Nov 14 (Reuters) – Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) said it bought more than $4.1 billion of stock in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (2330.TW), , a rare significant foray into the technology sector by billionaire Warren Buffett’s conglomerate.
The news sent shares in TSMC up more than 6% in Taiwan on Tuesday, as it boosted investor sentiment for the world’s largest contract chipmaker, which saw its shares hit a two-year low last month due to a sharp slowdown in global chip demand.
In a Monday regulatory filing describing its U.S.-listed equity investments as of Sept. 30, Berkshire said it owned about 60.1 million American depositary shares of TSMC.
Berkshire also disclosed new stakes of $297 million in building materials company Louisiana-Pacific Corp (LPX.N) and $13 million in Jefferies Financial Group Inc (JEF.N). It exited an investment in Store Capital Corp (STOR.N), a real estate company that agreed in September to be taken private.
The filing did not specify whether Buffett or his portfolio managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler made specific purchases and sales. Investors often try to piggy back on what Berkshire buys. Larger investments are normally Buffett’s.
While Berkshire does not normally make big technology bets, it often prefers companies it perceives to have competitive advantages, often through their size.
TSMC, which makes chips for the likes of Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Qulacomm (QCOM.O) and Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), posted an 80% jump in quarterly profit last month, but struck a more cautious note than usual on upcoming demand.
“I suspect Berkshire has a belief that the world cannot do without the products manufactured by Taiwan Semi,” said Tom Russo, a partner at Gardner, Russo & Quinn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which owns Berkshire shares.
“Only a small number of companies that can amass the capital to deliver semiconductors, which are increasingly central to people’s lives,” he added.
Berkshire has had mixed success in technology.
Its more than six-year wager during the last decade in IBM Corp (IBM.N) did not pan out, but Berkshire is sitting on huge unrealized gains on its $126.5 billion stake in Apple, which Buffett views more as a consumer products company.
Apple is by far the largest investment in Berkshire’s $306.2 billion equity portfolio.
Berkshire disclosed the TSMC stake about 2-1/2 months after it began reducing a decade-old, multi-billion dollar stake in BYD Co (002594.SZ), China’s largest electric car company.
In the third quarter, Berkshire added to its stakes in Chevron Corp (CVX.N), Occidental Petroleum Corp (OXY.N), Celanese Corp (CE.N), Paramount Global (PARA.O) and RH (RH.N).
It also sold shares of Activision Blizzard Inc (ATVI.O), Bank of New York Mellon Corp (BK.N), General Motors Co (GM.N), Kroger Co (KR.N) and US Bancorp (USB.N).
Buffett, 92, has run Berkshire since 1965. The Omaha, Nebraska-based company also owns dozens of businesses such as the BNSF railroad, the Geico auto insurer, several energy and industrial companies, Fruit of the Loom and Dairy Queen.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Bradley Perrett
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Musk looking to axe around half of Twitter’s workforce
Employees file class action against Twitter
Staff lose access to systems
Volkswagen pulls ads
Nov 4 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc started a major round of layoffs on Friday, alerting employees of their job status by email after barring the entrances to offices and cutting off workers’ access to internal systems overnight.
The move follows a week of chaos and uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who tweeted on Friday that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled spending.
Musk blamed the losses on a coalition of civil rights groups that has been pressing Twitter’s top advertisers to take action if he did not protect content moderation. The groups said on Friday they are escalating their pressure and demanding brands pull their Twitter ads globally.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” Twitter said in an email to staff on Thursday evening announcing the cuts that came on Friday, which was seen by Reuters.
The company was silent about the depth of the cuts, although internal plans reviewed by Reuters this week indicated Musk was looking to cut around 3,700 Twitter staff, or about half the workforce.
Staff who worked in engineering, communications, product, content curation and machine learning ethics were among those impacted by the layoffs, according to tweets from Twitter staff.
Shannon Raj Singh, an attorney who was Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted on Friday that the entire human rights team at the company had been cut.
Musk has promised to restore free speech while preventing Twitter from descending into a “hellscape.” However, his reassurances have failed to calm major advertisers, which have expressed apprehension about his takeover for months.
Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) recommended its brands pause paid advertising on Twitter until further notice in the wake of Musk’s takeover, it said on Friday. Its comments echoed similar remarks from other companies, including General Motors Co (GM.N) and General Mills Inc (GIS.N).
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, which is part of the civil rights coalition, said he knew of two more major advertisers that were preparing to announce that they would pause ads on the platform.
Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and done “everything we could” to appease the groups. “Extremely messed up! They’re (civil right groups) trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Speaking at an investors conference in New York on Friday, Musk called the activist pressure “an attack on the First Amendment.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ACCESS TO SYSTEMS CUT
Dozens of staffers tweeted they lost access to work email and Slack channels before receiving an official notice, which they took as a sign they had been laid off.
[1/9] Owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. Elon Musk arrives at the 29th Annual Baron Investment Conference in Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S., November 4, 2022. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
They tweeted blue hearts and salute emojis expressing support for one another, using the hashtags #OneTeam and #LoveWhereYouWorked, a past-tense version of a slogan employees had used for years to celebrate the company’s work culture.
Twitter’s curation team, which is responsible for “highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter,” had been axed, employees said on the platform. The company’s communications team in India has also been laid off, according to a Twitter executive in Asia.
A team that focused on research into how Twitter employed algorithms, an issue that was a priority for Musk, was also eliminated, according to a tweet from a former senior manager at Twitter.
Senior executives including Vice President of Engineering Arnaud Weber also said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday: “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked potential but I’m proud of what we accomplished,” he tweeted.
Employees of Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service that Musk is bolstering, were also let go. An employee with the handle “SillyRobin” who had indicated they were laid off, quote-tweeted Musk’s previous tweet saying Twitter Blue would include “paywall bypass” for certain publishers.
“Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this,” the employee said.
Twitter’s head of Safety & Integrity, Yoel Roth, appeared to have kept his job, as did Vice President of Product Keith Coleman, who launched a tool called Birdwatch for users to write notes on tweets they identify as misleading.
Last week, Musk endorsed Roth, citing his “high integrity” after Roth was called out over tweets critical of former U.S. President Donald Trump years earlier. Musk has also tweeted that he likes Birdwatch.
Roth and Coleman did not respond to requests for comment.
DOORS LOCKED
Twitter said in its email to staffers that offices would be temporarily closed and badge access suspended in order “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”
Offices in London and Dublin appeared deserted on Friday, with no employees in sight. At the London office, any evidence Twitter had once occupied the building was erased.
A receptionist at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters said a few people had trickled in and were working in the floors above despite the notice to stay away.
A class action was filed on Thursday against Twitter by its employees, who argued the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.
The lawsuit also asked the San Francisco federal court to issue an order to restrict Twitter from soliciting employees being laid off to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas, Katie Paul in Palo Alto, Calif., and Paresh Dave in Oakland, Calif.
Additional reporting by Fanny Potkin, Rusharti Mukherjee, Aditya Kalra, Martin Coulter, Hyunjoo Jin, Supantha Mukherjee and Arriana McLymore
Writing by Matt Scuffham
Editing by Kenneth Li, Jason Neely and Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Paresh Dave
Thomson Reuters
San Francisco Bay Area-based tech reporter covering Google and the rest of Alphabet Inc. Joined Reuters in 2017 after four years at the Los Angeles Times focused on the local tech industry.
Nov 1 (Reuters) – Tesla (TSLA.O) aims to start mass production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023, two years after the initial target for the long-awaited pickup truck Chief Executive Elon Musk unveiled in 2019, two people with knowledge of the plans told Reuters.
Tesla said last month that it was working on readying its Austin, Texas plant to build the new model with “early production” set to start in the middle of 2023. “We’re in the final lap for Cybertruck,” Musk told a conference call with financial analysts.
A gradual ramp in the second half of next year to full output for the sharp-angled electric truck would mean that Tesla would not be recording revenue until early 2024 for a full-quarter of production on a new model seen as key to its growth.
It would also mean a wait of another year for the estimated hundreds of thousands of potential buyers who have paid $100 to reserve a Cybertruck in one of the most highly anticipated, and closely tracked electric vehicle launches ever.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
It has not announced final pricing on the Cybertruck, showed the production version of the vehicle or specified how it will manage the battery supply for the new model.
In 2019, Tesla had projected an initial price of under $40,000, but prices for new vehicles have shot higher since then and Tesla has raised prices across its lineup.
CRACKED WINDOWS
Tesla’s Cybertruck is displayed at Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in New York City, U.S., May 8, 2021. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
Musk introduced Cybertruck in a 2019 reveal where the vehicle’s designer cracked the vehicle’s supposedly unbreakable “armor glass” windows. The company has pushed back production timing three times since: from late 2021 to late 2022, then to early 2023 and most recently to the mid-2023 target for initial production.
The launch of the Cybertruck will give Tesla an EV entrant in one of the most profitable segments of the U.S. market and a competitor to electric pickups from the likes of Ford Motor Co (F.N) and Rivian Automotive (RIVN.O), both of which have launched models in still-limited numbers.
In January, Musk had cited shortages in sourcing components as the reason for pushing the launch of Cybertruck into 2023.
In May, Tesla stopped taking orders for the Cybertruck outside North America. Musk said then the company had “more orders of the first Cybertrucks than we could possibly fulfill for three years after the start of production.”
Automakers often ramp production slowly for an all-new model like the Cybertruck.
Analysts have also cautioned that a weakening global economy will start to weigh on sales for Tesla, which has so far been able to sell every car it makes. Musk has said he expected a coming recession would last “probably until Spring of ’24.”
IDRA Group, the Italian company making the Giga Press that will be used for die casting parts for the Cybertruck, said in a LinkedIn post last week that the 9,000-ton machine for truck part production was packed and ready to be shipped.
The post did not name Tesla. Tesla has been using the Giga Press to cut the cost and complexity of production of its Model Y, an innovation other automakers, including Toyota, have studied.
Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco, Zhang Yan in Shanghai; Writing by Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Sept 28 (Reuters) – Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, the companies told Reuters.
DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter.
Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), NBCUniversal (CMCSA.O) and Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.
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Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.
“We’re horrified,” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. “Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”
In another example, a user tweeted searching for content of “Yung girls ONLY, NO Boys,” which was immediately followed by a promoted tweet for Texas-based Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. Scottish Rite did not return multiple requests for comment.
In a statement, Twitter spokesperson Celeste Carswell said the company “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and is investing more resources dedicated to child safety, including hiring for new positions to write policy and implement solutions.
She added that Twitter is working closely with its advertising clients and partners to investigate and take steps to prevent the situation from happening again.
Twitter’s challenges in identifying child abuse content were first reported in an investigation by tech news site The Verge in late August. The emerging pushback from advertisers that are critical to Twitter’s revenue stream is reported here by Reuters for the first time.
Like all social media platforms, Twitter bans depictions of child sexual exploitation, which are illegal in most countries. But it permits adult content generally and is home to a thriving exchange of pornographic imagery, which comprises about 13% of all content on Twitter, according to an internal company document seen by Reuters.
Twitter declined to comment on the volume of adult content on the platform.
Ghost Data identified the more than 500 accounts that openly shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period this month. Twitter failed to remove more than 70% of the accounts during the study period, according to the group, which shared the findings exclusively with Reuters.
Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of Ghost Data’s finding in full, but reviewed dozens of accounts that remained online and were soliciting materials for “13+” and “young looking nudes.”
After Reuters shared a sample of 20 accounts with Twitter last Thursday, the company removed about 300 additional accounts from the network, but more than 100 others still remained on the site the following day, according to Ghost Data and a Reuters review.
Reuters then on Monday shared the full list of more than 500 accounts after it was furnished by Ghost Data, which Twitter reviewed and permanently suspended for violating its rules, said Twitter’s Carswell on Tuesday.
In an email to advertisers on Wednesday morning, ahead of the publication of this story, Twitter said it “discovered that ads were running within Profiles that were involved with publicly selling or soliciting child sexual abuse material.”
Andrea Stroppa, the founder of Ghost Data, said the study was an attempt to assess Twitter’s ability to remove the material. He said he personally funded the research after receiving a tip about the topic.
Twitter’s transparency reports on its website show it suspended more than 1 million accounts last year for child sexual exploitation.
It made about 87,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a government-funded non-profit that facilitates information sharing with law enforcement, according to that organization’s annual report.
“Twitter needs to fix this problem ASAP, and until they do, we are going to cease any further paid activity on Twitter,” said a spokesperson for Forbes.
“There is no place for this type of content online,” a spokesperson for carmaker Mazda USA said in a statement to Reuters, adding that in response, the company is now prohibiting its ads from appearing on Twitter profile pages.
A Disney spokesperson called the content “reprehensible” and said they are “doubling-down on our efforts to ensure that the digital platforms on which we advertise, and the media buyers we use, strengthen their efforts to prevent such errors from recurring.”
A spokesperson for Coca-Cola, which had a promoted tweet appear on an account tracked by the researchers, said it did not condone the material being associated with its brand and said “any breach of these standards is unacceptable and taken very seriously.”
NBCUniversal said it has asked Twitter to remove the ads associated with the inappropriate content.
CODE WORDS
Twitter is hardly alone in grappling with moderation failures related to child safety online. Child welfare advocates say the number of known child sexual abuse images has soared from thousands to tens of millions in recent years, as predators have used social networks including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to groom victims and exchange explicit images.
For the accounts identified by Ghost Data, nearly all the traders of child sexual abuse material marketed the materials on Twitter, then instructed buyers to reach them on messaging services such as Discord and Telegram in order to complete payment and receive the files, which were stored on cloud storage services like New Zealand-based Mega and U.S.-based Dropbox, according to the group’s report.
A Discord spokesperson said the company had banned one server and one user for violating its rules against sharing links or content that sexualize children.
Mega said a link referenced in the Ghost Data report was created in early August and soon after deleted by the user, which it declined to identify. Mega said it permanently closed the user’s account two days later.
Dropbox and Telegram said they use a variety of tools to moderate content but did not provide additional detail on how they would respond to the report.
Still the reaction from advertisers poses a risk to Twitter’s business, which earns more than 90% of its revenue by selling digital advertising placements to brands seeking to market products to the service’s 237 million daily active users.
Twitter is also battling in court Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, who is attempting to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company over complaints about the prevalence of spam accounts and its impact on the business.
A team of Twitter employees concluded in a report dated February 2021 that the company needed more investment to identify and remove child exploitation material at scale, noting the company had a backlog of cases to review for possible reporting to law enforcement.
“While the amount of (child sexual exploitation content) has grown exponentially, Twitter’s investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not,” according to the report, which was prepared by an internal team to provide an overview about the state of child exploitation material on Twitter and receive legal advice on the proposed strategies.
“Recent reports about Twitter provide an outdated, moment in time glance at just one aspect of our work in this space, and is not an accurate reflection of where we are today,” Carswell said.
The traffickers often use code words such as “cp” for child pornography and are “intentionally as vague as possible,” to avoid detection, according to the internal documents. The more that Twitter cracks down on certain keywords, the more that users are nudged to use obfuscated text, which “tend to be harder for (Twitter) to automate against,” the documents said.
Ghost Data’s Stroppa said that such tricks would complicate efforts to hunt down the materials, but noted that his small team of five researchers and no access to Twitter’s internal resources was able to find hundreds of accounts within 20 days.
Twitter did not respond to a request for further comment.
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Reporting by Sheila Dang in New York and Katie Paul in Palo Alto; Additional reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Kenneth Li and Edward Tobin
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
BEIJING, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Before the pandemic, Doris Fu imagined a different future for herself and her family: new car, bigger apartment, fine dining on weekends and holidays on tropical islands.
Instead, the 39-year old Shanghai marketing consultant is one of many Chinese in their 20s and 30s cutting spending and saving cash where they can, rattled by China’s coronavirus lockdowns, high youth unemployment and a faltering property market.
“I no longer have manicures, I don’t get my hair done anymore. I have gone to China-made for all my cosmetics,” Fu told Reuters.
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This new frugality, amplified by social media influencers touting low-cost lifestyles and sharing money-saving tips, is a threat to the world’s second-largest economy, which narrowly avoided contraction in the second quarter. Consumer spending accounts for more than half of China’s GDP.
“We’ve been mapping consumer behaviour here for 16 years and in all of that time this is the most concerned that I’ve seen young consumers,” said Benjamin Cavender, managing director of China Market Research Group (CMR).
China’s ‘zero-COVID’ policy – including stringent lockdowns, travel restrictions and mass testing – has taken a heavy toll on the country’s economy. The government’s crackdown on big technology companies has also had an outsized effect on the young workforce.
Unemployment among people aged 16 to 24 stands at almost 19%, after hitting a record 20% in July, according to government data. Some young people have been forced to take pay cuts, for example in the retail and e-commerce sectors, according to two industry surveys. The average salary in 38 major Chinese cities fell 1% in the first three months of this year, data collated by online recruitment firm Zhilian Zhaopin show.
As a result, some young people prefer to save than splurge.
“I used to go see two movies every month, but I haven’t stepped inside a cinema since the pandemic,” said Fu, an avid movie fan.
Retail sales in China rose just 2.7% year-on-year in July, recovering to 5.4% in August but still well below the mostly 7%-plus levels during 2019, before the pandemic.
Almost 60% of people are now inclined to save more, rather than consume or invest more, according to the most recent quarterly survey by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank. That figure was 45% three years ago.
Chinese households overall added 10.8 trillion yuan ($1.54 trillion) in new bank savings in the first eight months of the year, up from 6.4 trillion yuan in the same period last year.
That is a problem for China’s economic policymakers, who have long relied on increased consumption to bolster growth.
China is the only leading economy that cut interest rates this year, in an effort to spur growth. China’s big state-owned banks cut personal deposit rates on Sept. 15, a move designed to discourage saving and boost consumption. read more
Addressing the rise in people’s inclination to save, a PBOC official said in July that when the pandemic eases, the willingness to invest and consume will “stabilize and rise.”
The PBOC did not respond to Reuters requests for comment; neither did China’s Ministry of Commerce.
’10 YUAN DINNER’
After years of increasingly ardent consumerism fuelled by rising wages, easy credit and online shopping, a move toward frugality brings young people in China closer to their more cautious parents, whose memories of lean years before the economy took off have made them more inclined to save.
“Amid the tough job market and strong downward economic pressure, young people’s feelings of insecurity and uncertainty are something they never experienced,” said Zhiwu Chen, chair professor of finance at Hong Kong University Business School.
Unlike their parents, some are making a show of their thriftiness online.
A woman in her 20s in the eastern city of Hangzhou, who uses the handle Lajiang, has gained hundreds of thousands of followers posting more than 100 videos on how to make 10 yuan ($1.45) dinners on lifestyle app Xiaohongshu and streaming site Bilibili.
In one minute-long video with nearly 400,000 views, she stir-fries a dish made from a 4-yuan basa fillet, 5 yuan of frozen shrimp, and 2 yuan of vegetables, using a pink chopping board and pink rice cooker.
Social media discussions have sprung up to share money-saving tips, such as the ‘Live off 1,600 yuan a month challenge,’ in Shanghai, one of China’s most expensive cities.
Yang Jun, who said she was deep in credit card debt before the pandemic, started a group called the Low Consumption Research Institute on networking site Douban in 2019. The group has attracted more than 150,000 members. Yang said she is cutting spending and is selling some of her belongings on second-hand sites to raise cash.
“COVID-19 makes people pessimistic,” the 28-year-old said. “You can’t just be like before, spend all the money you make, and make it back again next month.” She said she is now out of debt.
Yang said she has cut out her daily Starbucks coffee. Fu said she switched her makeup powder brand from Givenchy to a Chinese brand called Florasis, which is about 60% cheaper.
French luxury brands leader LVMH (LVMH.PA), which owns Givenchy, and coffee giant Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) both said sales fell sharply in China in the latest quarter. read more
China has given no signal on when or how it will exit from its zero-COVID policy. And while policymakers have taken various measures in hopes of boosting consumption, from subsidies for car buyers to shopping vouchers, far more money and attention has been directed towards infrastructure as a way of stimulating the economy.
Stability has been the key theme for China’s policymakers this year, experts say, as President Xi Jinping gears up for a third leadership term at next month’s congress of the ruling Communist Party.
“In the past, when you had economic slowdown, consumers were more likely to feel that government policy is going to fix this problem very quickly,” said Cavender at CMR. “I think right now the challenge is when you interview younger consumers they really don’t know what the future holds.”
Fu, the marketing professional, said she has deferred plans to sell her two small apartments to buy a bigger one in a better school district for her son, and has given up for now on upgrading from her Volkswagen Golf.
“Why do I dare not upgrade my house and my car, even if I have the money?” she said. “Everything is unknown.”
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Reporting by Albee Zhang and Tony Munroe
Editing by Bill Rigby
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Russia could do something ‘particularly ugly’, Ukraine warns
Ukraine independence day also marks six months since Russia’s invasion
Fresh shelling near Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant
Daughter of Russian nationalist killed by car bomb
Aug 21 (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged vigilance ahead of Wednesday’s celebrations of 31 years of Ukraine’s independence from Soviet rule, as shells rained down near Europe’s biggest nuclear plant and Russian forces struck in the south and east.
Ukrainians must not allow Moscow to “spread despondency and fear” ahead of the Aug. 24 events, which also mark six months since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Saturday.
“We must all be aware that this week Russia could try to do something particularly ugly, something particularly vicious,” Zelenskiy said.
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In Russia, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue who advocates Russia absorbing Ukraine was killed in a suspected car bomb attack outside Moscow on Saturday evening, Russian state investigators said on Sunday.
They said Darya Dugina, daughter of prominent ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed after a suspected explosive device detonated on the Toyota Land Cruiser she was travelling in, and they were considering “all versions” when it came to working out who was responsible. read more
The nightly curfew in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, regularly hit by Russian shelling, will be extended for the entire day on Wednesday, regional Governor Oleh Synehub told residents on the Telegram messaging app.
As the war that has killed thousands and forced millions to flee heads for its half-year mark, Ukrainian military and local officials reported more Russian strikes overnight on targets in the east and south of the country.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Facebook early on Sunday that over the past 24 hours Russian forces had conducted several attempted assaults in Donbas. The eastern border region controlled in part by pro-Moscow separatists has been a prime target of Russia’s campaign in the past months.
In the south, Russian forces conducted a successful assault on a village of Blahodatne at the border between Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. The city of Mykolaiv was hit with multiple S-300 missiles early on Sunday, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegram.
The area on the Black Sea coast has seen some of the fiercest fighting of the past weeks.
To the northeast, the city of Nikopol, which lies across the Dnipro river from Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s biggest nuclear plant, was shelled on five different occasions overnight, regional governor Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on Telegram. He said 25 artillery shells hit the city, causing a fire at an industrial premises and cutting power to 3,000 residents.
NUCLEAR FEARS
The fighting near the Russian-controlled plant and Saturday’s missile strike at the southern Ukrainian town of Voznesensk, not far from the country’s second-largest nuclear plant, revived fears of a nuclear accident.
The attack on Voznesensk was “another act of Russian nuclear terrorism”, state-run Energoatom, which manages Ukraine’s four nuclear energy generators, said in a statement.
Russia did not immediately respond to the accusation. Reuters could not verify the situation in Voznesensk. There were no reports of damage to the power plant.
As Moscow and Ukraine continue to trade accusations of shelling around the Zaporizhzhia complex, the United Nations has called for a demilitarized zone around the plant and talks continued about a visit of its nuclear agency to the area.
Zelenskiy in his speech also referred obliquely to a recent series of explosions in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attacks, but analysts have said at least some have been made possible by new equipment used by its forces.
“You can literally feel Crimea in the air this year, that the occupation there is only temporary and that Ukraine is coming back,” Zelenskiy said.
In the latest incident, Crimea’s Russian-appointed governor, who is not recognised by the West, said a drone attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet was thwarted on Saturday morning.
“It was downed right over the fleet headquarters. It fell on the roof and burned up. The attack failed,” Mikhail Razvozhayev said on Telegram.
Razvozhayev said the region’s anti-aircraft system had again been in operation and asked residents to stop filming and disseminating pictures of how it was working.
Ukrainian media reported explosions in nearby towns, among them the resorts of Yevpatoriya, Olenivka and Zaozyornoye.
Further west, five Kalibr missiles were fired from the Black Sea at the Odesa region overnight, according to the regional administration, citing the she southern military command. Two were shot down by Ukrainian air defences while three hit grain storage, but there were no casualties.
Odesa and other ports in the region have been at the centre of an U.N.-brokered deal to allow Ukrainian grain exports, blocked by the war, to reach world markets again. On Sunday, Turkey’s defence ministry reported four more food-laden ships left Ukrainian ports, bringing the total to 31.
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Reporting by Ron Popeski and Natalia Zinets; Writing by Clarence Fernandez and Tomasz Janowski; Editing by William Mallard and Nick Macfie
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Aug 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. government spared seven Western states from mandatory Colorado River water cutbacks for now but warned on Tuesday that drastic conservation was needed to protect dwindling reservoirs from overuse and severe drought exacerbated by climate change.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in June had given the states 60 days, until mid-August, to negotiate their own reductions or possibly face mandatory cutbacks enforced by the federal government. Federal officials asked for a reduced usage of 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water per year, an unprecedented reduction of 15% to 30% in the coming year.
But bureau and Department of Interior officials told a news conference they would give the states more time to reach a deal affecting the water supply of 40 million people.
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They instead fell back on previously negotiated cuts that for the second year in a row will impose reductions on Nevada, Arizona and the country of Mexico, which also receives a Colorado River allotment.
Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau said federal officials would continue working with the seven Colorado River states on reaching a deal: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
“That said, we stand firm in the need to protect the system,” Beaudreau said, adding he was encouraged by the talks so far and by new federal money for water management.
Even so, federal officials said more cuts were needed, both under terms already negotiated in the 100-year-old Colorado River compact and the 21st century reality of human-influenced climate change resulting in hotter temperatures and drier soils.
A 24-month forecast released on Tuesday showed falling levels of the two largest reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, will trigger the previously negotiated cuts.
An aerial view of Lake Powell is seen, where water levels have declined dramatically to lows not seen since it was filled in the 1960s as growing demand for water and climate change shrink the Colorado River and create challenges for business owners and recreation in Page, Arizona, U.S., April 20, 2022. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs/Files
Arizona, Nevada and Mexico will have supplies reduced for a second straight year: 21% for Arizona, 8% for Nevada and 7% for Mexico.
They are the first to be subject to cutbacks under the Colorado River compact. Last year, they got hit with 18%, 7% and 5% reductions, respectively, for the first time ever.
Negotiations over further reductions is creating tension among the states, especially as California, the largest user, has so far avoided cuts triggered by low reservoir levels.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are barely above one-quarter of their capacity. If they fall much lower, they will be unable to generate hydroelectric power for millions in the West.
“It is unacceptable for Arizona to continue to carry a disproportionate burden of reductions for the benefit of others who have not contributed,” Ted Cooke, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, said in a statement.
John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said he had hoped for more urgency from the bureau on Tuesday.
“It is possible for us to make the larger necessary cuts, but I think it is going to take everyone at the table realizing that everyone needs to suffer a commensurate level of pain to get there,” Entsminger said.
The 23-year megadrought, the worst on record in at least 1,200 years, is testing the strength of the compact, which a century ago assumed the river could provide 20 million acre-feet of water each year. The river’s actual flow the past two decades has averaged 12.5 million acre-feet, leaving state water managers with more rights on paper than water that exists in the river.
“As we have emphasized since taking office, the circumstances we face will require swift action and increased water conservation in every state, from every sector,” said Tanya Trujillo, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science.
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Reporting by Daniel Trotta and Caitlin Ochs; Editing by Donna Bryson and Josie Kao
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Aug 17 (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, said early on Wednesday that he was joking when he tweeted hours previously that he was going to buy currently struggling English football club Manchester United Plc (MANU.N).
“No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I’m not buying any sports teams,” Musk posted when asked by a user if he was serious about buying the club. “Although, if it were any team, it would be Man U,” he added, “they were my fav (sic) team as a kid.”
Musk originally tweeted: “I’m buying Manchester United ur (sic) welcome,” without offering any details. Some Manchester United fans, disgruntled by their club’s declining fortunes of late, had previously urged Musk on Twitter to consider buying the club.
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The tweet turnaround comes as Musk seeks to exit a $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter (TWTR.N) only four months after announcing on the platform he would buy the social media company, which has taken him to court.
Musk has a history of being unconventional and posting irreverent tweets, making it difficult sometimes to tell when he is joking.
“Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” he tweeted on April 27, two days after Twitter’s board accepted his unsolicited offer to buy the company.
Referring back to that post, on Wednesday he tweeted: “And I’m not buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in, despite the extreme popularity of such a move.”
Musk’s tweets about potential acquisitions have landed him in hot water with U.S. regulators in the past.
In 2018, he tweeted that there was “funding secured” for a $72 billion deal to take Tesla private, but did not move ahead with an offer. Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million civil fines – and Musk stepped down as Tesla’s chairman – to resolve U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claims that Musk defrauded investors.
The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweet that he was buying the club outside usual business hours.
Musk’s ambitions range from colonising Mars to creating a new sustainable energy economy, and in the process he has built the most valuable car company in the world, electric vehicle maker Tesla, rocket company SpaceX, and a slew of smaller firms. One is a tunnel maker called the Boring Company.
WIDESPREAD OPPOSITION
Manchester United is one of the most famous names in world football but is currently in crisis on the field amid angry calls from fans for the club’s current owners, the American Glazer family, to pull out.
Clamour from fans and pundits for a change of ownership at the three-time winners of the European Cup, the most prestigious club competition in the global game, is intensifying amid a lengthening run without winning major titles.
British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported last year that the Glazers, who have faced widespread fan opposition to their stewardship since acquiring the club in 2005 for 790 million pounds ($957 million), were prepared to sell but only if they were offered in excess of 4 billion pounds.
In its annual rankings this year, Forbes rated Manchester United, with its huge global fanbase, the third most valuable football club in the world, worth $4.6 billion, behind only Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona.
But shares in the New York-listed football club have slid a quarter in the past 12 months, valuing it at just over $2 billion. The stock has rebounded in the past month, gaining 16% to close at $12.78 on Tuesday.
The northern England-based team has more than 32 million followers on its main Twitter account and Musk’s first tweet about the club had garnered more than 430,000 ‘likes’ on the platform within five hours.
Musk, who is worth $270 billion, according to Forbes, could certainly afford to buy the club.
Last week, filings revealed that Musk had sold $6.9 billion worth of Tesla shares, which he said could be used to finance a potential Twitter deal if he loses a legal battle with the social media platform.
In total, Musk has sold about $32 billion worth of Tesla stock in less than a year partly to pay tax obligations and finance a Twitter deal.
Musk and his lawyer did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on his original Twitter post before his message that he had been joking. The Florida-based Glazer family did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Reporting by Juby Babu in Bengaluru and Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco; Writing by Peter Henderson, Michael Perry and Sayantani Ghosh; Editing by Aditya Soni, Neil Fullick and Kenneth Maxwell
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Tonnes of dead fish collected in river on Polish-German border
Authorities are working to establish cause
Polish authorities criticised for slow response
Polish PM says Oder “may take years” to return to normal state
BERLIN/WARSAW, Aug 12 (Reuters) – Polish and German authorities are working “flat-out” to establish the cause behind a mass fish die-off in the river Oder, German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said on Friday, warning of an environmental catastrophe.
Tonnes of dead fish have been found since late July in the river Oder, which runs through Germany and Poland. Both sides have said they believe a toxic substance is to blame but have yet to identify it.
“An environmental catastrophe is in the offing,” Lemke told the RND newspaper group. “All sides are working flat out to find the reasons for this mass die-out and minimise potential further damage.”
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Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the waterway would take years to return to normal.
“The scale of this pollution is very big. So big that the Oder may take years to return to a fairly normal state,” Morawiecki said in a regular podcast on Friday.
“It is likely that enormous amounts of chemical waste have been dumped into the river,” he said, adding those responsible would be held accountable.
A spokesperson for the German environment minister told a news conference on Friday that they were following the situation closely, and that it was not yet clear what had got into the water.
“We have an incomplete picture,” the spokesperson said. “We need clarity on what materials are in the water.”
“GIGANTIC” POLLUTION
Dead fish float on the surface of the Oder river, as water has been contaminated and is causing the mass extinction of fish in the river, in Kostrzyn upon Oder, Poland, August, 11, 2022. Cezary Aszkielowicz/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS
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Green activists and opposition politicians have criticised the Polish government for not responding quickly enough to the danger and failing to alert Poles to avoid bathing and angling in the river that has been contaminated since late July.
Germany has also grumbled over Poland’s response: Brandenburg environment minister Axel Vogel had earlier said “chains of communication between the Polish and German sides did not work in this case”.
The head of Poland’s national water management authority said the situation was serious and that by Thursday evening Poland had collected over 11 tonnes of dead fish.
“(It) is being investigated by the prosecutor’s office, the police and local environmental protection inspectorates,” Przemyslaw Daca, the head of Polish Waters, was quoted as saying by Polish Radio 24.
“The problem is enormous, the wave of pollution runs from Wroclaw to Szczecin. Those are hundreds of kilometres of river, the pollution is gigantic.”
An analysis of river water taken this week showed evidence of “synthetic chemical substances, very probably also with toxic effects for vertebrates,” the German state of Brandenburg’s environment ministry said on Thursday, adding that it remained unclear how the substance entered the water.
According to local German broadcaster rbb, the state laboratory found high levels of mercury in the water samples.
However, Wladyslaw Dajczak, the head of Poland’s Lubusz province, quoted by PAP news agency said that tests run on Aug. 10 and 11 showed mercury was found only in “trace amounts”, well within allowed levels.
He said a barrier would be set up on the Oder near the city of Kostrzyn to collect dead fish flowing down the river, with 150 Territorial Defence Forces soldiers delegated to help with the clean-up.
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Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Marek Strzelecki and Pawel Florkiewicz; Additional reporting by Thomas Escritt and Karol Badohal, Writing by Rachel More; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Mike Harrison, Toby Chopra and Raissa Kasolowsky
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HOSTENS, France, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Wildfires tore through the Gironde region of southwestern France on Wednesday, destroying homes and forcing the evacuation of 10,000 residents, some of whom had clambered onto rooftops as the flames got closer.
Black-and-orange skies, darkened by the smoke billowing from forests and lit up by the flames, were seen across the area as the fires continued to burn out of control despite the efforts of firefighters backed by water-bombing aircraft.
Fires, which have razed about 6,200 hectares (15,320), have now crossed in the neighbouring Landes region.
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France, like the rest of Europe, has been struggling this summer with successive heatwaves and its worst drought on record. Dozens of wildfires are ablaze across the country, including at least eight major ones.
“Prepare your papers, the animals you can take with you, some belongings,” the Gironde municipality of Belin-Beliet said on Facebook before evacuating parts of the town.
In the nearby village of Hostens, police had earlier been door to door telling residents to leave as the fire advanced. Camille Delay fled with her partner and her son, grabbing their two cats, chickens and house insurance papers.
“Everyone in the village climbed onto their rooftops to see what was happening – within ten minutes a little twist of smoke became enormous,” the 30-year-old told Reuters by telephone.
Firefighters said more evacuations were likely. Even so, some Hostens residents were reluctant to abandon their homes.
“It’s complicated to go with the dogs and we cannot leave them here,” said Allisson Horan, 18, who stayed behind with her father.
“I’m getting worried because the fire is in a plot of land behind ours and the wind is starting to change direction.”
Numerous small roads and a highway were closed.
Flames engulf trees during a fire in Hostens, as wildfires continue to spread in the Gironde region of southwestern France, in this screen grab taken from a handout video August 9, 2022. Sdis33 via Facebook/ Handout via REUTERS
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HEATWAVES
More than 57,200 hectares have gone up in flames so far in France this year, nearly six times the full-year average for 2006-2021, data from the European Forest Fire Information System shows.
“The fire is creating its own wind,” senior local official Martin Guespereau told reporters, adding that efforts to fight it were made more difficult by how unpredictable it was.
Sweden and Italy are among countries preparing to send help to France, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.
He repeated calls for everyone to be responsible – nine out of 10 fires are either voluntarily or involuntarily caused by people, he said.
The Gironde wildfire is one of many that have broken out across Europe this summer, triggered by heatwaves that have baked the continent and brought record temperatures.
In Portugal, nearly 1,200 firefighters backed by eight aircraft have battled a blaze in the mountainous Covilha area some 280 km (174 miles) northeast of Lisbon that has burned more than 3,000 hectares of forest since Saturday.
Spain and Greece have also had to tackle multiple fires over the past few weeks.
The Gironde was hit by major wildfires in July which destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of forest and temporarily forced almost 40,000 people from their homes.
Authorities believe the latest inferno was a result of the previous fires still smouldering in the area’s peaty soil.
Fires were also raging in the southern departments of Lozere and Aveyron. In the Maine et Loire department in western France, more than 1,200 hectares have been scorched by another fire.
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Reporting by Stephane Mahe in Hostens and Layli Foroudi in Paris; Additional reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten; Writing by Richard Lough, Ingrid Melander; Editing by Jane Merriman, Alexandra Hudson and Mark Heinrich
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