Ms. Capito has argued that coal-fired power plants, which have been closing as the nation moves away from fossil fuel sources, could become sites for nuclear reactors. That would provide benefits for places like her home state, which has produced coal and relied on it as fuel for power generators.
“Ultimately, you get to a point where you need something that’s not weather dependent, something like nuclear to make the grid reliable,” said John Kotek, who ran the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Obama administration and is now vice president for policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association. “There are other technologies that are candidates to play that role, but if you look at what is available today across the widest scale, that’s nuclear energy.”
The rising costs of other sources of power have made nuclear energy more competitive around the world, including in the United States, which has the largest fleet of nuclear plants of any country. They produce about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and 50 percent of the clean energy.
The United States maintains 92 reactors, though a dozen have closed over the last decade — including, a month ago, the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, about 55 miles southwest of Grand Rapids.
The owner, Entergy, decided to shut the plant after a power-purchase agreement with a utility expired. Entergy said it could not find buyers for the plant, and decommissioning has gone too far to bring it back online, even with the money from the federal government.
Diablo Canyon is next on the decommissioning list, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed extending its life. The plant, on California’s central coast, supplies almost 10 percent of the state’s electricity. Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns the plant, announced in 2016 that it planned to close it when its licenses expired, saying it would focus more on solar and wind power as renewable energy sources.
VENICE, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PGT Innovations, Inc. (NYSE:PGTI) will release its financial results and host a conference call on Tuesday, July 26, 2022, to discuss the company’s second quarter 2022 results as well as other business matters. The teleconference will begin at 10:30 a.m. eastern time and will be hosted by Jeff Jackson, President and Chief Executive Officer, John Kunz, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Brad West, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Treasurer. The company’s press release announcing our financial results will be issued pre-market at approximately 7:30 a.m. on July 26th and will also be available through the Investor Relations section of the PGT Innovations, Inc. website: http://ir.pgtinnovations.com/releases.cfm.
To participate in the teleconference, kindly dial into the call about 10 minutes before the start time: 833-316-0547 (U.S. toll-free) and 412-317-5728 (International). A replay of the call will be available within approximately one hour after the scheduled end of the call on July 26, 2022, through approximately 12:30 p.m. on August 2, 2022. To access the replay, dial 877-344-7529 (U.S. Only toll-free), 855-669-9658 (Canada Only toll-free) and 412-317-0088 (International) and refer to pass code 3547969. Other international replay dial-in numbers can be obtained at: https://services.choruscall.com/ccforms/replay.html.
You may pre-register for the call by using the following link. Please note that you will receive your dial-in number at the time of your pre-registration: https://dpregister.com/sreg/10168412/f3761a2bf8.
You may join the conference online by using the following link: https://event.choruscall.com/mediaframe/webcast.html?webcastid=k2gfjtZV.
The webcast will also be available through the Investors section of the PGT Innovations, Inc. website: http://ir.pgtinnovations.com/events.cfm.
About PGT Innovations, Inc.
PGT Innovations manufactures and supplies premium windows and doors. Their highly engineered and technically advanced products can withstand some of the toughest weather conditions on earth and are revolutionizing the way people live by unifying indoor and outdoor living spaces. PGT Innovations creates value through deep customer relationships, understanding the unstated needs of the markets it serves and a drive to develop category-defining products. PGT Innovations is also the nation’s largest manufacturer of impact-resistant windows and doors, holds the leadership position in its primary market, and is part of the S&P SmallCap 400 Index.
The PGT Innovations’ family of brands include CGI®, PGT® Custom Windows and Doors, WinDoor®, Western Window Systems, Anlin Windows & Doors, Eze-Breeze®, CGI Commercial, NewSouth Window Solutions, and a 75 percent ownership stake in Eco Enterprises LLC. The company’s brands, in their respective markets, are a preferred choice of architects, builders, and homeowners throughout North America and the Caribbean. Their high-quality products are available in custom and standard sizes with massive dimensions that allow for unlimited design possibilities in residential, multi-family, and commercial projects. For additional information, visit www.pgtinnovations.com.
Stopping at the edge of a vast field of barley on his farm in Prundu, 30 miles outside Romania’s capital city of Bucharest, Catalin Corbea pinched off a spiky flowered head from a stalk, rolled it between his hands, and then popped a seed in his mouth and bit down.
“Another 10 days to two weeks,” he said, explaining how much time was needed before the crop was ready for harvest.
Mr. Corbea, a farmer for nearly three decades, has rarely been through a season like this one. The Russians’ bloody creep into Ukraine, a breadbasket for the world, has caused an upheaval in global grain markets. Coastal blockades have trapped millions of tons of wheat and corn inside Ukraine. With famine stalking Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, a frenetic scramble for new suppliers and alternate shipping routes is underway.
barge that had sunk in World War II.
Rain was not as plentiful in Prundu as Mr. Corbea would have liked it to be, but the timing was opportune when it did come. He bent down and picked up a fistful of dark, moist soil and caressed it. “This is perfect land,” he said.
67.5 million tons of cargo, more than a third of it grain. Now, with Odesa’s port closed off, some Ukrainian exports are making their way through Constanta’s complex.
Railway cars, stamped “Cereale” on their sides, spilled Ukrainian corn onto underground conveyor belts, sending up billowing dust clouds last week at the terminal operated by the American food giant Cargill. At a quay operated by COFCO, the largest food and agricultural processor in China, grain was being loaded onto a cargo ship from one of the enormous silos that lined its docks. At COFCO’s entry gate, trucks that displayed Ukraine’s distinctive blue-and-yellow-striped flag on their license plates waited for their cargoes of grain to be inspected before unloading.
During a visit to Kyiv last week, Romania’s president, Klaus Iohannis, said that since the beginning of the invasion more than a million tons of Ukrainian grain had passed through Constanta to locations around the world.
But logistical problems prevent more grain from making the journey. Ukraine’s rail gauges are wider than those elsewhere in Europe. Shipments have to be transferred at the border to Romanian trains, or each railway car has to be lifted off a Ukrainian undercarriage and wheels to one that can be used on Romanian tracks.
Truck traffic in Ukraine has been slowed by backups at border crossings — sometimes lasting days — along with gas shortages and damaged roadways. Russia has targeted export routes, according to Britain’s defense ministry.
Romania has its own transit issues. High-speed rail is rare, and the country lacks an extensive highway system. Constanta and the surrounding infrastructure, too, suffer from decades of underinvestment.
Over the past couple of months, the Romanian government has plowed money into clearing hundreds of rusted wagons from rail lines and refurbishing tracks that were abandoned when the Communist regime fell in 1989.
Still, trucks entering and exiting the port from the highway must share a single-lane roadway. An attendant mans the gate, which has to be lifted for each vehicle.
When the bulk of the Romanian harvest begins to arrive at the terminals in the next couple of weeks, the congestion will get significantly worse. Each day, 3,000 to 5,000 trucks will arrive, causing backups for miles on the highway that leads into Constanta, said Cristian Taranu, general manager at the terminals run by the Romanian port operator Umex.
Mr. Mircea’s farm is less than a 30-minute drive from Constanta. But “during the busiest periods, my trucks are waiting two, three days” just to enter the port’s complex so they can unload, he said through a translator.
That is one reason he is less sanguine than Mr. Corbea is about Romania’s ability to take advantage of farming and export opportunities.
“Port Constanta is not prepared for such an opportunity,” Mr. Mircea said. “They don’t have the infrastructure.”
DOOLOW, Somalia — When her crops failed and her parched goats died, Hirsiyo Mohamed left her home in southwestern Somalia, carrying and coaxing three of her eight children on the long walk across a bare and dusty landscape in temperatures as high as 100 degrees.
Along the way, her 3-and-a-half-year-old son, Adan, tugged at her robe, begging for food and water. But there was none to give, she said. “We buried him, and kept walking.”
They reached an aid camp in the town of Doolow after four days, but her malnourished 8-year-old daughter, Habiba, soon contracted whooping cough and died, she said. Sitting in her makeshift tent last month, holding her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Maryam, in her lap, she said, “This drought has finished us.”
imperiling lives across the Horn of Africa, with up to 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia facing the risk of starvation by the end of this year, according to the World Food Program.
appealed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to lift the blockade on exports of Ukrainian grain and fertilizer — even as American diplomats warned of Russian efforts to sell stolen Ukrainian wheat to African nations.
The most devastating crisis is unfolding in Somalia, where about seven million of the country’s estimated 16 million people face acute food shortages. Since January, at least 448 children have died from severe acute malnutrition, according to a database managed by UNICEF.
only about 18 percent of the $1.46 billion needed for Somalia, according to the United Nations’ financial tracking service. “This will put the world in a moral and ethical dilemma,” said El-Khidir Daloum, the Somalia country director for the World Food Program, a U.N. agency.
projected to increase by up to 16 percent because of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, which made ingredients, packaging and supply chains more costly, according to UNICEF.
displaced by the drought this year. As many as three million Somalis have also been displaced by tribal and political conflicts and the ever-growing threat from the terrorist group Al Shabab.
cyclones, rising temperatures, a locust infestation that destroyed crops, and, now, four consecutive failed rainy seasons.
spend 60 to 80 percent of their income on food. The loss of wheat from Ukraine, supply-chain delays and soaring inflation have led to sharp rises in the prices of cooking oil and staples like rice and sorghum.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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Short on weapons. Ukraine has been making desperate pleas for the West to speed up the delivery of heavy weapons as its troops find themselves badly outgunned. The Russian forces, meanwhile, appear to be running low on precision missiles. This shortage had led the Russians to resort to other inefficient weapons systems that are less precise but can still cause major damage, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry.
At a market in the border town of Doolow, more than two dozen tables were abandoned because vendors could no longer afford to stock produce from local farms. The remaining retailers sold paltry supplies of cherry tomatoes, dried lemons and unripe bananas to the few customers trickling in.
perished since mid-2021, according to monitoring agencies.
The drought is also straining the social support systems that Somalis depend on during crises.
As thousands of hungry and homeless people flooded the capital, the women at the Hiil-Haween Cooperative sought ways to support them. But faced with their own soaring bills, many of the women said they had little to share. They collected clothes and food for about 70 displaced people.
“We had to reach deep into our community to find anything,” said Hadiya Hassan, who leads the cooperative.
likely fail, pushing the drought into 2023. The predictions are worrying analysts, who say the deteriorating conditions and the delayed scale-up in funding could mirror the severe 2011 drought that killed about 260,000 Somalis.
Famine in Somalia.”
For now, the merciless drought is forcing some families to make hard choices.
Back at the Benadir hospital in Mogadishu, Amina Abdullahi gazed at her severely malnourished 3-month-old daughter, Fatuma Yusuf. Clenching her fists and gasping for air, the baby let out a feeble cry, drawing smiles from the doctors who were happy to hear her make any noise at all.
“She was as still as the dead when we brought her here,” Ms. Abdullahi said. But even though the baby had gained more than a pound in the hospital, she was still less than five pounds in all — not even half what she should be. Doctors said it would be a while before she was discharged.
This pained Ms. Abdullahi. She had left six other children behind in Beledweyne, about 200 miles away, on a small, desiccated farm with her goats dying.
“The suffering back home is indescribable,” she said. “I want to go back to my children.”
Stefan Fritsche, who runs a centuries-old German brewery in Neuzelle, near the Polish border, has seen his natural gas bill jump a startling 400 percent over the past year. His electricity bill has increased 300 percent. And he’s paying more for barley than ever before.
But the soaring inflation for energy and grains in the wake of the Ukraine war is no match for the biggest challenge facing Mr. Fritsche’s brewery, Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle, and others like it across Germany: a severe shortage of beer bottles.
The problem is “unprecedented,” Mr. Fritsche said. “The price of bottles has exploded.”
The issue is not so much a lack of bottles. Germany’s roughly 1,500 breweries have up to four billion returnable glass bottles in circulation — about 48 for every man, woman and child.
recycling, it comes with one major problem: getting people to return their empties.
Dragging a crate — or several — of empty glass bottles back to a store can be a hassle, even if it means getting back the deposit fee. So people tend to let them stack up, in the basements of their homes or on the balconies of their apartments, biding their time until they are running out of either space or spare cash.
“It is deadly for small brewers,” Mr. Fritsche said. The brewery he runs sells 80 percent of its beer in bottles. (In 2003, a recycling law was expanded to focus on reducing waste in the beverage industry, meaning most beer sold for the domestic market is in returnable bottles, not cans.)
annual survey by Kirin, the Japanese brewer. (The United States ranked 17th.) But on the whole, Germans are cutting back. Since the Federal Statistics Office began keeping records in 1993 — a year after Mr. Fritsche’s family took over the brewery in Neuzelle — national consumption of beer has dropped nearly 24 percent, as people embrace a wider diversity of soft drinks.
Lockdowns surrounding the coronavirus over the past two years also contributed to the trend, as bars remained closed and sporting and cultural events were canceled.
The difficult environment makes management of the breweries all the more important. Mr. Fritsche said he had relied for decades on a combination of tradition and creativity.
A willingness to push the boundaries and think around the corner is essential to surviving in a tougher business environment, he said. For example, the brewery has a bottle of its signature product, Schwarzer Abt, or Black Abbot, that has been blessed by Pope Francis. The bottle is now dipped into each fresh batch of Schwarzer Abt.
What helps, too, is taking a long view of the history that comes with running a business founded in 1589, the events that it has witnessed and withstood over time.
“Nazis, Communists, government takeovers — in the past, we’ve had just about everything here,” Mr. Fritsche said. “And we have survived it all. We will get through this as well.”
Ms. Sandberg flirted with leaving Facebook. In 2016, she told colleagues that if Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, won the White House she would most likely assume a job in Washington, three people who spoke to her about the move at the time said. In 2018, after revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, she again told colleagues that she was considering leaving but did not want to do so when the company was in crisis.
Last year, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company was making a new bet and was going all in on the metaverse, which he called “the successor to the mobile internet.” In his announcement, Ms. Sandberg made only a cameo, while other executives were more prominently featured.
As Mr. Zuckerberg overhauled the company to focus on the metaverse, some of Ms. Sandberg’s responsibilities were spread among other executives. Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs and a former British deputy prime minister, became the company’s chief spokesman, a role that Ms. Sandberg had once taken. In February, Mr. Clegg was promoted to president of global affairs for Meta.
Ms. Sandberg’s profile dimmed. She concentrated on building the ads business and growing the number of small businesses on Facebook.
She was also focused on personal matters. Dave Goldberg, her husband, had died unexpectedly in 2015. (Ms. Sandberg’s second book, “Option B,” was about dealing with grief.) She later met Mr. Bernthal, and he and his three children moved to her Silicon Valley home from Southern California during the pandemic. Ms. Sandberg, who had two children with Mr. Goldberg, was focused on integrating the families and planning for her summer wedding, a person close to her said.
Meta’s transition to the metaverse has not been easy. The company has spent heavily on metaverse products while its advertising business has stumbled, partly because privacy changes made by Apple have hurt targeted advertising. In February, Meta’s market value plunged more than $230 billion, its biggest one-day wipeout, after it reported financial results that showed it was struggling to make the leap to the metaverse.
In the interview, Ms. Sandberg said Meta faced near-term challenges but would weather the storm, as it had during past challenges. “When we went public, we had no mobile ads,” Ms. Sandberg said, citing the company’s rapid transition from desktop computers to smartphones last decade. “We have done this before.”
DUBAI/ATHENS, May 27 (Reuters) – Iranian forces seized two Greek tankers in the Gulf on Friday, shortly after Tehran warned it would take “punitive action” against Athens over the confiscation of Iranian oil by the United States from a tanker held off the Greek coast.
“The Revolutionary Guards Navy today seized two Greek tankers for violations in Gulf waters,” said a Guards statement, quoted by Iranian state news agency IRNA. It gave no further details and did not say what the alleged violations were.
Greece’s foreign ministry said an Iranian navy helicopter landed on Greek flagged vessel Delta Poseidon, which was sailing in international waters, 22 nautical miles from the Iranian shore, and took the crew hostage, among them two Greek citizens.
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It said a similar incident took place on another Greek-flagged vessel near Iran, without naming the ship, adding both actions violated international law and Greece had informed its allies, as well as complained to Iran’s ambassador in Athens.
Greece-based Delta Tankers, which operates the Delta Poseidon, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Greek authorities last month impounded the Iranian-flagged Pegas, with 19 Russian crew members on board, near the coast of the southern island of Evia due to European Union sanctions.
The United States later confiscated the Iranian oil cargo held onboard and plans to send it to the United States on another vessel, Reuters reported on Thursday.
The Pegas was later released, but the seizure inflamed tensions at a delicate time, with Iran and world powers seeking to revive a nuclear deal that Washington abandoned under former President Donald Trump.
Earlier on Friday, Nour News, which is affiliated to an Iranian state security body, said on Twitter: “Following the seizure of an Iranian tanker by the Greek government and the transfer of its oil to the Americans, #Iran has decided to take punitive action against #Greece.”
It did not say what kind of action Iran would take.
The Pegas was among five vessels designated by Washington on Feb. 22 – two days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – for sanctions against Promsvyazbank, a bank viewed as critical to Russia’s defence sector.
It was unclear whether the cargo was impounded because it was Iranian oil or due to the sanctions on the tanker over its Russian links. Iran and Russia face separate U.S. sanctions.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency later quoted an unnamed source as saying: “There are 17 other Greek vessels in the Persian Gulf, which could be seized by the Revolutionary Guards if Greece continues its mischievousness.”
“Informed sources also stress that Greece should take compensatory measures towards the Iranian oil tanker as soon as possible,” said Tasnim.
NUCLEAR TALKS
A maritime security source said the other tanker seized on Friday was the Greek-flagged Prudent Warrior. Its operator, Greece-based shipping firm Polembros, told Reuters there had been “an incident” with one of its ships, without elaborating, adding it was “making every effort to resolve the issue.”
U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), which monitors Iran-related tanker traffic through ship and satellite tracking, said Prudent Warrior was carrying a cargo of Qatari and Iraqi oil, while the Delta Poseidon was loaded with Iraqi oil.
Each vessel was carrying approximately one million barrels, it said.
“This should have direct implications on the JCPOA (Iran nuclear) negotiations and further stalling any chances of reviving a deal,” Claire Jungman, chief of staff at UANI, told Reuters.
A spokesperson with the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said it was aware of the reported seizures and was looking into them.
Also on Friday, Iran summoned an envoy of Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in Tehran, to protest against the Pegas oil seizure, the Iranian foreign ministry said.
“The Islamic Republic expressed its deep concern over the U.S. government’s continued violation of international laws and international maritime conventions,” state media quoted the foreign ministry as saying.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on the oil seizure.
IRNA quoted Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization as saying the tanker had sought refuge along the Greek coast after experiencing technical problems and poor weather. It called the seizure of its cargo “a clear example of piracy”.
The United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on what it described as a Russian-backed oil smuggling and money laundering network for the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force.
In 2019, Iran seized a British tanker near the Strait of Hormuz for alleged marine violations two weeks after British forces detained an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar, accusing it of shipping oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions. Both vessels were later released.
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Reporting by George Georgiopoulos in Athens, Jonathan Saul in London and Dubai newsroom
Editing by Angus MacSwan and Alistair Bell
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
NEW YORK/MUNICH, May 17 (Reuters) – Germany’s Allianz SE (ALVG.DE) agreed to pay more than $6 billion and its U.S. asset management unit pleaded guilty to criminal securities fraud over the collapse of a group of investment funds early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Allianz’s settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are among the largest in corporate history, and dwarf earlier settlements obtained under President Joe Biden’s administration.
Gregoire Tournant, the former chief investment officer who created and oversaw the now-defunct Structured Alpha funds, was also indicted for fraud, conspiracy and obstruction, while two other former portfolio managers entered related guilty pleas.
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Once with more than $11 billion of assets under management, the Structured Alpha funds lost more than $7 billion as COVID-19 roiled markets in February and March 2020.
Allianz Global Investors US LLC was accused of misleading pension funds for teachers, bus drivers, engineers, religious groups and others by understating the funds’ risks, and having “significant gaps” in its oversight. read more
Investors were told the funds employed options that included hedges to protect against market crashes, but prosecutors said the fund managers repeatedly failed to buy those hedges.
Prosecutors said the managers also inflated fund results to boost their pay through performance fees, with Tournant, 55, collecting $13 million in 2019 and becoming his unit’s highest or second-highest-paid employee from 2015 to 2019.
Investigators said the misrepresentations began in 2014, and helped Allianz generate more than $400 million of net profit.
At a news conference, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in Manhattan said more than 100,000 investors were harmed, and that while American prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges against companies it was “the right thing to do.”
Investors “were promised a relatively safe investment with strict risk controls designed to weather a sudden storm, like a massive collapse in the stock market,” he said. “Those promises were lies…. Today is the day for accountability.”
BLAMING COVID
Also known for its insurance operations, Allianz is among Germany’s most recognizable brands and an Olympic sponsor.
Its namesake arena near its Munich headquarters, meanwhile, houses Bayern Munich, one of world’s best-known soccer teams.
The settlement calls for Allianz to pay a $2.33 billion criminal fine, make $3.24 billion of restitution and forfeit $463 million, court papers show.
Williams said the fine was significantly reduced because of Allianz’s compensation to investors.
Even so, the payout is close to twice the $3.3 billion in corporate penalties that the Justice Department collected for all of 2021.
An Allianz lawyer entered the guilty plea at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan.
Allianz also accepted a $675 million civil fine from by the SEC, one of that regulator’s largest penalties since Enron Corp and WorldCom Inc imploded two decades ago.
Shares of Allianz closed up 1.7% in Germany, with the payout broadly matching reserves that the company previously set aside.
Tournant, of Basalt, Colorado, surrendered to authorities on Tuesday morning.
The U.S.-French citizen appeared briefly in Denver federal court, and was released after agreeing to post a $20 million bond. An arraignment was set for June 2 in New York.
Tournant’s lawyers, Seth Levine and Daniel Alonso, said the investor losses were “regrettable” but did not result from a crime.
“Greg Tournant has been unfairly targeted [in a] meritless and ill-considered attempt by the government to criminalize the impact of the unprecedented, COVID-induced market dislocation,” the lawyers said in a joint statement.
The other two portfolio managers – Stephen Bond-Nelson, 51, of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey; and Trevor Taylor, 49, of Miami – agreed to plead guilty to fraud and conspiracy, and cooperate with prosecutors. Their lawyers declined immediate comment.
VOYA PARTNERSHIP
Allianz’s guilty plea carries a 10-year ban on Allianz Global Investors’ providing advisory services to U.S.-registered investment funds.
As a result, Allianz plans to move about $120 billion of investor assets to Voya Financial Inc (VOYA.N) in exchange for a stake of up to 24% in Voya’s investment management unit. It expects a final agreement in the coming weeks.
Regulators said the misconduct included when Tournant and Bond-Nelson altered more than 75 risk reports before sending them to investors.
The SEC said projected losses in one market crash scenario were changed to 4.15% from the actual 42.15%, simply by removing the “2.”
Allianz’s alleged oversight lapses included a failure to ensure Tournant was hedging, though prosecutors said only people in his group knew of the misconduct before March 2020.
“No compliance system is perfect, but the controls at AGI didn’t even stand a chance,” Williams said.
Bond-Nelson, at Tournant’s direction, also lied to Allianz’s in-house lawyers after the company learned about the altered reports and the SEC probe, prosecutors added.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen a recent string of cases in which derivatives and complex products have harmed investors across market sectors,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement.
Investors have also filed more than two dozen lawsuits against Allianz over the Structured Alpha funds.
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Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Tom Sims and Alexander Huebner in Munich
Additional reporting by Luc Cohen in New York
Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Tomasz Janowski and Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
As the rest of the world learns to live with Covid-19, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, wants his country to keep striving to live without it — no matter the cost.
China won a battle against its first outbreak in Wuhan, Mr. Xi said last week, and “we will certainly be able to win the battle to defend Shanghai,” he added, referring to the epicenter of the current outbreak in China.
summarized it as “zero movement, zero G.D.P.” Multinational companies have grown wary of further investments in the country.
For more than two years, China kept its Covid numbers enviably low by doggedly reacting to signs of an outbreak with testing and snap lockdowns. The success allowed the Communist Party to boast that it had prioritized life over death in the pandemic, unlike Western democracies where deaths from the virus soared.
More transmissible variants like Omicron threaten to dent that success, posing a dilemma for Mr. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party. Harsher lockdowns have been imposed to keep infections from spreading, stifling economic activity and threatening millions of jobs. Chinese citizens have grown restless, pushing back against being forced to stay home or to move into grim, government-run isolation facilities.
politically important year for Mr. Xi, China’s censors have moved quickly to muffle calls for a change in course on Covid-19. The head of the World Health Organization, whose recommendations China once held up as a model, was silenced this week when he called on the country to rethink its strategy.
Photographs and references to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., were promptly scrubbed from the Chinese internet after the statement. The foreign ministry responded by calling Mr. Tedros’s remarks “irresponsible,” and accusing the W.H.O. of not having a “proper understanding of the facts.”
China’s state-controlled media has also glossed over the draconian measures officials have deployed to deal with outbreaks. This week, as some authorities in Shanghai erected new fences around quarantine zones, boarded up more homes and asked residents not to leave their apartments, state media painted a picture of a city slowly returning to normal.
One article described the “hustle and bustle of city life” returning, while another focused on statistics for how many stores had reopened.
has not happened. Several Chinese companies are in the testing phase of a homegrown mRNA option, and China also recently approved for emergency use a Covid-19 antiviral pill made by Pfizer called Paxlovid.
Administering three vaccine shots, using antiviral therapies and offering more effective vaccines could help China find a path out of zero Covid, Mr. Ajelli said.
disappointing winter wheat harvest in June could drive food prices — already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States — further up, compounding hunger in the world’s poorest countries.
A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalities and usher in a new era of “common prosperity.” Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.
By one estimate, nearly 400 million people in 45 cities have been under some form of lockdown in China in the past month, accounting for $7.2 trillion in annual gross domestic product. Economists are concerned that the lockdowns will have a major impact on growth; one economist has warned that if lockdown measures remain in place for another month, China could enter into a recession.
European and American multinational companies have said they are discussing ways to shift some of their operations out of China. Big companies that increasingly depend on China’s consumer market for growth are also sounding the alarm. Apple said it could see a $4 billion to $8 billion hit to its sales because of the lockdowns.
struggle to find and keep jobs during lockdowns.
Even as daily virus cases in Shanghai are steadily dropping, authorities have tightened measures in recent days following Mr. Xi’s call last week to double down. Officials also began to force entire residential buildings into government isolation if just one resident tested positive.
The new measures are harsher than those early on in the pandemic and have been met with pockets of unrest, previously rare in China where citizens have mostly supported the country’s pandemic policies.
In one video widely circulated online before it was taken down by censors, an exasperated woman shouts as officials in white hazmat suits smash her door down to take her away to an isolation facility. She protests and asks them to give her evidence that she has tested positive. Eventually she takes her phone to call the police.
“If you called the police,” one of the men replies, “I’d still be the one coming.”
Isabelle Qian contributed reporting, and Claire Fu contributed research.
Members of indigenous communities camp on the property of Chinese-owned Las Bambas copper mine, in Las Bambas, Peru April 26, 2022. REUTERS/Angela Ponc
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LIMA, May 7 (Reuters) – The Peruvian government postponed a meeting scheduled for Saturday with the indigenous communities protesting Las Bambas copper mine due to protest leaders taking too long to respond, Prime Minister Anibal Torres said in a signed document.
The document, dated Friday and seen by Reuters, was sent to the leaders of the Fuerabamba and Huancuire communities and stated that the government also had “logistical difficulties” and weather difficulties in traveling to the conflict zone. The letter proposed that the meeting be held on Tuesday.
Peru is the world’s second-largest producer of copper and the Chinese-owned Las Bambas supplies 2% of the world’s supply of that metal. The mine is key to the Peruvian economy, as it represents at least 1% of the Andean country’s gross domestic product.
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Both indigenous communities had agreed on Friday to meet with government and mining representatives in a small community outside the current emergency zone. The prime minister’s office is also proposing Tuesday’s meeting be held in Tambobamba, a town farther east and closer to the city of Cuzco.
“We are accepting the meeting called for Tuesday, but we are telling (the prime minister) that the meeting be in Pumamarca, as a neutral zone,” Alexander Raul Anglas Quiroz, an adviser to the Huancuire community, told Reuters by telephone.
On April 27, the government declared a state of emergency in several areas surrounding the mine. The measure suspends civil liberties such as the right to assembly and protest. Police later tried to evict the protesters, but were unsuccessful. read more
Residents of the Fuerabamba and Huancuire communities broke in to part of the mine owned by China’s MMG Ltd (1208.HK) on April 14, forcing Las Bambas to suspend operations. They allege that the mining company has not fulfilled the commitments it made to them. read more
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Report by Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun in Lima; Writing by Alexander Villegas
Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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