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US reports it has imported sanctioned oil from Iran, a first after 30 years of sanctions

May 29, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The department did not provide information on how the Iranian imports showed up on its log, despite current US restrictions banning any nation from purchasing oil from Iran.

The US reportedly imported an estimated 36,000 barrels per day in October 2020, according to data tracked by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). In March, the import volumes of Iranian crude reportedly totaled 33,000 barrels per day.

Also on rt.com Iran has 69 million barrels of oil ready for when US sanctions end

That marks the first delivery of Iranian crude to the US since 1991, when the country was shipping up to 64,000 barrels per day.

However, the US energy department recorded another delivery of Iranian crude in 2020. In August, Washington confiscated 1.16 million barrels of Iranian-sourced oil aboard four tankers that were allegedly transporting the fuel to Venezuela.

The US has imposed sanctions against Iran since 1984, banning all arms sales and American aid to the nation. A new round of penalties against Tehran was introduced later, shortly after former US President Donald Trump initiated a withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration.

Also on rt.com Iran’s return to oil markets is imminent

Trump’s decisions reflected the US’ campaign of ‘maximum pressure’ against the Islamic Republic, measures aimed at forcing it to give up its nuclear ambitions.

The latest steps taken by the current US administration, with a view to easing tensions between the parties, reportedly may lead to a complete or a partial lifting of anti-Iran sanctions, and Washington and Tehran are currently in talks.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/525148-iran-crude-us-imports-sanctions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Germany pumps $10 billion in hydrogen in bid to become global leader

May 29, 2021 by Leave a Comment

Germany will provide $9.72 billion (€8 billion) to the 62 projects it has selected to reduce emissions in the transportation, steelmaking, and chemicals sectors.

Germany wants to become a global leader in hydrogen technology, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said, noting that the investment announced today is a step toward making Germany’s economy carbon neutral.

Also on rt.com Renewables dominate the headlines, but oil and gas remain king

Through the use of hydrogen, Germany could save several million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually from the steelmaking and chemicals industries, Altmaier said.

“We are making Germany a hydrogen country,” Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer added.

A total of 95% of road traffic still depends on fossil fuels, so Germany needs mobility that relies on renewable energies, Scheuer said.

“We must and WANT to urgently promote the switch to climate-friendly mobility,” the transport minister said. 

The energy ministry will oversee 50 of the projects, including plans for more than 2 gigawatts (GW) of electrolysis capacity for making green hydrogen. This is 40% of the 5 GW target in Germany’s national hydrogen strategy through 2030. The transport ministry will fund the remaining 12 projects in the transportation sector. These will include the development and manufacturing of fuel cell systems and vehicles, including passenger cars, trucks, and municipal vehicles.

Also on rt.com Russia plans to make up to $100 BILLION from hydrogen exports – media

Hydrogen has gained a lot of momentum in recent years. It now features in nearly every strategy of Big Oil and can be seen in many government plans for industry decarbonization.  Governments, international organizations, and oil and gas super-majors say that blue hydrogen (hydrogen plus carbon capture and storage) and green hydrogen (hydrogen made of water electrolysis using electricity from solar or wind) could be the key to helping the decarbonization of emission-intensive industries in the energy transition.

This article was originally published on Oilprice.com

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/525146-germany-billions-hydrogen-leader/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Workplace testing reveals record level of cannabis use among employees as more states legalize weed

May 29, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The data shows that nearly 2.7% of more than seven million drug tests conducted on behalf of employers in 2020 were positive for cannabis. That is up from 2.5% recorded in 2019, when the rate of detected workforce drug use reached a 16-year high.

Around 2.7% of the drug tests conducted by Quest on behalf of employers returned positive results for marijuana – up from 2.5% in 2019 and 2% in 2016.

Also on rt.com Weed is the new WallStreetBets darling: Marijuana stocks flying high thanks to Reddit-fueled rally

“Positivity rates in the combined US workforce increased in urine drug tests, climbing to the highest level since 2003 (4.5%) and more than 28% higher than the 30-year low of 3.5% recorded between 2010 and 2012,” the lab said in its report.

There have also been recorded increases in drug abuse and overdoses since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, Quest’s data is unlikely to reflect these as most overdose victims were not subject to work-related testing in 2020.

“Organizations will need to consider the impact of Covid-19 not only on workplace safety but also as a health concern for their employees for some time to come,” warned Dr. Barry Sample, senior director of science and technology with Quest Diagnostics.

Also on rt.com Merry marijuana! Cannabis becomes the perfect Christmas gift in US Canada

As more states have been legalizing weed for adult use and medicinal purposes, more employers opt to either skip cannabis drug tests or allow positive results for marijuana to slide rather than reject job applicants.

Jobs requiring broad safety measures, including trucking, mass transit, and railroads still require mandatory testing. However, for service industry workers, a positive test for cannabis rarely means that they will lose out on a job.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/525141-workplace-testing-record-weed-use/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Russian economy to perform better than expected this year – World Bank

May 29, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The forecast for 2022 has not changed, with gross domestic product growth expected to be 3.2%.

According to the report, the baseline scenario assumes a gradual decline in Covid-19 infections.

The World Bank’s projection is better than that of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, which expects the nation’s GDP to grow 2.9% by the end of the year. 

Also on rt.com Putin outlines national priorities to restart economy raise living standards as Russia emerges from Covid crisis

“According to our forecast, the recovery in economic activity, which will be based on the growth of household consumption and investment growth, will be facilitated by the revival of the global economy, higher oil prices and soft monetary conditions in the domestic market in 2021,” the World Bank economists said.

Apurva Sanghi, lead economist for Russia with the World Bank, said that the country’s government has done a lot “to ensure macro-fiscal stability, which has led to an improvement in the fiscal position.”

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/524858-russian-economy-growth-world-bank/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Here’s One Thing Missing from President Biden’s Budget: Booming Growth

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

“We are a really big economy where really big forces are shaping what happens to G.D.P. growth,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and a former C.B.O. chief economist.

Even these moderate projections by the Biden administration imply that its policies will lift growth in economic activity by a few tenths of a percent each year over a decade. This is significant when comparing it with the growth that would be expected by simply looking at demographic factors and historical averages of productivity growth. The forecast is more inherently optimistic about Mr. Biden’s policies — and their potential to increase productivity and the size of the work force — than it might seem at first glance.

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    • A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what he’d like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress.
    • Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade.
    • Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the president’s desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years.
    • Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.
    • Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as America’s population ages.
    • Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
    • How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.

“Making the claim that your fiscal policies will boost growth by four-tenths of a point seems optimistic, but I can see how they could get there,” she said.

Jason Furman, the Obama administration’s former top economist, said: “I think there’s a problem that people have in their head — more extravagant ideas about what economic policy can do and how quickly it can do it. When you’re talking about productivity enhancement, you’re talking about compounding that becomes a big deal for a long time.”

In other words, the difference of a few tenths of a percent of G.D.P. growth might not mean much for a single year, but a gap of that size that persists for many years has a big impact on living standards.

Some of the administration’s policies, by design, would focus on the very long-term impact on the nation’s economic potential. For example, additional money for community colleges might actually depress the size of the labor force, and thus G.D.P., in the short run if more adults go back to school. But it would then increase those workers’ productive potential, and thus contribution to growth, for the decades that follow.

Conservatives, for their part, view the Biden agenda as likely to restrain growth, particularly once tax increases and new regulatory action go into effect. Mr. Mulligan, the Trump adviser, said he believed the Biden agenda would reduce the nation’s growth path by around 0.8 percentage points a year compared with its Trump-era trajectory. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, said he thought Mr. Biden’s policies could create faster growth in the short term but slower growth in the long run because of taxes and spending.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/upshot/president-biden-6-trillion-budget-plan.html

Filed Under: Economy News

Fox News Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

His prime antagonist, Mr. Gutfeld, started an 11 p.m. show last month that is meant to compete with late-night fare like “The Daily Show.” “Gutfeld!” has attracted a bigger viewership than the previous 11 p.m. offering, a newscast anchored by Shannon Bream that was shifted to midnight.

Fox News is still determining a permanent host for its new 7 p.m. opinion hour, which is now a reliable venue for pro-Trump commentary. It was where Tucker Carlson, the network’s 8 p.m. host, made his remarks about white replacement theory that prompted an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.

A pro-Trump drift at Fox News is not new: George Will, a traditional conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy, lost his contributor contract in 2017. Shepard Smith, a news anchor who was tough on Mr. Trump, left in 2019.

Some Fox News journalists, though, say privately that they are increasingly concerned with the network’s direction. Kristin Fisher, one of the network’s rising stars in Washington and a White House correspondent, left Fox News earlier this month despite the network’s effort to keep her. She had faced criticism from viewers in November after a segment in which she aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The longtime Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, resigned in January after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage, around the time that Mr. Stirewalt was fired. (Mr. Stirewalt was let go along with roughly 20 digital journalists at Fox News, which the network attributed to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”)

Mr. Sammon has effectively been replaced by Doug Rohrbeck, a producer with extensive news experience on Bret Baier’s newscast and Chris Wallace’s Sunday show. Still, some Fox journalists were surprised when the network hired Ms. Kupec, the former Barr spokeswoman, to work under Mr. Rohrbeck.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/business/media/trump-fox-news.html

Filed Under: Media Business

Nikole Hannah-Jones Weighs Legal Action Against U.N.C.

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The board of trustees at the University of North Carolina is under intensifying pressure to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine journalist who is scheduled to start as a professor at its journalism school in July.

Ms. Hannah-Jones, who helped create The Times’s 1619 Project, a series that has drawn criticism from conservatives because of its re-examination of slavery in American history, said she was considering legal action after the university’s board did not formally consider the matter of her tenure.

In a statement on Thursday, Ms. Hannah-Jones, who earned a master’s degree from the university’s journalism school in 2003, said she had retained legal counsel to respond to the board’s “failure to consider and approve my application for tenure — despite the recommendation of the faculty, dean, provost and chancellor.” She said she would be represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., Levy Ratner, P.C., and Ferguson Chambers Sumter, P.A.

“I had no desire to bring turmoil or a political firestorm to the university that I love,” Ms. Hannah-Jones said in a statement issued by the Legal Defense Fund, “but I am obligated to fight back against a wave of anti-democratic suppression that seeks to prohibit the free exchange of ideas, silence Black voices and chill free speech.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/business/media/Nikole-Hannah-Jones-UNC-tenure.html

Filed Under: Media Business

A Look at What’s Inside Biden’s $6 Trillion Plan

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The Army, Navy and Air Force are all investing in hypersonic weapons — missiles with conventional explosive warheads that can fly at many times the speed of sound and hit targets at ranges previously only reachable by cruise missiles or nuclear ballistic missiles. In the wake of the United States leaving the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in August 2019, the Army is continuing the development of artillery rockets capable of ranges previously banned by that agreement.

The Pentagon will be buying 48 more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for the Air Force, and 37 for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Military personnel will be receiving a 2.7 percent raise, and troop levels will remain relatively flat with slight reductions in all services save for the Air Force, which will increase its ranks by less than one percent.

— John Ismay

Mr. Biden has stressed the value of restoring American diplomacy and alliances, and his budget requests an increase of $6.3 billion for the State Department and international programs, more than 11 percent above current levels — and almost 50 percent more than the last budget proposed by Mr. Trump, who repeatedly targeted the State Department for cuts.

Prioritizing the threat of the coronavirus, the overall $63.6 billion request includes $1 billion in foreign aid to combat the spread of Covid-19, promote global health security programs and increase research to detect and stop future viral outbreaks.

Programs supporting refugees and conflict victims would also grow: The budget asks for $10 billion in humanitarian assistance for vulnerable people overseas. And it would offer $861 million in assistance to Central American nations to help address the root causes of migration from those countries to America’s southern border.

In response to growing cybersecurity threats and breaches, the budget asks $500 million for the Technology Modernization Fund, $110 million for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and $750 million “to respond to lessons learned from the SolarWinds incident,” a massive intrusion into federal computer networks attributed to Russia.

— Michael Crowley

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/us/politics/trillion-budget-plan-joe-biden.html

Filed Under: Economy News

‘Friends’ Reunion Is Censored in China, Cutting BTS and Lady Gaga

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

One missing clip was Lady Gaga’s duet with Lisa Kudrow on “Smelly Cat,” a jingle by Ms. Kudrow’s character, Phoebe. Also missing in the Chinese broadcasts were recollections from BTS members of watching the show when they were younger and an appearance by Mr. Bieber dressed as “Spudnik,” as David Schwimmer’s character did in an episode.

The special, which premiered on Thursday on HBO Max in the United States, brought the cast of the 1990s sitcom back together for reminiscences and performances. It was a major viewing event in China, where the show is beloved, in part by a millennial generation that grew up watching it on DVD and often used it to learn English. The sitcom was so popular that in major Chinese cities, it spawned look-alike fan cafes of the show’s coffee shop, Central Perk.

Some fan accounts on social media noted that the lengths of each version of the special varied, depending on which streaming site users watched it on, a likely indication that the online video platforms had cut the show on their own to avoid any potential grief with China’s watchful internet regulator.

The incident is the second reminder in a week of the power China wields over Hollywood stars and Beijing’s willingness to cut celebrities from its massive market if they diverge from its political dogma. This week, John Cena, the professional wrestler and a star of the newest “Fast and Furious” movie, apologized after he referred to Taiwan as a country in an interview. China considers the self-ruled island to be a part of its territory.

Faced with being cut off from business in China and its valuable box office, most celebrities have tried to stay away from sensitive subjects in China, like Tibet, Taiwan, the Xinjiang region and protests in Hong Kong.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/business/friends-reunion-china.html

Filed Under: Media Business

Still Here and Still Queer: The Gay Restaurant Endures

May 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment

Scott Frankel’s favorite memories of New York gay restaurants aren’t about food.

Universal Grill cranked “Dancing Queen” on birthdays. There was that incredibly hot Italian waiter at Food Bar. Florent was around the corner from a notorious sex club in the meatpacking district. Manatus was so gay, it had a sobriquet: Mana-tush.

Gay restaurants, said Mr. Frankel, the Tony-nominated composer of the musical “Grey Gardens,” “made you feel like you belonged.”

But all those places he so fondly remembers are long closed, as are Harvest, Orbit’s and several others listed in an article, headlined “Restaurants That Roll Out the Welcome Mat for Gay Diners,” that ran in this newspaper 27 years ago. It now reads like an obituary.

Restaurants fold all the time, perhaps nowhere more so than in New York, and perhaps never as much as during the Covid era. The pandemic hit the country’s urban gay restaurants especially hard, said Justin Nelson, the president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce. MeMe’s Diner, a popular queer restaurant in Brooklyn, permanently closed in November, citing shutdown measures and a lack of government support.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/dining/gay-restaurants.html

Filed Under: Small Business
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