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Persistence and Political Correctness at Amherst

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By Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigations
April 23, 2019
Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.

Withdrawn from circulation, but why?

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” -- a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

But it wasn't just the right piling on. Members of the predominantly liberal Amherst faculty, who were not consulted about the guide as it was being drafted, criticized it too.

At a post-release meeting of some 70 faculty members, “the people who departed most strenuously from the guide were on the left, including transgender faculty members,” said one of those present, Francis G. Couvares, the chairman of the Amherst History Department, speaking by phone.

Soon after, the language guide was withdrawn from circulation, erased from the college website, with college President Carolyn Martin proclaiming it “counter to the core academic values of freedom of thought and expression.” End of story.

Or was it? 

Conservative bloggers weren’t the only ones portraying the Amherst Common Language Guide not as an aberration quickly withdrawn but as part of a persistent effort that will continue.

The objection among Amherst faculty wasn't so much to the politics of the document but to what seemed an effort by a branch of the college administration to impose simple, one-sided views on topics that are very much open for discussion. In other words, it contravened the idea that the college is supposed to teach students how to think, not what to think.

Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, Amherst president: The language guide was “counter to the core academic values of freedom of thought and expression.”

Amherst College

Nevertheless, people at Amherst, including some who opposed the guide, mounted strong defenses of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, saying that its intentions were honorable and that it, and others like it across the country, perform a vital, necessary function. 

“You can't blame colleges and universities or their faculties for a culture that's becoming more and more concerned with race, class, and gender,” Michaela Brangan, visiting assistant professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought, said in a phone interview.  Brangan did not approve of the guide, which she said was “ill-conceived and ill-executed,” and she wishes faculty had known about and been involved in its making.

But she supports the ODI and its general mission, and disputes the notion that it is attempting to impose an ideology. Rather, she said, it is responding to a genuine need of an institution whose young members are often associating with people of different races or sexualities for the first time, or are themselves minorities on campus.  She feels that other language guides published at other universities have been successful, giving as an example one at the Virginia Commonwealth University. 

“The diversity mission—and the offices tasked with handling it—didn’t come out of any left-wing echo chamber,” she said in an email, referring to the phrase often used by conservatives and others to depict diversity programs as promoting a uniform point of view. “ 'Diversity' is from the  Supreme Court case UC Regents v Bakke in 1978, and was justified under First Amendment doctrine by the arch-conservative justice, Lewis Powell Jr, as the only 'compelling interest' of the state that allowed colleges to use race-conscious assessments, as part of a holistic admissions process.”

“The ODI is there for those who feel that they need it,” she continued. “The staff that is there are those who want to be doing that work with students, who are figuring out how to navigate a hierarchical, assessment-heavy college system that wasn't really made with them in mind." Those who created the guide, she said, "believed that it was responding to a need for a specific resource.”

College Row at Amherst.

Wikipedia

It is hard to read the actual Amherst Common Language Guide without being struck by its saturation in the conventional assumptions of the identity-politics left.

There's the entry on the “Male Gaze,” which emerged from “feminist film theory,” whereby “the power of looking is centralized in the man who is the bearer of the look, and the patriarchal order is reified [while] women are objectified and consumed by men.”

Or there's the one on “Intersectionality,” a fashionable term now well established at practically every institution of higher learning:  “Intersectionality,” according to the CLG, is “a term...to name the intersections of multiple, mutually reinforcing systems of oppression [showing] how the individual experience is impacted by multiple axes of oppression and privilege.” (That's correct: “Mutually reinforcing system of oppression,” and “multiple axes of oppression” in a single sentence.)

Or “Mysogynoir”: A term “coined by black queer feminist scholar Moya Bailey to describe the particular racialist sexism that black women face.”

Pretty much nobody white is spared some sort of complicity in the oppression of others.  “White Feminism,” for example, is feminism that “is predicated on the erasure of women of color.” It is “feminism absent intersectionality.” You might think that “fragile masculinity” is a condition of nervous boys calling up girls for a date, but no.  It's “a state of requiring affirmation of one's masculinity and manhood in order to feel power and dominance.”   

The term that aroused perhaps the most pungently negative comment was the one on “Capitalism,” which, according to the CLG, is “an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by state.” So far so good. But the definition continues, as if stating a universally accepted truth: This system leads to “exploitative labor practices, which affect marginalized groups disproportionately.”

The diversity bureaucracy's own publication.

Journal of Diversity in Higher Education

According to some faculty members, these definitions were written over a two-year period by the members of the Amherst ODI, which is precisely why some dissenters from multiculturalist trends didn't find the college's withdrawal of the document a clear victory for free inquiry.  The Amherst ODI's definitions, after all, didn't come from nowhere.  They arose from what critics of it call the “diversity industry,” the burgeoning number of college ODIs that are now as commonly accepted, and taken for granted, on campus as the admissions office or the football team.

The conservative City Journal in a study last year found, for example, that the University of Michigan has 100 full-time diversity officers; UC-Berkeley, 175. 

Moreover, as some studies have shown, university administrators tend to be more ideologically uniform (that is to say, more “liberal” or “progressive”) even than faculties—by a ratio of roughly 12-to-1, liberals over conservatives.  There do not appear to be any surveys of ODIs alone, but they would seem to fit the pattern, and that's probably almost inevitable, given that people with conservative ideas, or evangelical Christians, or anti-abortion feminists, seem unlikely to want be college diversity officers 

The diversity bureaucracy has its own publication, The Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, which, its website says, “offers insights into theory and research that can help guide the efforts of institutions of higher education in the pursuit of inclusive excellence,” a term that critics say sounds unobjectionable, but actually means giving preference to women and minorities over white men in hiring, rather than simply hiring the best person for the job. 

There's also a professional association, The National Association of Diversity Officers, whose annual conference in March this year was devoted to the topic “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Imperatives of the 21st Century.”  Workshops were on subjects like “The Neuroscience of Social Justice” and “So You Want to be a Chief Diversity Officer?”

The website of Amherst's ODI lists 20 staff members, including Norm J. Jones, the chief diversity and inclusion officer, a “director of inclusive leadership” two “faculty diversity and inclusion members,” an “associate dean for diversity and inclusion,” the director of the Women's and Gender Center, the director of the Queer Resource Center, the director of the Multiculturalism Resource Center, a specialist for “race education and programs,” a “dialogue coordinator,” and a “dialogue facilitator,” this last person teaching a course called “Learning and Teaching With Feminism in Mind.”

The office is the main response of Amherst to the increased presence of non-traditional students and the demand of some of them to create tolerant and supportive environments.  The college, according to available statistics, says that its student body is now 38 percent people of color, presumably including a significant number of ethnic Asians. Nearly 30 percent of students receive Pell Grants, federal subsidies given to low-income students. There are, of course, gay, lesbian, and transgender students, who in the past might have kept their sexual identities secret, but who are no longer willing to do so and feel that they are subject to discrimination and prejudice.

The irony is that the Amherst ODI, in pressing its agenda to the point of what many called self-parody, may have harmed its ability to help these students.  “Part of the problem was that they didn't get out of the bubble of the diversity community,” Couvares said, referring to the authors of the language guide.  “Even my colleagues of transgender history said, 'This is ridiculous.'” 

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China Evergrande tops Asia borrowers with fresh dollar bond tap, raises $6.6 billion so far

A logo of China Evergrande Group is displayed at a news conference on the property developer's annual results in Hong Kong
FILE PHOTO: A logo of China Evergrande Group is displayed at a news conference on the property developer's annual results in Hong Kong, China March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

April 15, 2019

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China Evergrande Group became Asia’s biggest bond market borrower excluding Japan so far this year after a $1 billion tap of its latest issue took the mainland property developer’s total sales so far to $6.6 billion.

China’s third largest developer said on Monday it had sold $200 million in three-year notes, and an additional $400 million each in four- and five-year bonds.

The notes carry coupons of between 9.5 and 10.5 percent, and have the same terms and conditions as $2 billion of bonds Evergrande sold last week.

Evergrande has now tapped bond markets for a total of $6.6 billion this year, according to data from Refinitiv, including those issued through subsidiary Hengda Real Estate Group.

Its latest sale took it past Chinese gaming giant Tencent, which sold $6 billion of bonds earlier this month.

Including Japan, Evergrande is Asia’s second-largest borrower this year, with the top spot taken by Japan’s biggest bank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group which has raised $7.3 billion in dollar bonds so far, according to Dealogic data.

Sales of Asian junk bonds have had a blistering start to the year on expectations for lower interest rates and as a market rally has stoked risk appetite, with a record $27.5 billion sold in the first quarter, Refinitiv data showed.

Evergrande will use the proceeds to refinance existing indebtedness and for capital expenditure, it added.

Fitch said in a release the developer expected to spend 20 billion yuan on non-property businesses, including the research, development and production of electric vehicles. This compares to the 16 billion yuan in non-property capex in 2018.

“The key concern is the company has been issuing more bonds since there’s been an easing in liquidity, both onshore and offshore, and part of the proceeds are not used for refinancing,” said S&P analyst Matthew Chow.

“We need to see whether its overall spending appetite including doing more financing via other means such as trust loans also increases. There could be a risk that the situation could be different from what we expected earlier, but we believe that it is still in the hands of the company.”

Evergrande has one of the highest debt ratios in the industry, but has pledged to cut its net gearing ratio – a leverage measure which compares its net debt against the book value of its equity – to about 70 percent by June 2020 from 240 percent in June 2017.

Though the ratio was lowered to 152 percent at the end of last year, its total borrowings rebounded from the end of June. Chief Financial Officer Pan Darong attributed the rise to investments in new energy vehicles, but added he expected the debt ratio would decline to an industry average soon.

Credit Suisse was sole lead manager for Monday’s bond sale.

(Reporting by Clare Jim and Julia Fioretti; Editing by Kim Coghill and Louise Heavens)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Tornado confirmed in Alabama

The Latest on severe weather in the Southeast (all times local):

12:55 p.m.

The National Weather Service says a small tornado is responsible for destroying farm buildings and causing other damage in northeast Alabama.

The weather service says a team found damage from an EF-1 tornado with winds estimated at 90 mph (145 kph) after storms moved through Blount County early Monday.

A barn and other rural buildings were damaged or destroyed, and one person was reported hurt.

The weather service team is checking other damage that occurred elsewhere, and storms are still moving across the region.

___

11 a.m.

A strong storm moving across northeast Alabama knocked down power lines and caused scattered damage in a retail district and forecasters said more bad weather was on the way.

Photos shared on social media showed plants and other items thrown around the parking lot of a Walmart store in Guntersville, Alabama, during Monday's storm. Nearby stores had to close because of power outages.

High winds left trees tilted sideways and utility lines drooped toward the ground. Farm buildings were damaged in rural Blount County, Alabama, where one person was reported injured.

The National Weather Service issued tornado warnings after radar indicated a possible twister. The weather service office in Huntsville said it was sending a team to determine whether a tornado caused damage.

The Storm Prediction Center says 26 million people were at a slight risk of severe storms in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Source: Fox News National

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U.S. to announce end to sanctions waivers for Iran oil imports: Washington Post

FILE PHOTO: Gas flares from an oil production platform are seen at the Soroush oil fields.
FILE PHOTO: Gas flares from an oil production platform at the Soroush oil fields in the Persian Gulf, south of the capital Tehran, July 25, 2005. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/File Photo

April 21, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is preparing to announce on Monday that all importers of Iranian oil will have to end their imports shortly or be subject to U.S. sanctions, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The U.S. reimposed sanctions in November on exports of Iranian oil after President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of a 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and six world powers. Washington is pressuring Iran to curtail its nuclear program and stop backing militant proxies across the Middle East.

Along with sanctions, Washington has also granted waivers to eight economies that had reduced their purchases of Iranian oil, allowing them to continue buying it without incurring sanctions for six more months. They were China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece.

But on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will announce “that, as of May 2, the State Department will no longer grant sanctions waivers to any country that is currently importing Iranian crude or condensate,” the Post’s columnist Josh Rogin said, citing two State Department officials that he did not name.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the report.

On Wednesday, Frank Fannon, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources, repeated the administration’s position that “Our goal is to get to zero Iranian exports as quickly as possible.”

Other countries have been watching to see whether the United States would continue the waivers. Last Tuesday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said that Turkey expects the United States to extend a waiver granted to Ankara to continue oil purchases from Iran without violating U.S. sanctions.

Turkey did not support U.S. sanctions policy on Iran and did not think it would yield the desired result, Kalin told reporters in Washington.

Washington has a campaign of ‘maximum economic pressure’ on Iran and through sanctions, it eventually aims to halt Iranian oil exports and thereby choke Tehran’s main source of revenue.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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U.S. Bayer Roundup cancer trial goes to jury after closing arguments

FILE PHOTO: File photo of Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller atomizers displayed for sale at a garden shop at Bonneuil-Sur-Marne near Paris
FILE PHOTO: Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller atomizers are displayed for sale at a garden shop at Bonneuil-Sur-Marne near Paris, France, June 16, 2015. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

March 12, 2019

By Jim Christie

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A trial in which a California man alleged his use of Bayer AG’s glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer caused his cancer went to a federal U.S. jury after lawyers for both sides delivered their closing arguments on Tuesday.

The closely-watched case brought by plaintiff Edward Hardeman is only the second of some 11,200 Roundup lawsuits to go to trial in the United States. Another California man was awarded $289 million in August after a state court jury in August found Roundup caused his cancer, sending Bayer shares plunging.

Hardeman’s case has proceeded differently from the earlier trial, with an initial phase exclusively focused on scientific facts while omitting evidence of alleged corporate misconduct by company representatives.

Following the first phase, the six jurors in San Francisco federal court were asked by U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria to decide whether Roundup was a “substantial factor” in causing Hardeman’s cancer.

If the jury finds Roundup to have caused Hardeman’s cancer, the trial will proceed into a second stage, where his lawyers can present evidence allegedly showing the company’s efforts to influence scientists, regulators and the public about the safety of its products.

Hardeman’s lawyer, Aimee Wagstaff, during her closing arguments on Tuesday said Hardeman had “extreme” exposure to Roundup, spraying the chemical more than 300 times over 26 years.

“The dose makes the poison. The more you use, the higher the risk,” Wagstaff said. She urged jurors to consider all studies, including of rodents and cells, which she said showed an elevated cancer risk.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto for $63 billion, denies allegations that Roundup, or glyphosate, cause cancer. It says decades of studies and regulatory evaluations, primarily of real-world human exposure data, have shown the weed killer to be safe for human use regardless of exposure levels.

Wagstaff criticized the epidemiological studies as flawed.

Brian Stekloff, a lawyer for Bayer, in his closing statement said the cause of Hardeman’s cancer, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma generally, was not known.

“No one can tell you the cause,” Stekloff said, adding that Hardeman had some risk factors, such as old age and a history of hepatitis.

Chhabria decided in January to split Hardeman’s case into two phases. He called evidence of alleged corporate misconduct “a distraction” from the scientific question of whether glyphosate causes cancer.

Hardeman’s trial is a test case for some 760 cases nationwide consolidated before Chhabria in federal court.

Evidence of corporate misconduct was seen as playing a key role in the earlier state court case. The verdict in that case was later reduced to $78 million and is on appeal.

Plaintiff lawyers called Chhabria’s decision to exclude similar evidence from the first phase of Hardeman’s case “unfair,” saying their scientific evidence was inextricably linked to Monsanto’s alleged attempts to manipulate, misrepresent and intimidate scientists.

(Reporting by Jim Christie in San Francisco; additonal reporting and writing by Tina Bellon; editing by Anthony Lin and Bill Berkrot)

Source: OANN

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Peter Schiff: Nobody’s Going to Buy Fed’s BS Next Time Around

During its FOMC meeting last week, the Federal Reserve took 2019 rate cuts completely off the table. It said it will freeze bond sales from its $3.8 trillion balance sheet later this autumn. In other words, balance sheet normalization is pretty much a done deal.

Peter Schiff has predicted this would happen. He said from the beginning if and when the Fed tried to normalize rate, it would have to abort the process.

And here we are.

But as Peter explained in his most recent podcast, the Fed still isn’t being honest about why it’s done a monetary policy 180. It’s making excuses.

“As I predicted, they are not telling the truth. The markets can’t handle that. The Fed is not telling the markets, ‘We’re not raising rates because the economy is imploding because of all the debt that was accumulated when we kept rates so low. Now we can’t raise them. Or we can’t continue to shrink the balance sheet because the budget deficits are blowing out of control.’”

Indeed, the federal government spent itself into an all-time record deficit in February. Think about that. That means the government is running bigger deficits than it was during the Great Recession.

“If we are running these enormous budget deficits now – before the recession – imagine how much greater they’re going to be during the recession. The Fed can’t add fuel to the fire by competing with the Treasury. The Fed can’t keep unloading bonds at the same time that the Treasury is selling them like they’re going out of style.”

Peter said he thinks that by the time Trump leaves office, he will have set deficit records for every single month in the calendar year. He said the only good news – at least for Republicans politically – is that the next president will have to run even higher deficits.

“Which is why we’re going to have a sovereign debt crisis and a currency crisis.”

Given the enormity of these deficits and the ever-upward spiraling debt, the Fed has no choice but to call off the tightening. You can’t raise interest rates in an economy built on piles of debt. But the Fed can’t tell the markets that. They will have to figure it out on their own. So far, they seem pretty clueless. But eventually, they will and that’s when the bottom is really going to fall out of the dollar.

“When the Fed has to go back to zero, which it will be doing relatively soon, when the Fed has to go back to quantitative easing, nobody is going to believe that it is temporary again. Nobody is going to buy the Fed’s BS about how interest rates are going to stay low only temporarily and then we’re going to normalize them, and we’re going to shrink our balance sheet. We’re not monetizing the debt. After the recession is over we’re going to shrink our balance sheet back down to where it was before the recession. No one’s going to believe that. They couldn’t shrink a $4 trillion balance sheet. They won’t be able to shrink an $8 trillion balance sheet. If they couldn’t raise rates when the national debt was $22 trillion, they sure as hell can’t raise them when the national debt is $30 trillion.”

(Photo by Jericho / Wiki)

But at this point, the markets haven’t figured this out. Peter said they don’t really want to.

“They don’t want to admit I was right from the beginning – that the Fed checked us into a monetary roach motel and there’s no way to ever check out. But I do believe the markets are going to figure this out, whether the Fed admits it or not – during the next recession.”

Peter pointed out the inverted yield curve, widely seen as a warning sign for a recession. But he pointed out that the spread between 10-year Treasurys and 30-year Treasurys remains positive and is even widening. He goes on to explain why this next recession is actually going to feature stagflation. He also covers some of the recent economic data and touches on the Mueller report.


Officials in Rockland County, NY declared a countywide state of emergency Tuesday as medical martial law has made it’s debut by banning unvaccinated children from public spaces. Mike Adams joins Alex to break down this dystopian development.

Source: InfoWars

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In Kenya push, France seals business deals worth over 2 billion euros

French President Emmanuel Macron flanked by Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta address a news conference after touring the Nairobi Central Railway in Nairobi,
French President Emmanuel Macron flanked by Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta address a news conference after touring the Nairobi Central Railway in Nairobi, Kenya March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

March 14, 2019

By John Irish

NAIROBI (Reuters) – French firms signed contracts in Kenya worth some 2 billion euros ($2.26 billion) during a visit on Thursday by President Emmanuel Macron, who wants to deepen France’s economic ties with Anglophobe East Africa.

Macron’s visit to Nairobi is the first by a French president since Kenya won independence from Britain in 1963 and follows stopovers in Ethiopia and Djibouti – all countries where China has moved in aggressively and presents stiff competition.

At a ceremony with Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta, a consortium led by Vinci secured a 30-year concession worth 1.6 billion euros to operate a highway linking the Kenyan capital and Mau Summit in western Kenya.

Renewables firm Voltalia sealed a 70 million euro contract for a solar power plant while an Airbus-led consortium won a 200 million euro deal for coastal and maritime surveillance. Total is finalizing terms on a second solar plant.

“In Kenya there is an economic opportunity and it’s within the president’s strategy in France to look at not just Francophone Africa, but Anglophone Africa too,” said a French presidential source.

During a four-day trip to East Africa, Macron has vaunted France’s soft power in culture and education and its military know-how to woo deeper partnerships.

Kenya is east Africa’s most advanced economy with a liberal business environment and entrepreneurial culture. French businesses however account for just a 1.4 percent market share.

French exports to Kenya in 2017 amounted to between $170 million and $225.80 million, while China, Kenya’s number one trading partner, exported goods worth $3.8 billion.

“France has supported Kenya for several years in development projects … but we are not sufficiently economically and industrially,” Macron said on Wednesday night in a news conference with Kenyatta.

France also faces competition from other European allies, including Britain which is seeking to revive its trade relationship with its former colony as it prepares to leave the European Union.

Kenyatta, who took Macron for a drive around the grounds of State House in a Kenyan-assembled Peugeot car, said he hoped France would become a more important trading partner.

(Reporting by John Irish; editing by Richard Lough)

Source: OANN

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Cambodian authorities have ordered a one-hour reduction in the length of school days because of concerns that students and teachers may fall ill from a prolonged heat wave.

Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron said in an announcement seen Friday that the shortened hours will remain in effect until the rainy season starts, which usually occurs in May. The current heat wave, in which temperatures are regularly reaching as high as 41 Celsius (106 Fahrenheit), is one of the longest in memory.

Most schools in Cambodia lack air conditioning, prompting concern that temperatures inside classrooms could rise to unhealthy levels.

School authorities were instructed to watch for symptoms of heat stroke and urge pupils to drink more water.

The new hours cut 30 minutes off the beginning of the school day and 30 minutes off the end.

School authorities instituted a similar measure in 2016.

Source: Fox News World

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Explosions have rocked Britain’s largest steel plant, injuring two people and shaking nearby homes.

South Wales Police say the incident at the Tata Steel plant in Port Talbot was reported at about 3:35 a.m. Friday (22:35 EDT Thursday). The explosions touched off small fires, which are under control. Two workers suffered minor injuries and all staff members have been accounted for.

Police say early indications are that the explosions were caused by a train used to carry molten metal into the plant. Tata Steel says its personnel are working with emergency services at the scene.

Local lawmaker Stephen Kinnock says the incident raises concerns about safety.

He tweeted: “It could have been a lot worse … @TataSteelEurope must conduct a full review, to improve safety.”

Source: Fox News World

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The Wider Image: China's start-ups go small in age of 'shoebox' satellites
LinkSpace’s reusable rocket RLV-T5, also known as NewLine Baby, is carried to a vacant plot of land for a test launch in Longkou, Shandong province, China, April 19, 2019. REUTERS/Jason Lee

April 26, 2019

By Ryan Woo

LONGKOU, China (Reuters) – During initial tests of their 8.1-metre (27-foot) tall reusable rocket, Chinese engineers from LinkSpace, a start-up led by China’s youngest space entrepreneur, used a Kevlar tether to ensure its safe return. Just in case.

But when the Beijing-based company’s prototype, called NewLine Baby, successfully took off and landed last week for the second time in two months, no tether was needed.

The 1.5-tonne rocket hovered 40 meters above the ground before descending back to its concrete launch pad after 30 seconds, to the relief of 26-year-old chief executive Hu Zhenyu and his engineers – one of whom cartwheeled his way to the launch pad in delight.

LinkSpace, one of China’s 15-plus private rocket manufacturers, sees these short hops as the first steps towards a new business model: sending tiny, inexpensive satellites into orbit at affordable prices.

Demand for these so-called nanosatellites – which weigh less than 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and are in some cases as small as a shoebox – is expected to explode in the next few years. And China’s rocket entrepreneurs reckon there is no better place to develop inexpensive launch vehicles than their home country.

“For suborbital clients, their focus will be on scientific research and some commercial uses. After entering orbit, the near-term focus (of clients) will certainly be on satellites,” Hu said.

In the near term, China envisions massive constellations of commercial satellites that can offer services ranging from high-speed internet for aircraft to tracking coal shipments. Universities conducting experiments and companies looking to offer remote-sensing and communication services are among the potential domestic customers for nanosatellites.

A handful of U.S. small-rocket companies are also developing launchers ahead of the expected boom. One of the biggest, Rocket Lab, has already put 25 satellites in orbit.

No private company in China has done that yet. Since October, two – LandSpace and OneSpace – have tried but failed, illustrating the difficulties facing space start-ups everywhere.

The Chinese companies are approaching inexpensive launches in different ways. Some, like OneSpace, are designing cheap, disposable boosters. LinkSpace’s Hu aspires to build reusable rockets that return to Earth after delivering their payload, much like the Falcon 9 rockets of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“If you’re a small company and you can only build a very, very small rocket because that’s all you have money for, then your profit margins are going to be narrower,” said Macro Caceres, analyst at U.S. aerospace consultancy Teal Group.

“But if you can take that small rocket and make it reusable, and you can launch it once a week, four times a month, 50 times a year, then with more volume, your profit increases,” Caceres added.

Eventually LinkSpace hopes to charge no more than 30 million yuan ($4.48 million) per launch, Hu told Reuters.

That is a fraction of the $25 million to $30 million needed for a launch on a Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems Pegasus, a commonly used small rocket. The Pegasus is launched from a high-flying aircraft and is not reusable.

(Click https://reut.rs/2UVBjKs to see a picture package of China’s rocket start-ups. Click https://tmsnrt.rs/2GIy9Bc for an interactive look at the nascent industry.)

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LinkSpace plans to conduct suborbital launch tests using a bigger recoverable rocket in the first half of 2020, reaching altitudes of at least 100 kilometers, then an orbital launch in 2021, Hu told Reuters.

The company is in its third round of fundraising and wants to raise up to 100 million yuan, Hu said. It had secured tens of millions of yuan in previous rounds.

After a surge in fresh funding in 2018, firms like LinkSpace are pushing out prototypes, planning more tests and even proposing operational launches this year.

Last year, equity investment in China’s space start-ups reached 3.57 billion yuan ($533 million), a report by Beijing-based investor FutureAerospace shows, with a burst of financing in late 2018.

That accounted for about 18 percent of global space start-up investments in 2018, a historic high, according to Reuters calculations based on a global estimate by Space Angels. The New York-based venture capital firm said global space start-up investments totaled $2.97 billion last year.

“Costs for rocket companies are relatively high, but as to how much funding they need, be it in the hundreds of millions, or tens of millions, or even just a few million yuan, depends on the company’s stage of development,” said Niu Min, founder of FutureAerospace.

FutureAerospace has invested tens of millions of yuan in LandSpace, based in Beijing.

Like space-launch startups elsewhere in the world, the immediate challenge for Chinese entrepreneurs is developing a safe and reliable rocket.

Proven talent to develop such hardware can be found in China’s state research institutes or the military; the government directly supports private firms by allowing them to launch from military-controlled facilities.

But it’s still a high-risk business, and one unsuccessful launch might kill a company.

“The biggest problem facing all commercial space companies, especially early-stage entrepreneurs, is failure” of an attempted flight, Liang Jianjun, chief executive of rocket company Space Trek, told Reuters. That can affect financing, research, manufacturing and the team’s morale, he added.

Space Trek is planning its first suborbital launch by the end of June and an orbital launch next year, said Liang, who founded the company in late 2017 with three other former military technical officers.

Despite LandSpace’s failed Zhuque-1 orbital launch in October, the Beijing-based firm secured 300 million yuan in additional funding for the development of its Zhuque-2 rocket a month later.

In December, the company started operating China’s first private rocket production facility in Zhejiang province, in anticipation of large-scale manufacturing of its Zhuque-2, which it expects to unveil next year.

STATE COMPETITION

China’s state defense contractors are also trying to get into the low-cost market.

In December, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC) successfully launched a low-orbit communication satellite, the first of 156 that CASIC aims to deploy by 2022 to provide more stable broadband connectivity to rural China and eventually developing countries.

The satellite, Hongyun-1, was launched on a rocket supplied by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), the nation’s main space contractor.

In early April, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALVT), a subsidiary of CASC, completed engine tests for its Dragon, China’s first rocket meant solely for commercial use, clearing the path for a maiden flight before July.

The Dragon, much bigger than the rockets being developed by private firms, is designed to carry multiple commercial satellites.

At least 35 private Chinese companies are working to produce more satellites.

Spacety, a satellite maker based in southern Hunan province, plans to put 20 satellites in orbit this year, including its first for a foreign client, chief executive Yang Feng told Reuters.

The company has only launched 12 on state-produced rockets since the company started operating in early 2016.

“When it comes to rocket launches, what we care about would be cost, reliability and time,” Yang said.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom; Editing by Gerry Doyle)

Source: OANN

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At least one person is reported dead and homes have been destroyed by a powerful cyclone that struck northern Mozambique and continues to dump rain on the region, with the United Nations warning of “massive flooding.”

Cyclone Kenneth arrived just six weeks after Cyclone Idai tore into central Mozambique, killing more than 600 people and displacing scores of thousands. The U.N. says this is the first time in known history that the southern African nation has been hit by two cyclones in one season.

Forecasters say the new cyclone made landfall Thursday night in a part of Mozambique that has not seen such a storm in at least 60 years.

Mozambique’s local emergency operations center says a woman in the city of Pemba was killed by a falling tree.

Source: Fox News World

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German drug and crop chemical maker Bayer holds annual general meeting
Werner Baumann, CEO of German pharmaceutical and chemical maker Bayer AG, attends the annual general shareholders meeting in Bonn, Germany, April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

April 26, 2019

By Patricia Weiss and Ludwig Burger

BONN (Reuters) – Bayer shareholders vented their anger over its stock price slump on Friday as litigation risks mount from the German drugmaker’s $63 billion takeover of seed maker Monsanto.

Several large investors said they will not support aspirin investor Bayer’s management in a key vote scheduled for the end of its annual general meeting.

Bayer’s management, led by chief executive Werner Baumann, could see an embarrassing plunge in approval ratings, down from 97 percent at last year’s AGM, which was held shortly before the Monsanto takeover closed in June.

A vote to ratify the board’s actions features prominently at every German AGM. Although it has no bearing on management’s liability, it is seen as a key gauge of shareholder sentiment.

“Due to the continued negative development at Bayer, high legal risks and a massive share price slump, we refuse to ratify the management board and supervisory board’s actions during the business year,” Janne Werning, representing Germany’s Union Investment, a top-20 shareholder, said in prepared remarks.

About 30 billion euros ($34 billion) have been wiped off Bayer’s market value since August, when a U.S. jury found the pesticide and drugs group liable because Monsanto had not warned of alleged cancer risks linked to its weedkiller Roundup.

Bayer suffered a similar defeat last month and more than 13,000 plaintiffs are claiming damages.

Bayer is appealing or plans to appeal the verdicts.

Deutsche Bank’s asset managing arm DWS said shareholders should have been consulted before the takeover, which was agreed in 2016 and closed in June last year.

“You are pointing out that the lawsuits have not been lost yet. We and our customers, however, have already lost something – money and trust,” Nicolas Huber, head of corporate governance at DWS, said in prepared remarks for the AGM.

He said DWS would abstain from the shareholder vote of confidence in the executive and non-executive boards.

Two people familiar with the situation told Reuters this week that Bayer’s largest shareholder, BlackRock, plans to either abstain from or vote against ratifying the management board’s actions.

Asset management firm Deka, among Bayer’s largest German investors, has also said it would cast a no vote.

Baumann said Bayer’s true value was not reflected in the current share price.

“There’s no way to make this look good. The lawsuits and the first verdicts weigh heavily on our company and it’s a concern for many people,” he said, adding it was the right decision to buy Monsanto and that Bayer was vigorously defending itself.

This month, shareholder advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis recommended investors not to give the executive board their seal of approval.

(Reporting by Patricia Weiss and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Alexander Smith)

Source: OANN

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