Peruvian Club Sporting Cristal and Brazil's Flamengo, scheduled for Tuesday night in Lima, was also thrown into doubt.

cm/fj/rsr/mlr/bgs

Amazon’s first US union overcomes hurdles, faces new ones

By HALELUYA HADERO and ANNE D'INNOCENZIO

1 of 3

 Staten Island-based Amazon.com Inc distribution center union organizer Chris Smalls, center, wearing baseball cap, celebrates with union members after getting the voting results to unionize workers at the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, in New York, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, File)


NEW YORK (AP) — When a scrappy group of former and current warehouse workers on Staten Island, New York went head-to-head with Amazon in a union election, many compared it to a David and Goliath battle.

David won. And the stunning upset on Friday brought sudden exposure to the organizers and worker advocates who realized victory for the nascent Amazon Labor Union when so many other more established labor groups had failed before them, including most recently in Bessemer, Alabama.

Initial results in that election show the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union down by 118 votes, with the majority of Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer rejecting a bid to form a union. The final outcome is still up in the air with 416 outstanding challenged ballots hanging in the balance. A hearing to review the ballots is expected to begin in the coming weeks.

Chris Smalls, a fired Amazon worker who heads the ALU, has been critical of the RWDSU’s campaign, saying it didn’t have enough local support. Instead, he chose an independent path, believing workers organizing themselves would be more effective and undercut Amazon’s narrative that “third party” groups were driving union efforts.

“They were not perceived as outsiders, so that’s important,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor and labor movements at the City University of New York.

While the odds were stacked against both union drives, with organizers facing off against a deep-pocketed retailer with an uninterrupted track record of keeping unions out of its U.S. operations, ALU was decidedly underfunded and understaffed compared with the RWDSU. Smalls said as of early March, ALU had raised and spent about $100,000 and was operating on a week-to-week budget. The group doesn’t have its own office space, and was relying on community groups and two unions to lend a hand. Legal help came from a lawyer offering pro-bono assistance.

Meanwhile, Amazon exercised all its might to fend off the organizing efforts, routinely holding mandatory meetings with workers to argue why unions are a bad idea. In a filing released last week, the company disclosed it spent about $4.2 million last year on labor consultants, who organizers say Amazon hired to persuade workers not to unionize.

Outmatched financially, Smalls and others relied on their ability to reach workers more personally by making TikTok videos, giving out free marijuana and holding barbecues and cookouts. A few weeks before the election, Smalls’ aunt cooked up soul food for a union potluck, including macaroni and cheese, collard greens, ham and baked chicken. Another pro-union worker got her neighbor to prepare Jollof rice, a West African dish organizers believed would help them make inroads with immigrant employees at the warehouse.

Kate Andrias, professor of law at Columbia University and an expert in labor law, noted a successful union — whether it is local or national — always has to be built by the workers themselves.

“This was a clearer illustration of this,” Andrias said. “The workers did this on their own.”

Amazon’s own missteps may have also contributed to the election outcome on Staten Island. Bert Flickinger III, a managing director at the consulting firm Strategic Resource Group, said derogatory comments by a company executive leaked from an internal meeting calling Smalls “not smart or articulate” and wanting to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” backfired.

“It came out as condescending and it helped to galvanize workers,” said Flickinger, who consults with big labor unions.

In another example, Smalls and two organizers were arrested in February after authorities got a complaint about him trespassing at the Staten Island warehouse. The ALU used the arrests to its advantage days before the union election, teaming up with an art collective to project “THEY ARRESTED YOUR CO-WORKERS” in white letters on top of the warehouse. “THEY FIRED SOMEONE YOU KNOW,” another projection said.

“A lot of workers that were on the fence, or even against the union, flipped because of that situation,” Smalls said.

Experts note it’s difficult to know how much of ALU’s grassroots nature contributed to its victory when compared with the RWDSU. Unlike New York, Alabama is a right-to-work state that prohibits a company and a union from signing a contract that requires workers to pay dues to the union that represents them.

There was also a grassroots element to the union drive in Bessemer, which began when a group of Amazon workers there approached the RWDSU about organizing.

At a virtual press conference Thursday held by the RWDSU following the preliminary results in Alabama, president Stuart Appelbaum said he believed the election in New York benefited because it was held in a union-friendly state and Amazon workers on Staten Island voted in person, not by mail as was done in Alabama.

Despite some friction between the two labor groups in the leadup to the elections, both have adopted a friendlier public relationship in the past few days. Appelbaum praised Smalls during Thursday’s press conference, calling him a “charismatic, smart, dedicated leader.” Likewise, Smalls offered the RWDSU words of encouragement after their initial election loss.

For now, ALU is focusing on its win. Organizers say Amazon workers from more than 20 states have reached out to them to ask about organizing their warehouses. But they have their hands full with their own warehouse, and a neighboring facility slated to have a separate union election later this month.

Organizers are also preparing for a challenging negotiation process for a labor contract. The group has demanded Amazon officials to come to the table in early May. But experts say the retail giant, which has signaled plans to challenge the election results, will likely drag its feet.

“The number one thing is going to be fighting for the contract,” Smalls said. “We have to start that process right away because we know the longer drawn out the contract is, workers will lose hope and interest.”

Meanwhile, some workers are waiting to see what happens.

Tinea Greenway, a warehouse worker from Brooklyn, said before the election, she felt pressured by the messages she kept hearing both from Amazon and ALU organizers, and just wanted to make the decision herself. When the time came, she voted against the union because of a bad experience she’s had in the past with another union who she says didn’t fight for her.

“They won,” she said of the ALU. “So let’s see if they live up to the agreement of what they said they were going to do.”

____

Follow Haleluya Hadero: http://twitter.com/masayett

Follow Anne D’Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

Rockefeller’s $105M plan to produce climate-friendly food

By KRISTEN GRIFFITH of The Chronicle of Philanthropy

In this photo provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, Jason Grauer, the Seed and Crop Director at Stone Barns, poses for a photo at Stone Barns’s greenhouse on April 7, 2021, in Tarrytown, N.Y. Rockefeller grantee Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is working on innovative, community-based ways to increase access to food and use sustainable environmental practices. (William Rouse/Media RED via AP)

The pandemic sent global hunger soaring, but now the war in Ukraine is making the problem far worse. Since Russia and Ukraine together supply 30% of global wheat exports, a big chunk of the world is losing access to food.

Now one of the nation’s biggest foundations is trying to deal with some of these challenges with a $105 million plan to improve food access, make nutritious and healthy food more widely available, and advance production of food in ways that does not harm the planet.

Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said the commitment is the biggest nutrition effort in Rockefeller’s history. Over the next three years, the Good Food Strategy aims to ensure that 40 million people around the world have better access to healthy and sustainable food.

“Because of climate change, food prices were already the highest in a decade, even before Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine further decimated global food supplies. Now the world is on the precipice of a global humanitarian crisis,” Shah said in a statement.

The foundation and other experts say the way the world produces and consumes food is failing people and the planet. So it came up with a new strategy it hopes will shift the focus from increasing the quantity of food to improving its quality.

Rockefeller aims not just to increase access to affordable and healthy food but also to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the food system and expand opportunities for small food-production businesses to thrive.

The foundation has some innovative approaches to accomplishing those goals. For instance, it plans to:

— Encourage doctors to prescribe fruits and vegetables instead of drugs when appropriate since they can be both healthier and cheaper. Ten health insurance companies are working with Rockefeller to test the idea.

— Pay for healthy foods at schools, hospitals, prisons, and other state government facilities.

— Help farmers switch their production practices to approaches that reduce carbon from being released into the air after they plow the ground.

— Fund more small and medium-size food businesses to diversify the distributors and prevent supply-chain issues.

The announcement builds on one of philanthropy’s most successful efforts, the Green Revolution of the 1960s.

Rockefeller financed the technology that helped fuel production of food in a way that averted starvation in the world’s poorest countries. However, it lacked sustainability and equity. That’s what today’s effort is designed to tackle, foundation officials say.

Barron Segar, president of the World Food Program USA, agrees that something needs to be done now. Rockefeller gave the program $3.3 million in 2021 to supply nutritious food for school food programs in Africa.

“We’re facing the biggest crisis we’ve ever faced around food insecurity,” Segar said. “There are 811 million people today who don’t have access to quality food, and they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. We’re at a very pivotal moment in history where we have 45 million people that are marching toward starvation.”

Last year, Rockefeller published a report to evaluate all the ways food systems in the United States affect health, the environment, biodiversity, and livelihoods. It found that Americans paid an estimated $1.1 trillion of the cost of producing, processing, retailing, and wholesaling of food in 2019. But if other costs, like the food system’s impact on climate change were included, the cost would be $3.2 trillion a year.

One of Rockefeller’s grantees has been carrying out some of the ideas that are part of the Good Food Strategy.

FoodCorps, which received at least $500,000 from the foundation last year for its work to provide healthy food to kids in school, has already had some success in influencing food policy.

In California, FoodCorps advocated for passage of Free School Meals for All Act last year. And in Connecticut, the nonprofit helped the state achieve its first farm-to-school grant program, which will put more local foods in school meals, give educators more resources to teach students about nutrition, and sustain relationships with local farmers and producers.

Rockefeller is also working with Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare company, on its Food as Medicine program. A combined investment of more than $2 million will go toward three research studies that will evaluate healthy food-prescription programs for participants who suffer from or are at risk for diet-related diseases. Both groups are also building evidence to prove prescriptions of produce are healthier and cheaper in some cases than traditional drugs.

“Everyone needs and deserves access to healthy food they can afford,” said Pamela Schwartz, an executive director at Kaiser.

Another element of the Rockefeller plan is to focus on changing the mix of who produces food.

Roy Steiner, senior vice president of Rockefeller’s food grants work, said the pandemic has revealed how fragile supply chains are. And it doesn’t help that only a few large food distributors monopolize the industry, he says. Diversifying power and wealth in the food industry is healthier for the economy, he said, which is why part of the Good Food Strategy is to prioritize small and medium-size food businesses.

“It needs to be a diversity of crops that can be grown by a diversity of farmers,” Steiner said. “Therefore, when things break down, you have multiple players and multiple sources of supply.”

The pandemic isn’t the only crisis that has worsened hunger. Climate change and the conflicts in Ethiopia, Yemen, and Ukraine have also contributed, says Steiner.

“We would not be in such a crisis if we had more regenerative and distributed systems,” he said.

Segar, who visited the Ukraine-Poland border last weekend, said the World Food Program is pushing to feed 3.1 million people in Ukraine. Food and drinking water shortages are reported in Kyiv and in Kharkiv, two cities bearing the brunt of the war. However, the World Food Program’s resources are starting to dwindle.

Segar said the Rockefeller Foundation takes an original approach to improving food production, and it’s one that his organization is working to adopt. The foundation not only gives money, he said, but educates the public about food and uses data and research to make decisions. He referenced Rockefeller’s “True Cost of Food” report, which analyzes the impact food has on people and the planet. Segar also cites Rockefeller’s Periodic Table of Food, an effort to create a database that breaks down food composition.

Segar said his organization was able to use what it learned from Rockefeller and teach communities in Central America about healthy meals.

Segar said the World Food Program and Rockefeller both want to create a food system that everyone can afford and have access to.

“The right nutrition at the right time can save lives,” Segar said.

____

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Kristen Griffith is a staff writer at the Chronicle. Email: kristen.griffith@philanthropy.com. The AP and the Chronicle receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The AP and the Chronicle are solely responsible for all content.

UK

BEHIND THE SCENES
Who might buy Channel 4?
Broadcaster to go up for sale as senior conservatives criticise decision

THE WEEK STAFF
5 APR 2022

Channel 4’s headquarters in Horseferry Road, London
Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Channel 4 is to be sold by the government before the next general election after ministers decided privatisation was the best way to “sustain” the country’s public service broadcasting sector.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said the privatisation of Channel 4 will give the broadcaster “the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future”.

“Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case,” she added. “I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.”

The broadcaster described the funding shake-up as “disappointing”, having warned last year of a “real risk” to its programming when the government began a privatisation consultation. A spokesperson yesterday said that “significant public interest concerns” had not been formally recognised before the decision was made.
‘Very unconservative’

Channel 4 has been considered for privatisation by the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. And in 2016, it was reported that the future of the channel was again being looked into by the government.

As it stands, Channel 4 has been commercially funded since its creation in 1982, so unlike the BBC it gets no financial support from taxpayers. The privatisation of the network will result in ownership being transferred from the government to a private company or individuals.

Over 90% of the network’s income currently comes from “selling TV advertising in the shows it broadcasts”, The Guardian said. “The remaining 9% of income comes from operations including 4Studios, which creates digital content for advertisers, and new non-advertising partnership deals.”

It is not profitable, but its “remit has never been to make a profit”, the paper added. The money it makes is instead “reinvested in commissioning and buying programmes from mostly British TV production companies, helping to support a key national industry”.

The government said last year that the channel was “vulnerable to unstable advertising markets”, Reuters reported, arguing that “a move into private ownership with a changed remit could help safeguard its future”.

However, a raft of cultural figures have savaged the plans, with Armando Iannucci, the writer of the Alan Partridge character and the political sitcom The Thick of It, tweeting: “Our TV industry is a British success story. Channel 4 profits go back into the industry: selling it off will give them to American shareholders.”

The government is now “facing a backlash” from senior Conservatives over the “contentious decision”, said The Independent. Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat told Times Radio: “I remain to be convinced that this is going to achieve the aim the government has set out”.

Former cabinet minister Damian Green also said the decision was “very unconservative” and the result of “politicians and civil servants thinking they know more about how to run a business than the people who run it”.

 
Runners and riders

When the consultation process began, Culture Minister John Whittingdale told Times Radio that he did not “by any means rule out” the station being bought by a company such as Netflix or Amazon. “We think that it is sensible to look at alternative ownership models, to make sure that Channel 4 is still able to invest in programme content, to compete with these other services,” he said.

Whittingdale also told the radio station that a consultation would set ground rules for potential buyers.

“There would be competition issues if a very strongly established broadcaster wanted to merge, and that’s something which automatically is a matter of competition, but I don’t by any means rule out existing streaming services or indeed anybody else,” he said.

Discover is “the industry player most likely to buy Channel 4, with the least regulatory hurdles”, said The Guardian. The company “expressed interest” in the broadcaster in 2016 and “continues to be highly active in the UK market”.

But ITV has been “lobbying Whitehall about the possibility of a ‘national champion’ takeover, designed to take the political fallout of yet another buyout of a UK ‘crown jewel’ by a foreign owner”, the paper continued. The move would “help to safeguard” ITV’s own future “by giving it a much bigger scale,” said The Telegraph.

The paper also listed Sky and Amazon as potential bidders who already have commercial deals in place with the broadcaster. Paramount has also been “held up as an example by ministers as the kind of ‘deep pocketed’ backer that could take control”.

There will be “significant interest” from private equity buyers too, The Guardian added.
A done deal?

Channel 4’s chief executive Alex Mahon responded to the news of the sale by stating that there will be a “long process ahead”.

The broadcaster’s privatisation is “not yet” a done deal, said The Times. Ministers will need to pass legislation before a sale can happen, “setting the state for a showdown in the Commons”.

And “until the sale is made, it is unclear exactly what a privatised Channel 4 could look like”, said Metro. The broadcaster’s said yesterday that it remains “legally committed to its unique public-service remit”.

“The focus for the organisation will be on how we can ensure we deliver the remit to both our viewers and the British creative economy across the whole of the UK,” the added.

Neanderthals Went Extinct in Iberia, and Were Replaced – by Other Neanderthals

Armed with advanced tools, Neanderthals may have been able to reconquer territory they had abandoned 1,500 years earlier – but not for long


Excavating the open-air late Neanderthal site, Aranbaltza II

.Credit: Joseba Rios


Ruth Schuster
Apr. 5, 2022 

When did the Neanderthals die out once and for all? Some argue they never did because our ancestors mixed with that subspecies, so bits of their genome live on. The fact remains that you can’t meet a Neanderthal because they are gone, forever more. But one question is the manner of their passing. Now, a new paper posits that the different stone tool technologies at a site in northern Spain indicate migration by Neanderthals, and population replacement of Neanderthals – by other Neanderthals.

For whatever reason – and we shall get to that – by about 45,000 years ago Neanderthals using Middle Paleolithic stone technology seem to have disappeared from Cantabria, including from the open-air Northern Iberian Peninsula site called Aranbaltza II, write Joseba Rios-Garaizar of the Archaeology Museum of Bilbao and colleagues in PLOS One.

There is a “sterile” period, a gap, in the archaeological record there. And then, 1,500 to 1,000 years later, more Neanderthals arrived and replaced them.

These new Neanderthals were armed with more advanced, finer tools known as the Châtelperronian technology, the team posits. Châtelperronian flint tools have a distinctive single cutting edge and a curved back.

A map showing Neanderthals in Iberia.Credit: PLOS ONE

The archaeological layers – Middle Paleolithic; nothing; Châtelperronian – are distinct, the archaeologists write. Moreover, this is far from the only hominin site in the region where Middle Paleolithic and Châtelperronian layers are distinct, showing no continuity.

Neanderthals at work

The Neanderthals-replacing-Neanderthals theory is based on stone tool discoveries at Aranbaltza II, an open-air site (an area clearly used by hominins that is not in a cave or rock shelter). A huge number of tools was found there: in fact, the archaeologists suspect that Aranbaltza II was a Neanderthal stone-working factory, partly because it’s close to a flint outcrop.

In short, this isn’t where the Neanderthals lived, they suggest: it was their industrial zone. Separately, archaeologists have reported on Neanderthal-era hunting camps and cave dwellings in the region.

Unfortunately, no bones have been found at Aranbaltza II that could have shed a more categorical light on the human species involved, because the soil of Cantabria is too acid for preservation, Rios-Garaizar explains.

Much of this remains controversial, including the contention that Neanderthals were the inventors, the authors, the manufacturers of Châtelperronian-type tools, which so far have been found in France and northern Spain dating to a range of about 44,000 to 40,000 years ago. Not everybody even agrees that there is such as thing as a distinct Châtelperronian industry. And among those who accept its uniqueness, some suspect sapiens involvement, influence, or actual authorship of these tools.


Studying tools from Aranbaltza II in the lab.Credit: Joseba Rios

(The name “Châtelperronian” derives from the site where it was first identified as a distinct industry: Châtelperron in central France, where it was preceded by the Mousterian industry.)

We are pretty sure that anatomically modern humans, we Homo sapiens lot, had reached Bulgaria by 45,000 years ago – the remains uncovered at Bacho Kiro leave little room for doubt. So if sapiens had reached Spain too by that time, could they plausibly be responsible for the Châtelperronian tools found at Aranbaltza?

We do not know but, Rios-Garaizar says, the thinking is they got to western Europe “a little bit” later, definitely by 42,000 years ago. So he remains confident that the Châtelperronian assembly found in northern Spain is of Neanderthal origin.

To shore up that argument, previous work – including paleo-protein analysis – at the site of Arcy-sur-Cure in north-central France indicates Neanderthal authorship of the Châtelperronian techniques, Rios-Garaizar points out.

So for the purposes of this article, let us assume that the occupants of Aranbaltza were Neanderthals, whether post-hybridization with sapiens or not; and that Neanderthals were indeed the party responsible for bringing Châtelperronian technology to the world.


A Chatelperronian flake from Aranbaltza.Credit: Joseba Rios

If so, what happened at this open-air site in Spain tens of thousands of years ago?

Howling storms

If we assume that all the personalities involved in this story of prehistoric Aranbaltza are Neanderthals, then the presence of Mousterian stone technology, replaced a millennium later by Châtelperronian, suggests that the first group of Neanderthals went extinct. Other Neanderthals, late Neanderthals, arrived 1,500 to 1,000 years later, likely migrating from Aquitaine, southwestern France, the team suggests.

Does the cultural change – in stone technology – necessarily translate into Neanderthal migration? Not in the mind of Israeli anthropologist Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, an expert on that era: it’s an interesting speculation but there’s no evidence for it at this point, he argues.

That said, there is no argument that hominin species had wanderlust; various types were leaving Africa as much as 2 million years ago and quite speedily reached the farthest edges of continental Asia. Also, in 2020, separate work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows Neanderthal migration from Bavaria to southern Siberia. That thesis is based on similarity in tools at specific sites in the two regions, and on DNA analyses of Neanderthal bones and sediments from the Siberian cave Chagyrskaya – which show the Neanderthals there were significantly different from other Neanderthals in Siberia living in Denisova Cave.


Sample of the many tools found at Aranbaltza.Credit: PLOS ONE

Apropos of which, Denisovans – the cousins of Neanderthals – are also believed, based on genetic evidence, to have dispersed widely in central and eastern Asia, even if proven bone evidence for them is extremely scanty: only in Siberia and Tibet. The extraordinarily high component of Denisovan DNA in indigenous Filipinos today is otherwise hard to explain.

So it seems Neanderthals would and did get about, and if Rios-Garaizar and his colleagues are right about the cascade of events at Aranbaltza, localized extinctions and replacements may have played a role in the ultimate total extinction of their species, which would be pretty soon after Châtelperronian technology appeared.

There is no consensus for the timing of the Neanderthals’ extinction, but most agree they “barely” crossed the 40,000-year boundary, possibly surviving until about 37,000 years ago in some places, Rios-Garaizar says. Châtelperronian was one of the last technological and cultural expressions of Neanderthals.

No, their work cannot indicate which of the postulated causes – endogenous, climate change, we nice folk moving into the neighborhood – were responsible. But if Neanderthals went extinct in Cantabria for a thousand-plus years and then came back, we can suspect the howling vagaries of climate at the time were involved.

In any case, by this time in their story, the Neanderthals were in decline, their small groups under stress – various reports show evidence of pathologies suggesting they were procreating through incest in the absence of more appealing options; that at least some were stricken by kuru after eating the brains of their own dead; that sapiens appeared with its mega-kicky brain – not as big as a Neanderthal’s, but somehow qualitatively improved in a way that led us to create figurative art while they did not; or simply that we sneezed on them and infected them with germs to which they had no natural immunity.


A Chatelperronian flake from Aranbaltza.Credit: Joseba Rios

And while everybody is speculating, Rios-Garaizar suggests a wonderful theory.

By 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals were clearly under stress. They vanished from Cantabria, possibly because of resource stress. This was a time of intense climatic variability, with very rapid, dramatic changes and, likely, howling storms. There may have been drastic environmental changes in northern Spain, leading to change in the fauna and, therefore, in those who hunt the fauna. Perhaps they needed to go farther to obtain the food they needed and, whether they died out or just left, Cantabria would remain free of Neanderthals until the next set came along armed with Châtelperronian technology.

Possibly these Neanderthals armed with Châtelperronian blades were so successful that they could be fruitful and multiply (hopefully beyond the nuclear family), and occupy new territories, Rios-Garaizar suggests. But not for long. They too disappeared, and fast.

Why? We do not know. Theories continue to compete but plausibly, at some point in Africa we the sapiens sapiens species crossed some sort of barrier, threshold, in brain evolution that rendered us intellectually superior to the Neanderthals. We gained abilities they may not have had, and after thousands upon thousands of years of “trying” (not that there was a declared aspiration), we made it past the Neanderthals and left Africa and spread madly throughout the world.

They, meanwhile, had been suffering from vagaries of climate and armed with Châtelperronian technology or not, we outcompeted them, and perhaps dealt better somehow with the environmental stressors, possibly due to better sociability. They grew more and more stressed; we may have coexisted cheek by jowl in some areas, especially in the Middle East, for thousands of years – but the upshot is that here we are today, while they are not.

And we may never know just how culturally advanced they were. We may never know whether they really could swim like fish. We may never be sure they really did have digging sticks, whether they had religion or just wanted to emulate big birds; whether they could cook soup, or whether it really was a custom, as has been postulated in one case of late Neanderthals in Iraq, that they buried their dead with flowers. The only thing for sure is that they're extinct.