A former Mossad chief says Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank

TIA GOLDENBERG
Updated Wed, September 6, 2023 

Israel Apartheid Debate

Tamir Pardo, former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency pose for a photograph in Herzliya, Israel, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. A former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency said Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a small but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse. 

(AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

HERZLIYA, Israel (AP) — A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.

Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.

Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

A handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Pardo's language was even more blunt.

“There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Given Pardo's background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel.

Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel's clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016, wouldn't say if he held the same beliefs while heading the Mossad. But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Netanyahu as an existential threat.

Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel's borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews.

In the past year, Pardo has become an outspoken critic against Netanyahu and his government's push to reshape the judicial system, slamming his old boss for steps he said would lead Israel to become a dictatorship. His candid evaluation Wednesday of Israel's military occupation is rare among leaders of the grassroots protest movement against the judicial overhaul, which has largely avoided talk of the occupation out of concern that it might scare away more nationalist supporters.

Pardo's remarks, and the overhaul, come as Israel's far-right government, which is made up of ultranationalist parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel's hold on the territory. Some ministers have pledged to double the number of settlers currently living in the West Bank, which stands at a half-million.

Netanyahu's Likud party issued a statement condemning Pardo's comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said. “Pardo. You should be ashamed.”

In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. Human rights groups have based their conclusions on Israel on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”

Pardo said Israeli citizens can get into a car and drive wherever they want, excluding the blockaded Gaza Strip, but that Palestinians can't drive everywhere. He said that his views on the system in the West Bank were “not extreme. It's a fact."

Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls. Palestinians need permission from Israel to enter the country and often must pass through military checkpoints to move within the West Bank.

Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank. Israel exerts overall control of the territory, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community considers illegal.

Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It says the West Bank is disputed territory and that its fate should be determined in negotiations.

Pardo warned that if Israel doesn't set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel's existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.

Experts predict Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel plus the areas it captured in 1967 — the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Continued occupation could force Israel into a hard choice: Formalize Jewish minority rule over disenfranchised Palestinians — or give them the right to vote and potentially end the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine.

“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border has no boundaries,” Pardo said.

Global group of media organizations releases principles for AI development
Story by The Canadian Press 



Global group of media organizations releases principles for AI development© Provided by The Canadian Press

TORONTO — Twenty-five global organizations, including news and publishing companies, have banded together to urge developers, operators and deployers of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to respect intellectual property rights.

The group, which represents thousands of creative professionals and includes News Media Canada, made the request Wednesday in a document it released laying out a series of global AI principles it would like to see the world abide by.

The principles cover areas including intellectual property (IP), transparency, accountability, fairness and safety and were positioned as a response to rapid AI advances in recent months.

"The proliferation of AI systems, especially generative artificial intelligence, present a sea change in how we interact with and deploy technology and creative content," the groups wrote in their principles.

"While AI technologies will provide substantial benefits to the public, content creators, businesses, and society at large, they also pose risks for the sustainability of the creative industries, the public’s trust in knowledge, journalism, and science, and the health of our democracies."

The principles ask that those developing AI systems provide transparency to allow publishers to enforce their rights where their content is included in training data sets.

They assert that publishers are entitled to negotiate for and receive adequate remuneration for use of their IP.

"AI system developers, operators, and deployers should not be crawling, ingesting, or using our proprietary creative content without express authorization," the principles say.

They also say developers should clearly attribute content to the original publishers, recognize publishers' role in generating high-quality content for training and not create or risk creating unfair market dominance.

Rapid advancements in generative AI convinced News Media Canada, the national association of the Canadian news media industry, serving print and digital news media members in every province and territory, to join the group.

"Real journalism costs real money and publishers are going to protect our rights through fair licensing agreements so we can continue to invest in high quality, original, fact-based, fact-checked content," Paul Deegan, News Media Canada's president and chief executive, said in an emai
Similar groups from Colombia, Finland, Japan, Brazil, Hungary and Korea were among the organizations that endorsed the principles.

Pretty much all large language models — the heart of AI — are trained on publisher data from these organizations, said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute in Washington, D.C.

News media is so significant to the models because it is high quality information that has been fact-checked and includes syntax and quotes. In some cases, Radsch said work from publishers makes up 10 per cent of the data models are trained on.

But its easy accessibility across the internet also makes it vulnerable to misuse.

"One of the most dangerous things that is happening right now is the unconstrained hoovering up of everyone's information and content without compensating rights holders," Radsch said.

Some companies, including The Associated Press, are seeking to right such actions and have gained remuneration through deals with AI giants, while others like Danish media groups are in conversation with policymakers about protecting their work.

"The next challenge is figuring out what does fair compensation look like," said Radsch.

Such quandaries are arising as governments and society in general grapple with how to deal with the rapid development of AI systems and the technology's constant evolution.

Much of the current evolution was triggered by the arrival of ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot capable of humanlike conversations and tasks that was developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI. Its launch last November kick-started an AI race with other top tech names including Google and its rival product Bard and a slew of startups innovating in the space.

However, many observers are ringing alarm bells about the technology.

The so-called 'godfather of artificial intelligence,' Geoffrey Hinton, has repeatedly warned of a slew of threats the technology poses.

In June, he told attendees of the Collision tech conference in Toronto that he worries AI could lead to bias and discrimination, joblessness, echo chambers, fake news, battle robots and existential risk.

Others have similar worries as evidenced by a March letter from more than 1,000 technology experts, including engineers from Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. They called for a six-month pause on training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the large language model behind ChatGPT.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 6, 2023.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

Analysis-For foreign envoys in China, Xi’s G20 absence confirms worrying trend

Martin Quin Pollard, Laurie Chen and Yew Lun Tian
Wed, September 6, 2023

Xi Jinping attends BRICS Summit in Johannesburg

BEIJING (Reuters) - For several foreign diplomats based in China, the news that President Xi Jinping will not attend the G20 summit in India this week has confirmed a worrying trend: Beijing is shutting off to the West and its allies.

More than 10 envoys from these countries stationed in China detailed to Reuters the increasing difficulty they face getting access to Chinese officials and other sources of information on the world's second-largest economy.

The envoys, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said this trend had become pronounced in 2023 even as China had dropped rigid pandemic controls that had stymied diplomatic activities for three years.

China's foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Ryan Neelam, a foreign policy analysts who previously served as an Australian diplomat based in Hong Kong, said such a development emphasises that under Xi's strict regime, officials have become more wary about engaging with foreign powers.

"That has trickle-down effects through the system where lower-level officials, bureaucrats and diplomats are less willing to go off script," said Neelam, director of public opinion and foreign policy at Lowy Institute.

"If everything becomes stage-managed and there's less opportunity to have informal interactions, if you get less access to senior decision makers across the system, then there's going to be a narrowing of the opportunity to find points of commonality or areas of compromise."

Relations between China and the West have nosedived in recent years over issues ranging from Beijing's reluctance to condemn ally Russia over its Ukraine invasion to tensions over sensitive technologies and Taiwan, the democratic, self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.

China has not explained why Xi, who has participated in every G20 summit since he came to office more than a decade ago, is not leading Beijing's delegation to New Delhi for the Sept. 9-10 meeting. It has said only that Premier Li Qiang will represent China.

China has testy relations with host India, which analysts say may be a factor, but more broadly Xi's international travel has significantly dropped off this year and has been limited to countries Beijing views as friendly.

He has only left China twice - to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and to attend a meeting of major BRICS emerging economies in South Africa last month, where he also missed a keynote address without explanation.

SCRIPTED COMMENTS

By comparison, Xi managed five overseas visits in 2022 - when the country's borders were effectively shut due to rigid pandemic controls - and a dozen in 2019 before COVID struck.

Some Western leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken have travelled to China to hold talks with Xi this year.

But for several Western envoys in Beijing, regular access to Chinese officials or even scholars from state-linked think tanks - which play a key role in explaining China's policies to the world - has dropped off compared to before the pandemic, they said.

Scheduling visits for travelling dignitaries, as well as establishing protocols and ensuring media access, is also getting harder, several diplomats said.

When meetings are arranged, Chinese officials stick rigidly to scripted comments, the diplomats said, while some added they experienced hostile behaviour from nationalistic academics. This has curtailed the quality of information envoys can feed back to their capitals, they said.

Reuters reported in July on how some diplomats say they are also facing heightened scrutiny and interference from Chinese authorities.

However, envoys from two countries which enjoy close relations with China said they had experienced no such problems.

Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, said curtailing access or not attending events is increasingly used by China as "leverage" against countries with whom it has disagreements.

"Engagement is seen and used by China as a leverage to shape other countries' behaviours," Sun said, adding that she had also heard that the lack of access and security restrictions for Western diplomats in China had "intensified".

And with China ramping up a sweeping national security drive, aimed in part at rooting out foreign spies, there is little sign of this trend letting up any time soon, analysts say.

"When the anti-West sentiment is on the rise within the Chinese bureaucracy, frequent contact or close working relationships with Western officials may raise questions about one's political trustworthiness," said Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the U.S. based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"To Chinese officials, the benefits of such engagements have become less evident, while the political and security risks are growing."

(Reporting by Martin Quin Pollard, Laurie Chen and Yew Lun Tian; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Nick Macfie)

The US broke global trade rules to try to fix climate change – to finish the job, it has to fix the trade system

Noah Kaufman, Senior Research Scholar in Climate Economics, Columbia University, 

Chris Bataille, Adjunct Research Fellow in Energy and Climate Policy, Columbia University, Sagatom Saha, Research Scholar in Energy Policy, Columbia University, 

 Gautam Jain, Senior Research Scholar in Financing the Energy Transition, Columbia University
Tue, September 5, 2023

 THE CONVERSATION

U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 16, 2022, including electric vehicle subsidies with 'buy American' rules. 

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, is now expected to prompt a trillion dollars in government spending to fight climate change and trillions more in private investment. But the law and Biden’s broader “buy American” agenda include measures that discriminate against imports.

One year in, these policies, such as the law’s electric vehicle subsidies, appear to be succeeding at growing domestic clean energy industries – consider the US$100 billion in newly announced battery supply chain investments. But we believe the law also clearly violates international trade rules.

The problem is not the crime but the cover-up. Today’s trade rules are ill-suited for the climate crisis. However, simply tearing them down could hinder economic growth and climate progress alike.

If U.S. leaders instead take responsibility for forging an improved international trade system – rather than denying the violations of trade rules or pointing fingers at similar transgressions by trade partners – they could help put the global economy in a better position to weather increasing climate-related trade tensions.
Building, then violating WTO rules

The United States has shaped international trade rules more than any other country.


In the 1940s, the U.S. proposed rules that were eventually largely adopted as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, or GATT, a series of multinational agreements to reduce trade barriers. The most ambitious of the GATT agreements was the U.S.-instigated Uruguay Round of the 1990s, which created the World Trade Organization.

Some WTO rules are vague, but others are crystal clear, including an unambiguous prohibition of subsidies contingent on the use of domestic products instead of imports. Certain provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act do exactly that, such as the electric vehicle subsidies that require a large percentage of parts to be produced in North America.

The choice facing U.S. policymakers was between accepting the Inflation Reduction Act, including its rule-breaking, protectionist elements, or missing the small window to pass federal climate legislation.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) explicitly refused to provide the 50th vote needed to pass the law if it wasn’t to his liking, and among his asks was domestic sourcing requirements. More broadly, any meaningful climate legislation that does not support the local economies of fossil fuel-heavy regions may be dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate.

Without the Inflation Reduction Act, however, the U.S. had next to no chance of meeting its climate commitments, which would have dampened climate policy momentum across the world.


U.S. leaders might have been justified in begging for forgiveness after passing the legislation rather than asking for permission to violate trade rules. Instead, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, said his team reviewed the international trade laws very carefully and found no violations.

Instead of an apology, U.S. leaders have said, “You’re welcome,” arguing that the subsidies will benefit other countries by accelerating the deployment of clean energy technologies and lowering costs.

While there is strong evidence to support this argument, it falls flat from a country that has failed to fulfill its obligations to take federal action on climate change for decades and just violated trade laws it has held others accountable to for so long. India’s power minister accused the West of hypocrisy, saying the Inflation Reduction Act’s protectionism will inhibit the energy transitions in developing economies.
The real concern: Rising protectionism

The Inflation Reduction Act contains a fundamental contradiction. Its promise to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions relies on the rapid diffusion of technologies, knowledge and finance across borders. Yet, its domestic subsidies may accelerate the adoption of trade barriers that inhibit these same cross-border flows, thus slowing progress on climate change.

Moreover, the investments it catalyzes will immediately benefit the U.S. economy, while the shared benefits of technological progress and emissions reductions will unfold over many decades for other countries. In the intervening years, other countries may respond with protectionist policies of their own.

Indeed, the real concern might not be the opening salvo, but the shootout of growing protectionism that ensues. For all its drawbacks, the growth in international trade since World War II has led to immense economic progress in much of the world, including the United States. The WTO and its predecessors have been instrumental in reducing harmful tariffs and providing a consistent set of trade rules to which countries are supposed to adhere.

Combating climate change was on the agenda when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited the White House in March 2023. The European Union has proposed its own rules to support its domestic clean energy industries. 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Biden administration is attempting to assuage these concerns by forging agreements that make more foreign producers eligible for Inflation Reduction Act subsidies. But, in our view, bespoke agreements with a handful of countries aren’t enough. A new vision is needed for international trade rules that support low trade barriers and “green industrial policies” alike.
An opportunity to modernize international trade

Global trade rules have not been updated in a generation. They are sorely in need of reform.

The usefulness of the WTO is contingent on most parties agreeing that its rules are worth following. Without a new working consensus and backing from the largest powers with effective vetoes, the organization will become irrelevant.

The first step to fixing the situation is to stop denying the problem or digging deeper holes, such as the United States’ ill-advised blocking of appointments to the WTO’s dispute settlement Appellate Body since 2017 to protest what it sees as overreach by the body.

More proactively, the U.S. can reestablish its commitment to trade rules by instigating a process to develop equitable reforms.

That could begin with a global summit to discuss the changes necessary to reflect new realities. High-level leadership from the United States would add considerable heft to the ongoing efforts to reform global trade rules.

Any fundamental rewrite of WTO rules will be a long and painstaking process. Instead, it may be sufficient to add a few clauses to existing agreements – like GATT Articles 20 and 21, which deal with exceptions to the trade rules – that clearly and transparently recognize that governments will need to nurture emerging domestic industries to cut emissions fast, ensure energy security and support vulnerable economies.

New rules could limit and define the appropriate use of green subsidies, carbon border tariffs, export and import controls and supply chain coordination. For example, the U.S. and other developed countries could agree to limit subsidies’ domestic sourcing requirements to only emerging, innovative clean technologies that require public support to commercialize. Building on this, all countries could work toward an explicit list of clean energy, transport and industrial technologies needed by all that can be traded with reduced or minimal tariffs.

Of course, these trade tools would have to be managed carefully to avoid proliferating and exacerbating tensions.

In the meantime, since U.S. leaders are already acting as if these rules exist, they’ll have to accept that other countries’ leaders may act similarly — a new Kantian Golden Rule for trade.

It may turn out that the United States did the world a favor by throwing off the shackles of outdated trade rules. That will depend on whether U.S. leaders take advantage of the opportunity to reframe the discussion around the country’s recent legislation as steps toward a modernized international trade regime that better aligns with the world’s climate goals.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Noah Kaufman, Columbia University; Chris Bataille, Columbia University; Gautam Jain, Columbia University, and Sagatom Saha, Columbia University.

Read more:

As US-EU trade tensions rise, conflicting carbon tariffs could undermine climate efforts

Big new incentives for clean energy aren’t enough – the Inflation Reduction Act was just the first step, now the hard work begins

US offshore wind projects seek looser subsidy rules in fight for survival


Workers look out from a construction barge next to the first jacket installed to support a turbine for a wind farm in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Block Island


By Nichola Groom
Wed, September 6, 2023 

(Reuters) - A fleet of U.S. offshore wind projects central to President Joe Biden's climate change agenda may not move forward unless his administration eases requirements for subsidies in the year-old Inflation Reduction Act, according to project developers.

Norway's Equinor, France's Engie, Portugal's EDP Renewables, and trade groups representing other developers pursuing U.S. offshore wind projects told Reuters they are pressing officials to rewrite the requirements, and warning of lost jobs and investments otherwise.

"The components needed for our projects to progress simply do not exist in the U.S. at this time, and we see no signs that the supply chain will be ready in time to meet our procurement schedule," said David Marks, a spokesperson for the U.S. renewables division of Equinor.

Denmarks’ Orsted, a top offshore wind developer, warned last week that barriers to securing U.S. subsidies under the IRA, combined with soaring interest rates and supply chain delays, could lead to $2.3 billion in impairments for three projects, sending its stock plummeting.

At issue is a requirement in the IRA that clean energy projects seeking bonus tax incentives must be built with American-made equipment and sited in low-income communities.

Those provisions are key to supporting Biden's goals to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing jobs through clean energy investments and to direct 40% of those benefits to disadvantaged areas. The credits are each worth 10% of a project's cost and can be claimed on top of the IRA's base 30% credit for renewable energy projects - bringing a total subsidy to as much as 50%.

But those standards are hard for offshore wind projects to hit given their reliance on overseas equipment and materials, and their locations in U.S. coastal waters.

U.S. Treasury rules specify, for instance, that towers for offshore turbines must be made entirely of domestic steel to win the domestic content credit. The first factory that would produce such a product, a facility in New York, was scheduled to open in 2025 but has encountered delays and cost overruns.

"You can't put requirements that no one can meet," David Jon Hardy, the chief executive of Orsted's operations in the Americas, said on a recent conference call.

The offshore wind industry already has looser requirements for claiming the bonus than other sectors, with domestic content required to make up just 20% of costs, compared with 40% for solar and onshore wind, according to the Treasury rules.


The credit for siting projects in "energy communities," defined as areas that have significant employment or tax revenues from fossil fuel industries and high unemployment, is dictated by where a project connects to an onshore substation.

Some developers want to see that expanded to include the location of port infrastructure that can provide jobs and economic benefits to a wider area, they said.

A U.S. Treasury spokesperson said the department was focused on implementing the IRA’s subsidies in a way that “follows the law and its underlying goals” and pointed out the incentives had already sparked billions of dollars in new investments.

The agency said its approach was meant to be challenging enough to incentivize investment in a U.S. clean energy supply chain over time.

Labor unions, a key constituency for Biden, have pushed Treasury to implement strict requirements for the domestic content bonus, according to comments submitted to the agency.

White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa said the administration "is using every legally available tool to advance American offshore wind opportunities" and said the industry is creating thousands of union jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction.

JC Sandberg, chief advocacy officer for the trade organization American Clean Power Association, said easing the requirements for offshore wind, however, will be key to the administration meeting a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind along U.S. coastlines by 2030.

"The American offshore wind industry is attempting to go from 7 turbines to over 2,100 in 7 years but is meeting financial headwinds due to inflation, supply chain constraints, and permitting delays," he said in a statement.

"The Biden Administration has a historic opportunity to help solve these challenges.”

The industry said tweaks to the credit requirements were important not just for the projects, but for the domestic industry and jobs they will create.

"If the bar to achieve the bonus is too high... then, to be blunt, everyone loses," said Seth Kaplan, director of governmental and regulatory affairs at Ocean Winds North America, a joint venture between Engie and EDP Renewables.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

China's CALB says European battery makers could source 70% of inputs locally by 2026


Thu, September 7, 2023 
By Zhang Yan

MUNICH, Sept 7 (Reuters) - European battery makers may be able to source at least 70% of the key materials they need locally by 2026, a senior manager at Chinese battery maker CALB Group said, as suppliers ramp up investments in the region.

CALB has been localising its supply chains by offering technical support to local firms and encouraging Chinese suppliers to set up plants in Europe, Wu Tao, general manager of CALB's marketing division, told Reuters.

"We do feel it's necessary to localise supplies of materials as much as possible," Wu said in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich auto show IAA Mobility.

"As a new energy company, it makes no sense for us to ship them with vessels burning diesel all the way from China."

However, around 5% to 10% of the materials would still need to be imported from China due to high costs and a lack of technological capabilities locally, he added.

Wu's comments came as Chinese battery makers seek growth in Europe to supply to European automakers, as demand at home is slowing. CALB is currently building a plant in Portugal with a planned capacity of 15 gigawatt hours annually.

Its biggest competitor CATL has been producing battery cells and modules in a plant in Germany, and is building another site in Hungary.

Authorities in Europe have also been urging the development of local supply chains with low-carbon and sustainability requirements to speed up adoption of electric vehicles in the region.

At the World New Energy Vehicle Congress (WNEVC) in Munich, China's EV industry leaders including policy adviser and 'father of EVs' Wan Gan, the heads of carmakers BYD and Nio and battery maker CATL called for stronger global cooperation and policy standardisation to scale up EV adoption.

Founded in 2015, CALB, which supplies automakers including Xpeng and Nio, was the third largest battery maker after CATL and BYD in terms of sales in the first seven months of 2023. (Reporting by Zhang Yan in Munich; Editing by Christoph Steitz and Jan Harvey)

Slovenia's women's football team write open letter over 'unprofessional environment'

Katie Gornall - BBC Sport
Wed, September 6, 2023 

Dominika Conc (right) made her international debut for Slovenia in 2010

Dominika Conc is tired.

Tired of how female footballers are treated, tired of the conditions she's forced to play in, and tired of fighting for even the smallest improvements.

But she will not stop.

Conc is the vice-captain of Slovenia's women's national team. In July, she and 30 of her team-mates wrote an open letter to the president of the Slovenian football federation (NZS) demanding the removal of head coach Borut Jarc and detailing allegations of bullying, sexism, body-shaming and inappropriate behaviour within the camp.

Training, she says, had become intolerable, also stating that the environment they found themselves in affected players' mental health.

"The environment was just very unprofessional," 30-year-old Conc tells BBC Sport. "Very inappropriate comments. Cussing towards us, sexist comments or homophobic things getting into our personal lives, which has nothing to do with the football pitch.

"Things were going on for the past five years. We had a respect-out-of-fear relationship before, you didn't say anything.

"A lot of players had to ask for help from the outside, from psychologists and other professionals."

Conc's words come at a time when the football world continues to reel from the aftermath of the Women's World Cup final, when Luis Rubiales - the president of the Spanish football federation - kissed forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips after Spain's victory over England.

The list of allegations in the Slovenian players' letter is extensive. They include claims of inappropriate comments from Jarc, that coaches smuggled alcohol into camps and openly drank during meals and after training sessions, and that players' personal lives and sexual orientation became a target for the staff.

It is also alleged that players were forced to play a Euro 2022 qualifier while ill with Covid-19, that they faced "demeaning treatment" regarding body weight, and had to fight to wear the same kit as Slovenia's men and have their names on the back.

Conc says she and her international team-mates had previously held a meeting with the football federation president and other officials, but came away feeling there was "no interest for the women's side".

"They didn't want to listen to us and they said it's none of our business," she says. "It is at that point we saw that no-one is listening to us. So we had to do something different.

"We decided to write things down and send them to the federation again and try to communicate about those things with them again in private, and what they did was they never responded to us."

So, Conc - who plays in midfield for Levante Las Planas in the Spanish top flight - and her team-mates went public, releasing their open letter.

Slovenia's head coach Jarc has since resigned, releasing a lengthy statement in which he said he "could no longer successfully continue my work as a selector under these circumstances".

He continued: "I wish to expressly deny any allegations that have been made against me personally. I would like to stress that I have always acted morally and in accordance with ethical principles."

But even after Jarc's departure, Conc isn't convinced the culture will change.

"He wasn't the only one like that," she says. "We just have a feeling that the federation have us because they have to have us.

"We have to fight for jerseys, for the names on the jerseys, for the same jerseys as the men. We're playing in the middle of the day, in the middle of the nowhere. No wonder no-one is coming to watch our games."

Slovenia are due to play in Uefa Women's Nations League qualifying this month, with matches against the Czech Republic and Bosnia and Herzegovina on 22 and 26 September respectively.

A large number of the team play their domestic football abroad. Defender Sara Agrez reached the Champions League final with Wolfsburg last season, while Lara Prasnikar starred for Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga. Conc herself has previously played for the likes of Valencia, AC Milan and Malaga.

"With pretty much nothing invested in us, we are already achieving things," says Conc.

But she adds that had Jarc still been in position, she and her team-mates would not have played their upcoming fixtures.

"We are expecting better, but it's hard to say because we don't know what they're going to do," she says.

"A lot of times they're just picking someone, putting that person there and it's someone who's never been around women's football, who doesn't know us and it's just hard. I feel like it's just not respectful towards us either."

In a statement to BBC Sport, the NZS denied the allegations, saying the issues raised in the letter had never been discussed with the president.

Since the letter was made public in July, the NZS said it had been investigating and was in the final stages of the preparation of a report containing "recommendations on making positive changes in the future".

It added: "The Slovenian FA has always up until this point and will continue to support the development of women's football up to a level that is reasonable and sustainable for the federation and the future of Slovenian women's football as a whole."

Iran journalist says was sexually assaulted during arrest

AFP
Wed, September 6, 2023 

After previous releases, Maroufian has defiantly posted pictures of herself without a headacarf in defiance of the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women (Alex MITA)

An Iranian journalist who interviewed the father of Mahsa Amini said she was sexually assaulted during her latest arrest and was now on hunger strike in prison, according to an audio message published Wednesday by several Persian media outlets and rights groups.

Nazila Maroufian, 23, has been repeatedly targeted by the Iranian authorities since she published an interview with Amjad Amini, whose daughter died in custody on September 16, 2022, sparking months of protests.

Rights groups have accused the Iranian authorities of stepping up an already intense crackdown to prevent the upcoming one-year anniversary of Amini's death being marked by new protests.

Maroufian, who rights groups say has now been arrested four times in recent months, was most recently detained in Tehran on August 30.

"I was sexually assaulted in a situation where I was in the worst possible state," she said in the audio message from Tehran's Evin prison published by media outside Iran including Iran International and Radio Farda as well as the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) and Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).

Maroufian, who is from Amini's hometown of Saqez in Kurdish-populated western Iran, said in her message that she was now on hunger strike to protest her situation and that of all women who are subjected to violence in police stations and prisons.

"This strike is for me but is also for all the women in dire conditions in Iran," she said in her message, which appeared to have been recorded during a phone call to her family which also shared pictures of bruises she allegedly sustained in the assault.

Reports earlier this week said she had also been jailed for one year on charges of "spreading propaganda" against Iran's Islamic system.

After previous releases, Maroufian has defiantly posted pictures of herself without a headscarf in defiance of the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women.

Mahsa Amini had been arrested for allegedly violating this code. Iranian authorities have indicated she died because of a health problem but, in his interview with Maroufian, Amjad Amini accused authorities of lying about the circumstances of his daughter's death.

Iran has reacted harshly to reporting inside the country on the Amini case.

The two women journalists who helped bring the story to the world's attention have now spent almost a year in Evin prison after their arrest in September.

Niloufar Hamedi reported for Iran's Shargh newspaper from the hospital where Amini languished in a coma for three days before she died, and Elahe Mohammadi, a reporter for the Ham Mihan newspaper, went to Saqez to report on Amini's funeral.

Both are now on trial on charges of violating national security, which they vehemently deny.

sjw/dv

Toyota Factories Shut Down When Company Runs Out of Disk Space

Victor Tangermann
Wed, September 6, 2023 

Disk Full

Japanese auto giant Toyota has had to shut down all of its factories in the country due to what the company claims to be a system malfunction triggered by "insufficient disk space."

In simple terms, the second-biggest carmaker in the world just had to grind production to a halt because it ran out of storage.

As The Guardian reports, the carmaker had to issue a stoppage on August 29 at all 14 of its Japan-based plants, representing roughly a third of its global production.

It's a major fumble that goes to show that even in Japan, a country often seen as a pioneer of cutting-edge technologies, minor glitches can cascade into company-wide chaos and bring down entire titans of industry.

Station Laggin

A maintenance procedure apparently caused the company's servers to break down when "data that had accumulated in the database was deleted and organized, and an error occurred due to insufficient disk space, causing the system to stop," Toyota said in a statement, as quoted by The Guardian.

As a result,  the company had to transfer the data to a server with sufficient capacity.

"We would like to apologize once again to our customers, suppliers, and related parties for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our domestic plants," the company said in the statement.

The incident goes to show there are very real risks to Toyota's renowned and well-studied "just-in-time" production system, "in which each process produces only what is needed for the next process in a continuous flow," according to the company's website.

The company, however, was able to rule out one possible cause: it definitely wasn't a cyberattack. In other words, the company has nobody to blame but itself for the interruption.

Cleveland-Cliffs' bid to keep US blast furnaces smelting

U.S. Steel gets offer from Esmark, Okta stock rises on double upgrade: Trending ticker

Isla Binnie and Bianca Flowers
Tue, September 5, 2023 

High costs and environmental opposition have prevented the construction of blast

 furnaces at steel mills in the United States since 1980. Cleveland-Cliffs Inc CEO Lourenco Goncalves is on a mission to snap up all that are left.

Since joining the U.S. steelmaker in 2014 as part of an activist hedge fund's board takeover, Goncalves has made blast furnaces a hallmark of his strategy, positioning Cliffs as an outlier in an industry shifting towards cheaper and more environmentally friendly electric arc furnaces.

A 65-year-old Brazilian metallurgical engineer, Goncalves transformed Cliffs from an iron ore and coal miner into the largest supplier of steel to the automotive industry in North America by acquiring companies that own blast furnaces to smelt the pig iron it produces.

Now, he has his sights on acquiring U.S. Steel Corp, the other remaining U.S. blast furnace operator, which has been gradually moving into electric arc furnaces, known as mini-mills. Should his $7.3 billion cash-and-stock bid prevail, Cliffs would break into the world's top 10 steel producers, which are mostly from Asia.

Interviews with six people close to the companies and industry insiders, as well a review of regulatory filings, show Goncalves' bet on blast furnaces has yet to pay off, and its success hinges on pulling off the deal with U.S. Steel.

This is because blast furnaces operate around the clock and need more workers. They are more expensive to run when they have to be stopped and restarted to account for changes in demand, as often happens with the automotive sector.

To compensate for that cost, they need a dominant market share so they can charge more for their steel. To build a market position, Cliffs acquired AK Steel for $3 billion and ArcelorMittal's U.S. operations for $3.3 billion in 2020. Cliffs focused on dominating production of U.S.-made steel used in the external panels of cars, which require quality that electric arc furnaces currently cannot achieve.

"By increasing market share, Goncalves has a much more commanding position where he can charge more," said Josh Spoores, principal analyst at CRU Group, a business intelligence firm that provides analysis on global metals and mining.

Goncalves is also betting that producing iron ore in-house for blast furnaces, rather than sourcing scrap steel for electric arc furnaces, will give Cliffs a competitive edge. So far, the nimbler electric arc furnaces have remained cheaper to run, amid fluctuations in demand for steel.

Cliffs' gross margin was 11% last year, down from 35% in 2018, when it focused on iron ore production, according to LSEG data. This was well below Nucor Corp's and Steel Dynamics Inc's margins of 30% and 27.5%, respectively — two rivals that run exclusively on electric arc furnaces. It is also below U.S. Steel's 20.6% margin.

Goncalves has said profitability will improve as Cliffs gains scale, and projects $500 million in annual synergies from the potential U.S. Steel acquisition.

A Cliffs spokesperson said the company is innovating to meet clients' requirements and make U.S. steel competitive.

Focus on car makers

About two-thirds of U.S. steel comes from electric arc furnaces. While Nucor and Steel Dynamics also serve the car sector, they have mostly ceded the market for automotive bodies to Chinese competitors.

This has given Cliffs an opening to serve U.S. car makers that find importing overseas steel expensive, especially following tariffs that former President Donald Trump implemented in 2018. While a few carmakers use aluminum for automotive bodies, most prefer high-grade steel from blast furnaces.

"Materially switching content isn't something these automakers do lightly. I don't think they're going to move away," said KeyBanc equity analyst Phil Gibbs.

Cliffs' devotion to blast furnaces, which are unionized unlike some electric arc furnaces, won it the support of United Steelworkers. The union's international president Thomas Conway said it's backing Cliffs' bid for U.S. Steel because of Goncalves' commitment to blast furnaces. He pointed to Cliffs adding 1,700 new jobs following its last two acquisitions.

Carbon emissions

Goncalves has said in interviews and earnings calls that criticism of blast furnaces' emissions ignores that electric arc furnaces cannot make the steel many car makers want.

"Try to build a car all with steel, flat-rolled steel produced in flat-rolled mini-mills. It doesn't work," Goncalves said on Cliffs' latest quarterly earnings call.

Nucor's and Steel Dynamics' carbon footprints are more than two-thirds smaller than Cliffs' and U.S. Steel's, their sustainability disclosures show.

Cliffs points to having reduced its emissions by 32% since 2017, ahead of a target to achieve this by 2030, primarily by using hot briquetted iron (HBI) in its blast furnaces. HBI is made with natural gas rather than coke from coal, resulting in fewer emissions.

Cliffs is also testing the use of hydrogen to reduce emissions, though the technology's commercially viability remains uncertain.

Last year, President Joe Biden's administration pointed to Cliffs' direct reduction steel plant in Toledo, Ohio, which cost $1 billion and makes HBI, as an example of "clean" U.S. manufacturing.

(Reporting by Isla Binnie in New York and Bianca Flowers in Chicago Editing by Greg Roumeliotis and Daniel Wallis)