Pakistan's premier apologizes to nation for power outage





Pakistan Power Outage

Motorcyclists and car drive on through a market where some shopkeepers use generators for electricity during a national-wide power breakdown, in Lahore, Pakistan, Monday, Jan. 23, 2023. Much of Pakistan was left without power Monday as an energy-saving measure by the government backfired. The outage spread panic and raised questions about the cash-strapped government's handling of the country's economic crisis. 

(AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)

MUNIR AHMED
Tue, January 24, 2023 

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan’s prime minister on Tuesday apologized to the nation for a major, daylong power outage that disrupted normal life across the country and drew criticism from millions who were left without electricity amid the harsh winter weather.

Monday's blackout engulfed schools, factories and shops, and many among Pakistan's 220 million people were without drinking water as pumps powered by electricity also failed to work. In key businesses and institutions, including main hospitals, military and government facilities, backup generators kicked in.

Power was mostly restored, though some parts of the country still experienced blackouts on Tuesday.

“On behalf of my government, I would like to express my sincere regrets for the inconvenience our citizens suffered due to power outage yesterday," tweeted Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

“On my orders an inquiry is underway to determine reasons of the power failure," he said adding that the probe will uncover who was responsible.

At a press conference earlier Tuesday, Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir defended the government’s handling of the collapse of the grid and lauded engineers and technicians for their efforts to boot up the system. He made no reference to the fact that an energy-saving measure by the government had backfired.

Authorities had turned off electricity during low-usage hours on Sunday night to conserve fuel, according to an energy-saving plan. Efforts to turn power back on early on Monday morning led to the system-wide meltdown.

“Today, at 5:15 in the morning, power was fully restored,” Dastgir said Tuesday. He blamed the outage on a technical glitch but also floated a “remote chance" that it was caused by hackers targeting the country's grid systems.

The minister also expressed faith in Sharif's three-member committee, which is expected to complete a preliminary investigation within days. “We will fully cooperate" with it, he said.

He cautioned that some regions may still face “routine power outages" this week as Pakistan's two nuclear power plants and coal plants have yet to come fully online.

The outage was reminiscent of a massive blackout in January 2021, attributed at the time to a technical fault in Pakistan’s power generation and distribution system. Pakistan gets at least 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels, while nearly 27% of the electricity is generated by hydropower. The contribution of nuclear and solar power to the nation’s grid is about 10%.

Fawad Chaudhry, a senior leader at the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party on Monday criticized the government for mismanaging the country's economy and said the outage was a reflection of the government's incompetence.

Grappling with one of its worst economic crisis in recent years amid dwindling foreign exchange reserves, Pakistan is currently in talks with the International Monetary Fund to soften some conditions on a $6 billion bailout. Sharif's government say the harsh conditions will trigger further inflation hikes.

The IMF released the last crucial tranche of $1.1 billion to Islamabad in August but since then, discussions between the two parties have oscillated due to Pakistan’s reluctance to impose new tax measures.

South Korea to offer 18 months of paid parental leave for both parents

Iris Jung
January 12, 2023




Introduced on Monday, the plan was introduced as an attempt to reverse South Korea’s declining birth rate. In 2022, South Korea’s birth rate dropped to a record-low of 0.81. The birthrate for countries to maintain their population size without migration is 2.1.

According to South Korea’s Department of Labor Minister Lee Jeoung-sik, the plan will increase the time for paid parental leave from 12 months to 18 months for each parent, reported Yonhap News. With the option available to both parents, Lee stated, “Women will no longer face concerns regarding career interruptions.”

In addition, the plan will allow parents to take paid parental leave up until the child is 12 years old. Other incentives included shortening working hours for parents responsible for childcare.

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If successful, South Korean men will receive the longest paid paternity leave in the world.

1933

However, the plan fails to address growing fears surrounding parental leave and its impact on working individuals.

According to Hangyung, employees of larger companies faced a “disadvantage” after taking parental leave. As a result, although 193,000 men were eligible for paternity leave in 2022, only 4.1 percent used the opportunity.

In contrast, 65.2 percent of women eligible for maternity leave chose to take the option.

In addition to increased parental leave, the plan also aims to address the participation of the elderly in economic activities, increase opportunities for foreign workers (E-9 visas) to 110,000, strengthen unemployment benefits and implement policies regarding workplace incidents.

On the same day, the Ministry of Labor announced their upcoming “Risk Assessment” system — first introduced in 2013 — which would attempt to prevent industrial accidents by identifying risk factors in the workplace and establishing improvement measures.

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South Korea triples baby payments in attempt to reverse fertility ‘calamity’

Japan ‘on the Verge’ of Societal Collapse Due to Plummeting Birth Rate, Prime Minister Says

Ari Blaff
Mon, January 23, 2023


Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida spoke in desperate terms about the country’s cratering birth rate in an address to his nation’s parliament on Monday.

“Now or never when it comes to policies regarding births and child-rearing-it is an issue that simply cannot wait any longer,” Prime Minister Kishida said in a speech marking the new parliamentary session. “The number of births dropped below 800,000 last year.”

“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” he added.

For perspective, Japan experienced nearly 2 million births per year throughout the 1970s.

Although the Asian island nation has a population of roughly 125 million, its demographic pyramid is rapidly greying. Only Monaco, the city-state on the French Riviera, has a higher proportion of residents 65 and older.

Graph of population sizes

The rising cost of living and low immigration has hampered Japan’s ability to elevate its lagging birth rate. Barely 3 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to over a quarter of Americans.


Kishida pledged on Monday to double spending associated with child-related initiatives and announced the creation of a new governmental agency tasked with addressing the issue.

“Focusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postponed.”

Demographers use the measurement of a replacement or fertility rate, the average number of children born to each woman, to evaluate the health of a society. When the fertility rate drops below 2.1, a society begins to shrink.

In 2020, Japan had a fertility rate of 1.34. The same year, a team of researchers projected in the Lancet that Japan’s population would shrink to barely above 50 million by the end of the century.

Japan is among a growing list of East Asian nations that are expected to face harsh demographic headwinds throughout the coming decades.

Last Tuesday, the Chinese government published demographic data showing that the country’s population had declined over the previous year, for the first time in six decades. The news surprised many academics who projected that China would not experience such a precipitous drop for another decade.

“I don’t think there is a single country that has gone as low as China in terms of fertility rate and then bounced back to the replacement rate,” Philip O’Keefe, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and demography expert, told the New York Times.

India is set to become the world’s most populous country in 2023.

Japan PM warns country will cease to 'function as a society' if population decline persists



Iris Jung
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared a dire need for policies tackling the country’s declining birth rate, calling it “now or never.”

“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” Kishida told lawmakers at the opening of this year's parliamentary session on Monday. “Focusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postposted.”

In recent years, Japan — a population of barely 125 million — has been facing a rapidly declining birth rate. In 2022, the country saw a record low of less than 800,000 births. According to research published by The Lancet in 2020, at the current rate, Japan’s population is expected to fall below 53 million by the end of the century.

To address the issue, Kishida argued to double the government’s fund for child-related programs by June and revealed a plan to create a new Children and Families government agency, which is expected to begin operations in April 2023.

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“We must build a child-first social economy to reverse the [low] birthrate,” the prime minister explained.

Although the country’s government has previously attempted to implement similar policies and incentives to encourage childbirth, they so far have been met with failure.

As one of the world’s most expensive places to raise a child, Japan’s falling birth rates have been attributed to increasing living costs, more work and education opportunities for women, greater access to contraception, lack of inclusivity and individual freedom, corporate culture and difficult economic conditions.

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Adding to the country’s ongoing crisis, Japan’s life expectancy has significantly risen, reaching a median age of 49.

With one of the oldest populations in the world — second only to Monaco — Japan’s growing senior population signifies a declining number of workers and a possibility of losing a fifth of its population by 2050.

However, despite Japan’s crisis, residents and conservative government officials have remained hostile to immigration.

GOP HOMOPHOBIC HETEROSEXISM

More than half of LGBTQ parents in Florida say they are considering leaving the state

Brooke Migdon
Tue, January 24, 2023 

More than half of LGBTQ parents in Florida are considering moving their families to another state over concerns that a new Florida education law – known to its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law – stigmatizes LGBTQ identities and creates a hostile learning environment for LGBTQ children or students with LGBTQ family members.

In a report issued Tuesday by the Williams Institute, a public policy research institute based at the UCLA of Law, and Clark University in Massachusetts, 56 percent of LGBTQ parents surveyed said they were considering leaving Florida over concerns about how the new law may impact their children and family. Another 17 percent said they had already taken steps to do so.

“I am terrified that I would need to make the decision to leave Florida and leave my parents,” one respondent said. “The idea of having to leave to protect my child and my partner is scary but one I am willing to do.”

The new law, officially titled the “Parental Rights in Education” law, bars public kindergarten through third grade teachers from engaging in classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity – subjects the measure’s proponents in the state legislature last year argued are inappropriate for young students.

Educators through high school are barred from addressing either topic in the classroom in a manner that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” for their students. Florida public school teachers who violate the law risk having their licenses suspended or revoked under a rule adopted by the state Board of Education in October.

LGBTQ parents in Florida surveyed by the Willams Institute between June and September said their initial response to the bill, introduced last January in the state House, ranged from fear to disbelief. Many were unconcerned about the measure at first because they believed it would not be signed into law or was unenforceable.

Over time, however, as the measure moved swiftly through the legislature, LGBTQ parents who were initially not worried became increasingly concerned. Some even considered removing their children from the public school system altogether, according to the Williams Institute survey.

LGBTQ parents surveyed by the group voiced a variety of concerns about the “Don’t Say Gay” law’s expected impact on their children, including that it would restrict them from speaking freely about their families, negatively impact their sense of legitimacy and encourage a hostile school climate.

“Many are concerned that the bill will not only result in restricted or nonexistent education about the existence of diverse sexual and gender identities, but it will result in a chilly or hostile school climate for LGBTQ educators, students, and families because it suggests that something is wrong with LGBTQ identities,” researcher Abbie E. Goldberg, a psychology professor at Clark University, wrote in the report.

LGBTQ parents with LGBTQ children said they were especially worried how the law would impact their child’s learning environment and mental well-being, and 13 percent said their children have expressed fears about continuing to live in Florida as an LGBTQ young person.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), seen as a top GOP contender for the 2024 presidential election, has spearheaded a statewide crusade against LGBTQ issues and identities over the last year, calling for physicians who provide gender-affirming medical care to transgender minors to be sued and accusing teachers and public school systems of indoctrinating vulnerable young people with “woke gender ideology.”

Earlier this month, as he was sworn in for his second term as governor, DeSantis touted his administration’s success in passing educational reforms including the “Parental Rights in Education” law and pledged to ensure Florida schools “are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology.”

“Florida must always be a great place to raise a family – we will enact more family-friendly policies to make it easier to raise children and we will defend our children against those who seek to rob them of their innocence,” DeSantis said.

But according to LGBTQ parents, Florida has become an increasingly hostile place to live.

Nearly a quarter of LGBTQ parents surveyed in the Williams Institute report said they feared being harassed by their neighbors because of their sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, and more than 20 percent said they had been out less in their neighborhood, workplace or community over the past 3 to 6 months.

“The Don’t Say Gay bill claims to be for parent rights, but my rights have been taken away since its passage,” one respondent said. “My right to send my daughter to school freely, my right to live without fear of who I am, my right to not be discriminated against based on my sexual orientation, and my daughter to not be discriminated against based on her parents’ sexual orientation.”

For some LGBTQ parents, the passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law has motivated them to engage more directly in community activism; nearly 20 percent said they participated in a demonstration to protest the legislation over the past 6 months.

Others spoke to how their parenting and activism serves as means of queer resistance and empowerment.

“We do our best to instill the right things in our children to help them grow to be kind collectivemembers of society,” one survey respondent said. “As queer parents we do this all in spite of a society that actively tries to silence us. But what they do not understand is that we also raise our children to scream above the silence and fight for the right to love and exist without persecution.”

Palestinian workers strike as UN agency squeeze hits salaries



Palestinian workers strike as UN agency squeeze hits salariesAid-reliant Palestinians struggle for basic necessities amid UN assistance reduction

Wed, January 25, 2023 
By Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Schools, clinics and some municipal services in the West Bank were closed on Wednesday as workers went on strike for a third day amid an escalating funding squeeze on the United Nations agency that pays their wages.

Around 3,700 workers in the West Bank joined the strike, demanding an across-the-board pay increase of 200 Jordanian dinars ($281.81) a month from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

"The strike will go on until UNWRA accepts our demands," said Jamal Abdullah, head of the union representing workers paid by the agency in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, UNRWA appealed for $1.6 billion in funding for schools, healthcare and aid in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where most Palestinian refugees or their descendants from various Arab-Israeli conflicts live.

With donations to the agency hit by crises across the world, compounded by inflation and supply chain disruptions, there was no immediate prospect of relief.

"All indications point out that it is going to be a difficult year," said Adnan Abu Hasna, spokesman of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza City.

With health clinics closed, some 50,000 school students shut out of their classrooms, and rubbish piled up in the streets on Wednesday, the strike added to the daily struggle faced by people in deprived areas of the West Bank.

"Cleaners aren't working, so garbage and dirt are piling up next to houses and stores," said Hussein Zaid, a resident of Jalazone camp outside Ramallah, where UNWRA supports a health centre and two schools. "If you go into the camp, you will not be able to pass because of the dirt and garbage."

In Gaza, the blockaded southern coastal strip run by the Islamist movement Hamas, there was only one brief stoppage this week but pressure mounted for humanitarian supplies that many refugees depend on for food.

Nahed Abu Amira, 63, who said his 24-member family depended entirely on UNWRA aid to survive, said cooking oil and flour allocations in the aid packages they received had become smaller in recent months as food prices have surged globally.

"I am afraid UNRWA may suspend the food aid; if that happens our households would be ruined, and we won't be able to eat or drink," he said.

($1 = 0.7097 Jordanian dinars)

(Nidal Al-Mughrabi reported from Gaza; writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

LIKE THE IRS
Depleted Under Trump, a 'Traumatized' EPA Struggles With Its Mission

Lisa Friedman
Tue, January 24, 2023 

A coal-fired power station in Euharlee, Ga., Oct. 19, 2022. (Kendrick Brinson/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top environmental agency is still reeling from the exodus of more than 1,200 scientists and policy experts during the Trump administration. The chemicals chief said her staff can’t keep up with a mounting workload. The enforcement unit is prosecuting fewer polluters than at any time in the past two decades.

And now this: The stressed-out, stretched-thin Environmental Protection Agency is scrambling to write about a half-dozen highly complex rules and regulations that are central to President Joe Biden’s climate goals.

The new rules have to be enacted within the next 18 months — lightning speed in the regulatory world — or they could be overturned by a new Congress or administration.

The regulations are already delayed months past EPA’s own self-imposed deadlines, raising concerns from supporters in Congress and environmental groups. “It’s very fair to say we are not where we hoped we’d be,” said Miles Keogh, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents most state and local air regulators.

As staffing at the EPA thinned out, the workload only increased, both the agency and its critics say.

Career employees are being “worked to death,” said Betsy Southerland, a former top EPA scientist. “They’re under the greatest pressure they’ve ever been.”

Biden administration officials insist the agency has delivered more environmental protections than any previous presidency and listed dozens of new policies, including the creation of a high-level office focused for the first time on addressing racial disparities when it comes to environmental hazards.

The agency’s administrator, Michael S. Regan, has promised that new regulations being written by his staff now will be made public by spring. Agency officials said that the EPA has stepped up its recruitment efforts and has purchased software that has helped it identify more potential job candidates, particularly from universities.

“The agency is moving further and faster than ever before,” Dan Utech, Regan’s chief of staff, said in a statement. He added that accomplishments had come “despite depleted staffing levels, persistent funding challenges and a previous administration that left the agency neglected and scientifically compromised.”

The EPA is at an unusual juncture. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the climate law enacted last year have begun to pump $90 billion into the agency over the next 10 years for climate projects such as $1.5 billion for new technologies to monitor and reduce methane emissions from oil and gas wells, $5 billion for states to purchase low-emission school buses, and $3 billion to cut pollution at ports. For the first time the EPA has “a little bit of walking-around money,” Regan joked to staff at a recent meeting.

But experts said they worry the EPA’s regulatory and enforcement work is taking a back seat to issuing grants.

“EPA is a regulatory agency, and I worry the huge piles of money they now have to administer and manage could end up obscuring the regulatory work the statutes say they have to do,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

And time is running out.

Biden wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half this decade in order to avoid the most severe climate disruptions. Analysts say that even with the new climate law, the president can’t achieve his goal without new regulations designed to cut carbon dioxide and other pollutants from power plants, cars and trucks.

The process from proposing a regulation to enacting it can take months, and the current delays may mean that some rules are not completed until next year. Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can repeal any regulation within 60 legislative days of being finalized with a simple majority vote. So any final rule issued in late 2024 could be repealed by Republicans if they maintain control of the House and pick up seats in the Senate in the November 2024 elections.

Moreover, Biden administration climate rules are also likely to face legal challenges. If a new administration is elected in 2024, it might opt not to defend the rules in court.

A recent report card from Evergreen, an environmental group, found the EPA was behind its own deadlines on nine key environmental regulations, including limits on power plant emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, ozone standards, and curtailing the storage of coal ash to avoid spills and contamination. Most worrisome, climate advocates said, is that the agency has yet to propose rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new gas-fired power plants and existing coal and gas plants — measures that energy analysts say will be necessary to eliminate fossil fuels from the electricity sector by 2035 as Biden has pledged to do.

In a recent interview, Regan said his agency has recently been reassessing its regulatory plans. The millions of dollars now available through the climate law to make it cheaper and easier for utilities and automobile manufacturers to move away from fossil fuels has led the agency to consider whether it could impose more stringent emissions goals than initially conceived, he said. That would move the power and transportation sectors of the economy even faster away from fossil fuels. He said developing the legal and economic justification for such regulations would take time but was nearing completion.

“This spring, you’re going to see a number of actions taken by EPA,” Regan said.

Despite the billions earmarked for climate programs, EPA remains underfunded and understaffed when it comes to its other obligations, including enforcing environmental laws and evaluating chemicals to ensure they don’t pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.

The nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project recently found that federal environmental enforcement was slipping under Biden. EPA’s civil cases against polluters hit a two-decade low in 2022, with 72 such enforcement cases closed in court. That’s fewer than during the Trump administration, which bristled against restrictions on industry yet closed an average of 94 enforcement cases per year. The Obama administration averaged 210 per year, the report found. EPA officials said they were focused on protecting heavily polluted communities by increasing inspections and targeting the most serious violations.

Industries regulated by the EPA are also frustrated, saying the agency is taking too long to determine whether new and existing chemicals pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or human health.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents companies such as Dow, DuPont and ExxonMobil Chemical, is frustrated by “constant delays and lack of transparency in how resources are being deployed,” according to a statement from Kimberly Wise White, vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs at the trade group.

Michal Freedhoff, who leads the EPA’s chemical unit, told Congress recently that the office of chemical safety would fall short of its obligations and miss many “significant statutory deadlines.” She blamed the fact that after a 2016 law significantly increased the agency’s duties, the EPA under the Trump administration never sought the resources from Congress that were required to perform the work.

In fact, former President Donald Trump tried each year to slash the EPA budget by at least 30%. Highly skilled scientists and other experts left the agency as the Trump administration dismantled science advisory panels, disregarded scientific evidence and weakened protections against pollution.

“They beat down the EPA workforce; a lot of people left dispirited,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, which oversees the EPA.

The result is that the EPA’s chemical safety office is way behind, Freedhoff told Congress. Attracting and retaining staff have been difficult because of the heavy workload, she said.

Carper said he was “impatient,” particularly with the regulatory delays, and had expressed that to Regan personally.

The EPA is hiring and, in the past two years, has increased its payroll by 3%, up to 14,844 employees. But that has brought total staffing levels to slightly more than when Ronald Reagan was president.

Staffing at the EPA peaked in 2004 during the George W. Bush administration, when there were 17,611 employees, according to the agency. Those levels ebbed and flowed slightly, but began to take a sharp dip during the Obama administration amid Republican control of the House and Senate.

When Trump entered the White House, the EPA had 15,408 employees. The following year it dropped to 14,172 employees, a level that stood more or less steady until the Biden administration.

It was only last month that the agency received its first significant budget increase in years, an additional $576 million, for enforcement and compliance, as well as clean air, water and toxic chemical programs.

Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to make government more effective, said the EPA faced a “consequential hurdle” to both accomplishing the long list of rules that Biden has promised and to expanding further to make sure money from the new climate law gets spent effectively.

“You have an organization that was at some level traumatized to begin with, that was facing difficulties created over many, many years of divestment, and now you have a new set of requirements that are going to call for new capabilities,” he said. “They’re going to have to build up their strength, and that does not happen overnight.”

© 2023 The New York Times Company

Biden rolls out 'Renters Bill of Rights' as lawmakers push for federal rent control laws

Jennifer Schonberger
·Senior Reporter
Wed, January 25, 2023 

In the face of sky-high rents, President Joe Biden is rolling out a new set of principles the White House is calling a "Renters Bill of Rights" in an effort to improve rent affordability and protections for tenants.

The president is directing the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to examine limits on rent increases for future investments and actions promoting renter protections. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have been tapped to root out practices that unfairly prevent applicants and tenants from accessing or staying in housing.

This rollout comes as progressive Democrats have asked Biden to direct different agencies, including the FTC, to limit rent increases. While rent control is common in some cities, there has never been federal residential rent control.

Nearly 50 progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), sent a letter to Biden earlier this month urging the president to take executive action to protect tenants from rising rents.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) meets with (L-R) Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), near the entrance to the Capitol Building on August 03, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

"In the absence of robust investments in fair and affordable housing, it is clear that additional timely executive action is needed to address the urgent issue of historically high rental costs and housing instability," the lawmakers wrote. "…We urge your Administration to pursue all possible strategies to end corporate price gouging in the real estate sector."

Specifically, lawmakers had called on the president to direct the FTC to issue new regulations defining excessive rent increases and enforce actions against rent gouging, suggestions that are aggressive than what the administration has so far put forth. The letter also asked to have FHFA put in place rent protection for tenants living in properties financed with government-backed mortgage properties, which is more closely aligned with what the president outlined on Wednesday.

In Wednesday's announcement, the administration also sought to rally state and local governments — as well as the private sector — to protect renters.

The Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority and Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, for instance, have agreed to cap annual rental increases to 5% per year for federal- or state-subsidized affordable housing.

In the private sector, the National Association of Realtors has also agreed to put new resources towards property managers in their network to promote practices like advertising to prospective tenants that Housing Choice Vouchers are accepted at their property, providing information about rental assistance, and using alternative credit scores for applicants without a detailed credit history.

Despite Wednesday's action, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Sen. Warren think the actions fall short.

"We believe that the administration can go significantly further to help tenants struggling to pay rent as soon as next week," Bowman said. "We need actions that will urgently address skyrocketing housing costs, keep people housed, and rein in corporate profiteering...I look forward to continuing to work with the Biden Administration on this issue."

Bowman said he plans to work with colleagues in Congress to work on legislation to address high rents.

The limits of FTC power

In advance of receiving the letter, the White House held several conversations with staff from Rep. Bowman and Sen. Warren’s offices about ensuring rental markets are fair and affordable for renters. Lawmakers argued the FTC already has the power to limit rent increases, given Congress has granted the agency power to police unfair and deceptive acts and practices. The argument is that rent hikes which are not proportional to higher costs for the landlord are unfair or deceptive.

But analysts are skeptical the FTC could impose rent controls and that courts would uphold these policies if put in place.

"The Supreme Court is more conservative. It is less inclined to let agencies assert authorities that Congress did not explicitly give them. Congress never empowered the FTC to limit how much residential rents may increase," Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg said in a recent note. "It is why we would expect the courts to reject this type of regime."

Seiberg also questioned how a federal regime would actually work, given costs vary from city to city and buildings may get remodeled or upgraded. "The FTC is a relatively small agency," Seiberg added. "We don't see how it could account for all this in a way that could survive court challenges."

While legislation could accomplish this, Seiburg said he doesn't see Congress adopting federal rent control.

Rent prices rose 7.45% year over year in November, according to the latest available data from the Rent Report, the slowest annual rise over the last 15 months. Still, this increase is more than triple the 2.2% annual rent increase seen during the same month two years ago.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

One of Wall Street’s most feared short-selling research firms just accused Asia’s richest man of a multibillion-dollar fraud


Chloe Taylor
Wed, January 25, 2023 


Asia’s wealthiest person saw his fortune take a hit on Wednesday, after a famed U.S. short seller accused him of “pulling the largest con in corporate history.”

In a report published on Tuesday, Hindenburg Research said Adani Group and its founder Gautam Adani – one of the richest people in the world – had engaged in “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.”

Adani serves as the Indian conglomerate’s chairman.

Hindenburg Research has a history of shining a light on corporate malpractice, successfully predicting the demise or exposing the shortcomings of several companies, including Nikola, Riot Blockchain and China Metal Resources Utilization.

It announced on Tuesday that it had concluded a two-year investigation into Adani Group, which involved speaking with dozens of insiders, including former senior executives, as well as reviewing thousands of documents and carrying out “diligence site visits” in several countries.

‘Precarious financial footing’

Adani Group’s aggressive expansion efforts have seen it rack up massive debts.

The firm’s financial problems have been widely reported on, but Hindenburg warned that the company’s use of its “inflated stock” as loan collateral was “putting the entire group on precarious financial footing.”

However, the problems with Adani Group’s finances were much deeper than its stock being overpriced, Hindenburg said.

Through its wide-reaching investigations, Hindenburg said it had uncovered a “vast labyrinth of offshore shell entities” being managed by Adani’s older brother, Vinod.

Thirty-eight of those shell companies were in Mauritius, the report claimed, with others discovered in Cyprus, the UAE, Singapore and the Caribbean.

“The shells seem to serve several functions, including stock parking/stock manipulation and laundering money through Adani’s private companies onto the listed companies’ balance sheets in order to maintain the appearance of financial health and solvency,” Hindenburg’s report said. “This offshore shell network also seems to be used for earnings manipulation.”

One offshore fund had allocated around $3 billion almost exclusively to shares of Adani Group companies, Hindenburg’s report also claimed.

A former trader at the fund reportedly said it was obvious the Adanis controlled those shares, but that the fund had been “intentionally structured to conceal their ultimate beneficial ownership.”

In India, shares of publicly listed companies that are held by those involved with establishing or controlling the business must be disclosed by law.

The rules also dictate that listed firms have at least 25% of their shares held by “non-promoters” in order to mitigate manipulation and insider trading.

“Four of Adani’s listed companies are on the brink of the delisting threshold due to high promoter ownership,” the report alleged.

“Our research indicates that offshore shells and funds tied to the Adani Group comprise many of the largest ‘public’ (i.e., non-promoter) holders of Adani stock, an issue that would subject the Adani companies to delisting, were the Indian securities regulator’s rules enforced.”

As well as using offshore shell companies to hold stock, Hindenburg’s researchers also detailed how the family was using them to send money to their publicly traded firms.

“The funds then seem to be used to engineer Adani’s accounting (whether by bolstering its reported profit or cash flows), cushioning its capital balances in order to make listed entities appear more creditworthy, or simply moved back out to other parts of the Adani empire where capital is needed,” they said.

They noted that Adani’s personal fortune had been boosted over the past three years by Adani Group stock price appreciation, with its seven core firms seeing an average price rise of 819% over that period.

However, they argued that these elevated prices – and thus Adani’s net worth – could not be sustained.

“Even if you ignore the findings of our investigation and take the financials of Adani Group at face value, its seven key listed companies have 85% downside purely on a fundamental basis owing to sky-high valuations,” they said in Tuesday’s report.

‘Baseless allegations’

Representatives for the Adani Group did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on Hindenburg’s investigation.

However, the organization publicly refuted the allegations on Wednesday, arguing that they had been made in an attempt to sabotage the success of Adani Enterprises’ upcoming Follow-on Public Offer (FPO), which is expected to go live on Friday, Jan. 27.

Last year, Adani Group announced it would inject more shares of Adani Enterprises – one of its public divisions – into the market after its stock price surged more than 3,300% in three years.

Since debuting on the stock market in the 1990s, shares of Adani Enterprises have seen their value rise by more than 50,000%.

On Wednesday, it was reported that the company’s $2.45 billion secondary share offering – India’s largest-ever FPO – was oversubscribed by anchor investors.

Initial bids included offers from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, according to news agency Reuters.

“The report is a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by India’s highest courts,” the company’s CFO Jugeshinder Singh said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The Group has always been in compliance with all laws, regardless of jurisdiction, and maintains the highest standards of corporate governance,” he insisted.

“Our informed and knowledgeable investors are not influenced by one-sided, motivated and unsubstantiated reports with vested interests.”

Despite Singh’s assertion that “the investor community has always reposed faith in the Adani Group,” Hindenburg’s report triggered a massive sell-off of the corporation’s listed businesses on Wednesday.

On average, the group’s listed firms saw more than 5% wiped off of their value during Mumbai’s trading session on Wednesday, according to the Financial Times – amounting to a $10.8 billion hit on the companies’ combined market caps.

The retreat from the company’s stock also had wider implications for Indian businesses, generating a ripple effect that saw Indian shares as a whole take a downward turn.

What does Adani Group do?

Headquartered in Ahmedabad, Adani Group is an Indian corporation comprised of seven publicly traded companies.

It has interests in energy, infrastructure, agriculture and transport.

The company, founded by Gautam Adani in 1988, employs more than 23,000 people.

Who is Gautam Adani?

As his company’s stock nosedived on Wednesday, Adani personally lost almost $1 billion – or 0.8% – of his fortune, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which ranks Adani as the fourth wealthiest person in the world.

Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people, which uses a slightly different methodology, puts Adani in third place – above Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Last year, Adani briefly held the title of the World’s Second Richest Person, as his fortune continued to climb while sinking U.S. tech stocks bit into the wealth of Bezos and other billionaires whose fortunes were tied to the success of Big Tech.

Bloomberg reported at the time that Adani’s fortune had risen more than anyone else’s in 2022.

Regardless of his position among the top five wealthiest people on earth, the self-made tycoon – who describes his company’s operations as “nation building” – is firmly the richest person in Asia, with a net worth of around $119 billion.

However, Adani’s phenomenal rise in wealth and power hasn’t been without controversy.

In the past, Adani’s close relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has led to allegations that his success has arisen from “brazen cronyism.”

The 60-year-old mogul controls India’s biggest port, Mundra Port, and acquired a 74% stake in Mumbai International Airport in 2020, according to Forbes, making him India’s biggest airport operator.

He also holds stakes in other airports around the country, after scooping up all six airports that were approved for privatization by the Indian government in 2018 after officials relaxed the rules about which companies were permitted to operate them.

Since 2020, his personal fortune has skyrocketed by more than 1,200%, data from Forbes shows.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Adani Group shares fall after Hindenburg report. What we know so far

Story by India Today Web Desk • 2h ago

Shares of seven listed Adani Group companies fell sharply between 1-9 per cent after a report by US-based investor research and activist short-seller firm, Hindenburg Research, led to panic among domestic investors.


Adani Group shares fall after Hindenburg report. What we know so far© Provided by India Today

Adani Group listed companies such as Adani Total Gas, Adani Enterprises, Adani Transmission, Adani Green Energy, Adani Ports, Adani Power and Adani Wilmar fell sharply and led to a cumulative market cap erosion of nearly Rs 1 lakh crore at the end of today's trading session.

In fact, shares of cement manufacturing firms Ambuja Cements and ACC – two companies acquired by Adani Group last year – also fell 6-7 per cent amid the broader selloff in Adani Group listed companies.

What did the Hindenburg report say?

The report by Hindenburg Research, released on January 24, 2023, suggested that Adani Group was "engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades".

Revealing the findings of its "two-year investigations", Hindenburg said companies under the Gautam Adani-owned conglomerate "have taken on substantial debt, including pledging shares of their inflated stock for loans, putting the entire group on precarious financial footing".

The report also said that Adani Group's seven key listed companies have an "85 per cent downside purely on a fundamental basis owing to sky-high valuations". In addition, the report also levelled allegations of fraud and stock manipulation against the group.

The report triggered massive panic in domestic stock markets, with listed Adani Group companies falling sharply. This also led to a nearly 1 per cent drop in benchmark equity indices Sensex and Nifty.

How Adani Group responded?

Related video: Hindenburg Research Short Position Triggers Adani Selloff (Bloomberg)

Duration 2:16

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Adani Group released an official statement to rubbish allegations levelled by Hindenburg Research in its report. The group also questioned the timing of the report, released days before the Adani Enterprises FPO.

Adani Group CFO Jugeshinder Singh said, "We are shocked that Hindenburg Research published a report on January 24, 2023, without making any attempt to contact us or verify the factual matrix."

"The report is a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by India's highest courts," he said.

"The timing of the report's publication clearly betrays a brazen, mala fide intention to undermine the Adani Group's reputation with the principal objective of damaging the upcoming Follow-on Public Offering from Adani Enterprises, the biggest FPO ever in India," Singh added.

"Our informed, and knowledgeable investors are not influenced by one-sided, motivated and unsubstantiated reports with vested interests."

How analysts reacted to the Hindenburg report?

Analysts quoted in several media reports have questioned the timing of the report as many of the facts mentioned by Hindenburg report are already in the public domain and have not been proven.

"The timing of the report is suspicious," said Kranthi Bathini, Director, Equity Strategy, WealthMills, in an interview to Business Today TV.

"They (Hindenburg) could've brought this report under public domain months earlier. This timing is suspicious and as Adani Group's statement says they have mentioned that all these are malicious rumours about the group, and they stick to their corporate governance," Bathini said.

He also explained the reason behind the panic selling witnessed in Adani Group listed companies today and said, "As investors are aware, all the Adani Group shares are high beta stocks and their valuations always look strange. So, whenever these kinds of allegations surface, the stocks tumble."

However, he assured investors that there is no reason to panic and added that "existing investors can hold their positions and have nothing to worry about". He also reiterated that the allegations made in the report have not been proven to date.

Asia’s richest man slams short-seller’s fraud claims as ‘baseless’ and ‘malicious’

By Diksha Madhok, CNN
Published 8:18 AM EST, Wed January 25, 2023

Chairperson of Indian conglomerate Adani Group, Gautam Adani, speaks at the World Congress of Accountants in Mumbai on November 19, 2022.Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images
New DelhiCNN —

India’s Adani Group on Wednesday denounced allegations of fraud made by US-based short seller Hindenburg Research as “baseless” and a “malicious combination of selective misinformation.”

Hindenburg Research published an investigation on billionaire Gautam Adani’s sprawling conglomerate on Tuesday, accusing it of “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.”

Hindenburg said it has taken a short position in companies in the Adani Group “through U.S.-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivative instruments.” Short sellers aim to make money by betting that the stock price of the companies they target will fall.

Adani’s business empire contains seven listed companies — in sectors ranging from ports to power stations — and shares in most of them fell by between 3% and more than 8% on Wednesday.

In its investigation, which Hindenburg said took two years to compile, the research firm questioned the “sky-high valuations” of Adani firms and said their “substantial debt” puts the entire group “on a precarious financial footing.”

The research firm concluded its report with 88 questions for the Adani Group. These range from asking for details on Adani’s offshore entities, to why it has “such a convoluted, interlinked corporate structure.”

CNN has not verified the claims in the report, and India’s stock market regulator did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shares of Adani’s companies have surged in the last few years, making him Asia’s richest man.

In a statement released a few hours after Hindenburg published its report, the Adani Group’s chief financial officer Jugeshinder Singh said that Hindenburg did not make “any attempt to contact us or verify the factual matrix,” adding that the allegations made by the short seller are “stale, baseless and discredited.”

The conglomerate has faced scrutiny from Indian authorities in the past. In 2021, shares in Adani’s companies tumbled after The Economic Times newspaper said that foreign funds that hold stakes worth billions of dollars were frozen by the country’s National Securities Depository. The Adani Group called that report “blatantly erroneous.”

Nate Anderson, who founded Hindenburg Research, has made a name for himself in the past few years by targeting companies that he thinks are overvalued and have suspect financials. Anderson is best known for going after electric truck company Nikola in 2020, calling it an “intricate fraud,” and causing the firm’s stock to plunge sharply. In 2022, Nikola’s founder was convicted by a US jury of fraud in a case alleging he lied to investors about the company’s technology.

But some have accused Hindenburg of trying to push stocks lower with its research reports in order to make a profit.

Its report on the Adani Group comes at a sensitive time. Later this week, Adani Enterprises, the conglomerate’s flagship company, is aiming to raise 200 billion rupees ($2.5 billion) by issuing new shares.

Singh said that the “timing of the report’s publication clearly betrays a brazen, mala fide intention to undermine the Adani Group’s reputation with the principal objective of damaging the upcoming follow-on public offering.”

The conglomerate is also considering taking five new businesses to the stock market in the next two to five years.

A college dropout and a self-made industrialist, Adani is worth nearly $120 billion, making him the world’s fourth richest man, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. He is also seen as a close ally of India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi.

But this is not the first time analysts have expressed fear that the rapid expansion of his business comes with a huge risk. Adani’s juggernaut has been fueled by a $30 billion borrowing binge, making his business one of the most indebted in the country.

Last year, CreditSights, a research firm owned by Fitch Group, published a report about Adani Group titled “Deeply Overleveraged” in which it expressed strong concerns about its debt-funded growth plans.

Adani Group responded to CreditSights with a 15-page report, saying that the “leverage ratios” of its companies “continue to be healthy and are in line with the industry benchmarks in the respective sectors” and that they “have consistently de-levered” in the last nine years.

Adani stocks fall in India on fraud, stock manipulation claims

Nivrita GANGULY
Wed, 25 January 2023 


Asia's richest man Gautam Adani saw his net worth drop six billion dollars on Wednesday after a US investment firm accused him of "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud".

Adani, 60, is the world's third-richest person, with an estimated fortune of around $120 billion and interests ranging from Australian coal mines to India's busiest ports.

But the magnate was the biggest loser on Forbes' real-time billionaires list on Wednesday, dropping nearly five percent -- or $6.4 billion -- of his net worth overnight as investors rushed to sell shares in his group of companies.


Hindenburg Research published a report on Tuesday alleging that Adani Group "has engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades".

The firm said it had taken a short position in Adani Group companies after a two-year investigation based on interviews with former executives, site visits in multiple countries and document reviews.

Its report claims that Adani's elder brother Vinod "manages a vast labyrinth of offshore shell entities" in tax havens including Mauritius, Cyprus and several Caribbean islands.

Hindenburg said it had identified numerous instances of undisclosed related-party transactions and earnings manipulation "to maintain the appearance of financial health and solvency" of listed Adani companies.

The allegations come ahead of an ambitious $2.5 billion follow-on public offer -- India's biggest-ever -- due to open for bids on Friday and aimed at bolstering the business empire's balance sheet.

"The report is a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations," Adani Group chief financial officer Jugeshinder Singh said in a statement.

Singh added that the report had been deliberately timed to undermine the conglomerate's reputation "with the principal objective of damaging the upcoming follow-on public offering".

- 'Afraid to speak out' -

Adani Group is India's second-largest conglomerate, with the combined market capitalisation of its seven listed companies exceeding $218 billion.

Shares in Adani business units have soared up to 2,000 percent in the past three years, adding more than $100 billion to its founder's net worth and vaulting him up the ranks of the world's richest people.

Critics of the billionaire attribute his meteoric rise to a close association with Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and support for his policies.

Hindenburg's report said there had been a pattern of "government leniency towards the group" stretching back decades.

"We believe the Adani Group has been able to operate a large, flagrant fraud in broad daylight in large part because investors, journalists, citizens and even politicians have been afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal," the report said.

Shares in flagship Adani Enterprises fell as much as three percent on Wednesday, before recovering to trade 1.41 percent lower in the afternoon.

Other business units fell as much as 6.5 percent over the day's trade.

ng/gle/mca

Brazil official says Yanomami region looks like 'concentration camp'


Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looks on, as he visits the Yanomami Indigenous Health House (CASA Yanomami) in Boa Vista

Anthony Boadle
Tue, January 24, 2023 

By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's military should evict illegal gold miners who have caused malnutrition and starvation in a region of the Yanomami reservation near the Venezuelan border, Indigenous Health Secretary Weibe Tapeba said on Tuesday, urging

"It looks like a concentration camp," Tapeba, a doctor appointed to the position by Brazil's new government, said in a radio interview.

Tapeba said 700 members of the community were going hungry and healthcare is non-existent due to presence of well-armed gold miners that scared away medical workers from the health post and block people from bringing in supplies of medicine and food.

Brazil's ministry of health on Friday declared a medical emergency in the Yanomami territory, the country's largest indigenous reservation, following reports of children dying of malnutrition and other diseases brought by gold mining.

On Saturday, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited the state following the publication of photos showing Yanomami children and elderly people so thin their ribs were visible.

"It's an extreme calamity, many Yanomami are suffering from malnutrition and there is a total absence of the Brazilian state," Tapeba said.

An invasion by more than 20,000 wildcat gold miners has contaminated the rivers with mercury that has poisoned the fish the Yanomami eat he said, citing children with their hair falling out due to the mercury used to separate gold from ore.

"Health teams cannot get here because of the heavily armed bandits. This can only be resolved by removing the gold miners and that can only be done by the armed forces," he said.

Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the removal of the gold miners. But the previous government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro never complied. Yanomami leaders said their pleas for help were ignored.

In four years of Bolsonaro's presidency, 570 Yanomami children died of curable diseases, mainly malnutrition but also malaria, diarrhea and malformations caused by the mercury in the rivers, the Amazon journalism platform Sumauma reported, citing data obtained by a FOIA.

The reservation has been invaded by illegal gold miners for decades, but the incursions multiplied since Bolsonaro won office in 2018 promising to allow mining on previously protected indigenous lands and offering to legalize wildcat mining.

Justice Minister Flavio Dino said on Monday that there was "evidence of genocide" that is being investigated.

In December, Survival International warned about the extent of the crisis, citing a study by UNICEF and Brazil's FioCruz biomedical research center that found that 8 out of 10 Yanomami had chronic malnutrition, and deaths from preventable diseases among children under five were 13 times the national average.

"The Yanomami rarely suffer from malnutrition in normal circumstances. Their forests are bountiful and they are experts at growing, gathering and hunting everything they need, and they enjoy excellent health," said Survival International director Fiona Watson in a statement.

"This is a deliberate, man-made crisis, stoked by President Bolsonaro, who has encouraged the mass invasion and destruction of the Yanomami's lands," she said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

US board says Boeing Max likely hit a bird before 2019 crash

CANADIANS WERE ON THAT FLIGHT

Wreckage is piled at the crash scene of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, March 11, 2019. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023, that a sensor which gave false readings about the plane was damaged by striking a foreign object, most likely a bird. That conflicts with a finding by Ethiopian officials. 

(AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene, File)

Tue, January 24, 2023 a
U.S. accident investigators disagree with Ethiopian authorities over the cause of a sensor malfunction that preceded the March 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that it determined that the bad sensor reading was caused by impact with an object, most likely a bird.

Ethiopia's aviation authority said false readings by the sensor, which measures the direction of the plane's nose, were caused by electrical issues that had existed since the plane was manufactured.

The NTSB said in a document dated Jan. 13 and released Tuesday that Ethiopia's final report on the crash provides no details to support the finding of an electrical problem. The U.S. board relied partly on a fault analysis by Collins Aerospace, which made the sensor.

Both sides agree that the sensor readings caused an automated flight-control system new on the Max to pitch the nose of the plane downward. Pilots were unable to regain control. The crash killed all 157 people on board and occurred less than five months after a Max crash in Indonesia killed 189 people.

The NTSB released its new comments three weeks after its initial criticism of Ethiopia's findings around the cause of the crash, which led to a worldwide grounding of all Max jets for nearly two years.

Boeing is to be arraigned Thursday in a federal court in Texas on a charge of defrauding the United States. More than a dozen relatives of crash victims have asked the court for time to speak after Boeing enters a plea to the fraud charge.

The families are pushing the Justice Department to re-open a 2021 settlement in which Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion in exchange for not facing criminal prosecution over the way it obtained regulatory approval for the plane. Both Boeing and the Justice Department oppose reopening the settlement.

The judge ordered Boeing to be represented by an “appropriate person.” Boeing has not publicly identified that perso