Here is a look at the life of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft.
Birth date: March 24, 1956
Birth place: Detroit, Michigan
Birth name: Steven Anthony Ballmer
Father: Fred Ballmer, manager for Ford Motor Co.
Mother: Bea (Dworkin) Ballmer
Marriage: Connie Snyder (1990-present)
Children: three sons
Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1977, double major in Mathematics and Economics; Attended Stanford University Graduate School of Business, 1979-1980
Became friends with Bill Gates while at Harvard University.
Worked for Procter & Gamble as assistant product manager before Microsoft.
Met his wife, Connie Snyder, while both were working at Microsoft.
1980 – Begins his Microsoft career as a business manager and is the company’s 24th employee.
July 1998-February 2001 – President of Microsoft.
January 13, 2000 – Is named chief executive officer when Gates steps down to concentrate on philanthropy.
February 4, 2014 – Steps down as Microsoft CEO.
May 29, 2014 – Ballmer signs a binding agreement to buy the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion from the Sterling family trust.
August 12, 2014 – Ballmer becomes the official owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, according to Ballmer’s attorney, Adam Streisand. The negotiated $2 billion sale price is a record at the time for an NBA team.
August 19, 2014 –Steps down from the Microsoft board of directors in order to concentrate on the Clippers.
October 16, 2015 – Announces he has bought a 4% stake in Twitter during the past few months, becoming one of its largest shareholders.
2015 – The Ballmers found the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization focusing on civic activism and economic mobility.
June 4, 2016 – Along with Brandt Vaughan, founds USAFacts Institute. Ballmer later describes the work of the institute as creating a “10-K for the government,” according to a Bloomberg interview.
October 19, 2022 – The Ballmers announce they will invest $400 million with organizations focused on Black-owned businesses. The organizations are Fairview Capital, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, GCM Grosvenor and Ariel Alternatives’ Project Black.
March 7, 2024 – Announces the formation of an umbrella brand called Halo Sports and Entertainment that includes the LA Clippers, their G-League affiliate team, Intuit Dome and KIA Forum.
February 1, 2017 – Tillerson is confirmed by the Senate by a 56-43 vote. All of the Republicans voted for him while most of the Democrats voted against him. Later in the evening, Tillerson is sworn in as secretary of state.
December 7, 2018 – Tillerson calls Trump “undisciplined” during an interview with former CBS News’ Bob Schieffer. “When the President would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘Well Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates treaty,’” Tillerson says.
Children: A son born in 2009 and another child born in 2011
Education: University of Michigan, B.S.E., 1995; Stanford University, M.S., 1998
Google is a play on the word googol, the term for the numeral one followed by 100 zeroes.
Page has a vocal cord condition that he says is responsible for his hoarser, softer speaking voice. He also has Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a disorder that causes inflammation of the thyroid gland.
2010 – Kittyhawk, a flying car company, is founded by Sebastian Thrun with the backing of Page. On September 21, 2022, Kittyhawk announces that it plans to “wind down” operations.
April 4, 2011-October 2, 2015 – CEO of Google.
August 10, 2015 – Google announces a corporate restructuring, forming an umbrella company called Alphabet and naming Sundar Pichai as the new CEO to the core business of Google. Page will serve as Alphabet’s CEO and Brin will serve as president.
August 2021 – New Zealand government officials confirm that Page is a New Zealand resident following news that Page entered the country during border restrictions due to Covid-19. According to immigration officials, Page applied for residency in November 2020.
Recently, a photo of rice left me confused. The rice itself looked tasty enough—fluffy, well formed—but its oddly fleshy hue gave me the creeps. According to the scientists who’d developed it, each pink-tinged grain was seeded with muscle and fat cells from a cow, imparting a nutty, umami flavor.
In one sense, this “beef rice” was just another example of lab-grown meat, touted as a way to eat animals without the ethical and environmental impacts. Though not yet commercially available, the rice was developed by researchers in Korea as a nutrition-dense food that can be produced sustainably, at least more so than beef itself. Although it has a more brittle texture than normal rice, it can be cooked and served in the same way. Yet in another sense, this rice was entirely different. Lab-grown meat aims to replicate conventional meat in every dimension, including taste, nutrition, and appearance. Beef rice doesn’t even try.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Lab-grown meat, also widely known as cultivated meat, has long been heralded as the future of food. But so far, the goal of perfectly replicating meat as we know it—toothy, sinewy, and sometimes bloody—has proved impractical and expensive. Once-abundant funding has dried up, and this week, Florida moved toward becoming the first state to ban sales of cultivated meat. It seems unlikely that whole cuts of cultivated meat will be showing up on people’s plates anytime soon—but maybe something like beef rice could. The most promising future of lab-grown meat may not look like meat at all, at least as we’ve always known it.
The promise of cultivated meat is that you can have your steak and eat it too. Unlike the meatless offerings at your grocery store, cultivated meat is meat—just created without killing any animals. But the science just isn’t there yet. Companies have more or less figured out the first step, taking a sample of cells from a live animal or egg and propagating them in a tank filled with a nutrient-rich broth. Though not cheaply: By one estimate, creating a slurry of cultivated cells costs $17 a pound or more to produce.
The next step has proved prohibitively challenging: coaxing that sludge of cells to mature into different types—fat, muscle, connective tissue—and arranging them in a structure resembling a solid cut of meat. Usually, the cells need a three-dimensional platform to guide their growth, known as a scaffold. “It’s something that is very easy to get wrong and hard to get right,” Claire Bomkamp, a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit supporting meat alternatives, told me. So far, a few companies have served up proofs of concept: In June, the United States approved the sale of cultivated chicken from Upside Foods and Good Meat. However it is virtually impossible to come by now.
The basic science of lab-grown meat can be used for more than just succulent chicken breasts and medium-rare steaks. Cells grown in a tank function essentially like ground meat, imparting a meaty flavor and mouthfeel to whatever they are added to, behaving more like an ingredient or a seasoning than a food product. Hybrid meat products, made by mixing a small amount of cultivated-meat cells with other ingredients, are promising because they would be more cost-effective than entire lab-grown steaks or chicken breasts but meatier than purely plant-based meat.
Already, the start-up SciFi Foods is producing what has been described as a “fatty meat paste” that is intended to be mixed with plant-based ingredients to make burgers. Only small amounts are needed to make the burgers beefy; each costs less than $10 to make, according to the company—still considerably more than a normal beef patty, but the prices should come down over time. Maybe it sounds weird, but that’s not so different from imitation crab—which doesn’t contain much or any crab at all. A similar premise underlies the plant-based bacon laced with cultivated pork fat that I tried last year. Was it meat? I’m not sure. Did it taste like it? Absolutely.
Meat can be so much more than what we’ve always known. “We don’t have to make meat the same way that it’s always come out of an animal,” Bomkamp said. “We can be a little bit more expansive in what our definition of meat is.” Beef rice, which essentially uses rice as a miniature scaffold to grow cow cells, falls into this category. It isn’t particularly meaty—only 0.5 percent of each grain is cow—but the scientists who developed it say the proportion could change in future iterations. It’s framed as a way to feed people in “underdeveloped countries, during war, and in space.”
Eventually, cultivated meat could impart a whiff of meatiness to blander foods, creating new, meat-ish products in the process that are more sustainable than regular meat and more nutritious than plants. Beef rice is one option; meat grown on mushroom roots is in development. Even stranger foods are possible. Bomkamp envisions using the technology to make thin sheets of seafood—combining elements of salmon, tuna, and shrimp—to wrap around a rainbow roll of sushi. In this scenario, cultivated meat probably won’t save the planet from climate change and animal suffering. “It wouldn’t serve its original function of being a direct replacement for commercial meat,” Daniel Rosenfeld, who studies perceptions of cultivated meat at UCLA, told me. But at the very least, it could provide another dinner option.
Of course, it’s in the interest of the cultivated-meat industry to suggest that cultivated meat isn’t just outright doomed. No doubt some vegetarians would cringe at the thought, as would some dedicated carnivores. But considering how much meat Americans eat, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which cultivated cells satisfy people searching for a new kind of meat product. Imagine the salad you could make with chicken cells grown inside arugula, or bread baked with bacon-infused wheat. But should those prove too difficult to produce, I’d happily take a bowl of beef rice, in all its flesh-tinged glory.
Here is a look at the life of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL).
Birth date: April 19, 1957
Birth place: Aden, Yemen
Birth name: Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani
Father: Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of Reliance
Mother: Kokilaben Ambani
Marriage: Nita Ambani (1985-present)
Children: Akash and Isha (twins); Anant
Education: Institute of Chemical Technology at the University of Bombay (now Mumbai), bachelor’s in chemical engineering, 1979; Attended Stanford University, 1979-1980
Lifestyle and Wealth
Ambani is a strict vegetarian, teetotaler and an avid fan of Bollywood movies.
The Ambanis’ 27-story 400,000 square foot tower home in Mumbai is known as Antilia. It reportedly cost $1 billion to build and boasts a spa, three helipads and a 50-seat theater.
RIL is a Fortune Global 500 company and “the largest private sector corporation in India.”
1957 – After Dhirubhai Ambani returns from Yemen, he starts a small yarn trading firm in Mumbai that he subsequently turns into a thriving textile business.
1977 – The initial public offering of Reliance Textile Industries takes place.
1980 – Withdraws from his MBA program at Stanford University to help build a polyester yarn plant for Reliance in India.
1985 – The company’s name is changed from Reliance Textile Industries Ltd. to Reliance Industries Ltd.
July 6, 2002 – Dhirubhai Ambani passes away at the age of 69. He does not leave a will, sparking a bitter feud between Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother, Anil Ambani, for control of the vast Reliance business empire.
July 31, 2002 – At a board meeting, Mukesh is announced as chairman of the Reliance Group of Industries, and Anil is named vice-chairman and managing director.
November 2004 – A feud between the brothers is made public when the elder Ambani admits there are “ownership issues” at Reliance during an interview with CNBC TV18.
June 18, 2005 – Kokilaben Ambani announces that she has brokered a settlement between her sons to split the $23 billion Reliance Group. Mukesh will control the company’s main oil and petrochemicals assets and textiles along with Reliance Industries, while Anil assumes control of the newer ventures, including telecom and digital businesses. Though separate, both companies will retain the Reliance name.
2008 – Through Reliance Industries, Ambani and his wife, Nita, purchase the cricket team Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League for a reported $111 million.
2010 – The non-profit Reliance Foundation is established, “to provide impetus to various philanthropic initiatives of RIL.”
May 7, 2010 – India’s Supreme Court rules in favor of Mukesh Ambani’s RIL over Anil Ambani’s company, deciding that the natural gas supply price they agreed to in 2005 will have to be renegotiated within six weeks.
September 5, 2016 – Ambani launches a mobile network called Reliance Jio that offers customers six months of free high-speed internet. The move triggers a brutal price war, forcing some companies to eventually quit the mobile market altogether.
March-November 2020 –Ambani raises more than $27 billion in investments for Jio Platforms, including $5.7 billion from Facebook and $4.5 billion from Google. Since its inception in 2016, Jio has amassed around 400 million users and launched a streaming service, a video conferencing app, a fiber broadband network and digital payments.
February 25, 2021 – A car containing explosives and an alleged threat letter is located outside Ambani’s home in Mumbai. On March 14, 2021, Mumbai police officer Sachin Vaze is arrested for his assumed involvement in the case.
August 29, 2022 – While insisting he has no intention of retiring any time soon, Ambani lays out his plan for his children to take over his $220 billion RIL empire, telling shareholders in his Reliance Industries conglomerate that his three children are “first among equals” and are being “mentored on a daily basis by our senior leaders, including myself.”
February 28, 2024 – Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Disney have combined their digital streaming platforms and 100 TV channels in India to create a new media giant worth about $8.5 billion, the companies say in a statement. Ambani’s wife Nita Ambani will be the chairperson of the joint venture.
He has a twin brother, Theodore Dimon Jr., who is the founder of the Dimon Institute in New York.
1982-1985 – Assistant to American Express president Sandy Weill.
1996-1997 – Chairman and CEO of Smith Barney.
1997-1998 – Co-chairman and co-CEO of Salomon Smith Barney Holdings.
1998 – President of Citigroup. Dimon is forced out of the company after a falling-out with Weill.
2000-2004 – Chairman and CEO of Bank One Corporation.
2004 – Becomes president and chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. when it merges with Bank One Corporation.
December 31, 2005 – Assumes title of chief executive officer and president at JPMorgan Chase & Co., effective January 1, 2006.
December 31, 2006 – Named chairman of the board at JPMorgan Chase & Co., effective January 1, 2007.
2011 – Earned $23.1 million in compensation as chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., making him the best paid bank CEO.
May 10, 2012 – On a conference call, reveals that a trading portfolio that was designed to help JPMorgan Chase hedge its credit risk lost $2 billion and could lose $1 billion more.
May 15, 2012 – Apologizes to JPMorgan Chase shareholders at the annual meeting. Shareholders approve Dimon’s $23 million pay package and preliminary results show that only 40% support a proposal that calls for the appointment of an independent chairman.
May 17, 2012 – Senate Banking Committee announces Dimon has been invited to appear before the committee at hearings looking into the JP Morgan trading losses from a regulatory angle.
June 13, 2012 – Dimon testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee telling senators that while he did not approve the trades that led to the multi-billion dollar loss, he was aware of it.
June 19, 2012 – Dimon testifies before the House Financial Services Committee and says that he did not mislead shareholders.
July 13, 2012 – JPMorgan announces that the trading loss originally believed to be $2 billion is now approximately $5.8 billion. JPMorgan later discloses that the loss increased to $6.2 billion in the third quarter.
2012 – Due to the London Whale losses, Dimon’s pay package is reduced to $11.5 million, down from the previous year’s $23.1 million.
January 23, 2013 – Dimon apologizes to the shareholders by stating that the “whale” trade that caused the $6 billion loss was a “terrible mistake.”
May 21, 2013–Approximately 68% of JPMorgan Chase stockholders vote to keep Dimon as chairman and CEO at the annual meeting, but three directors on the risk committee receive a narrow majority of only between 51% and 59% of votes.
September 19, 2013 – JPMorgan Chase agrees to pay about $920 million in fines to US and UK regulators to settle charges related to the “London Whale” trading scandal.
November 19, 2013 – Officials announce JPMorgan Chase has agreed to a $13 billion settlement to resolve several investigations into the bank’s mortgage securities business. According to the Justice Department, the deal is the “the largest settlement with a single entity in American history.”
January 24, 2014 – Dimon gets a 74% pay hike for 2013, even though JPMorgan Chase & Co was forced to pay billions in fines and settlements last year. In a government filing, JPMorgan Chase says that Dimon will receive $18.5 million worth of restricted stock that will vest over the next three years as his 2013 bonus. That’s up from a $10 million bonus for 2012. His $1.5 million base salary remains unchanged.
July 1, 2014 – Dimon releases a memo saying that he has been diagnosed with a curable throat cancer. He will receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment over the next eight weeks at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, but will remain working while undergoing treatment.
March 5, 2020 – In a letter to employees, shareholders and clients, JPMorgan Chase’s co-COOs Gordon Smith and Daniel Pinto announce that Dimon is recovering after undergoing emergency heart surgery. Dimon required surgery after experiencing an “acute aortic dissection,” a tear in the inner lining of the aorta blood vessel.
On the anniversary of Putin’s aggression, however, uncertainty and irritation were undisguised in Kyiv. Ukrainians wanted to know why Western sanctions on Russia are not working, and why Moscow keeps getting components for its missiles from Western companies. Why Ukrainians have to keep asking for weapons; and why the U.S. is not pushing through the crucial new aid package for Ukraine.
“We are very grateful for the support of the United States, but unfortunately, when I turn to the Democrats for support, they tell me to go to the Republicans. And the Republicans say to go to the Democrats,” Ukrainian MP Oleksandra Ustinova said at a separate Kyiv conference on Saturday. “We are grateful for the European support, but we cannot win without the USA. We need the supply of anti-aircraft defenses and continued assistance.”
“Why don’t you give us what we ask for? Our priorities are air defense and missiles. We need long-range missiles,” Ustinova added.
U.S. Congressman Jim Costa explained to the conference that Americans, and even members of Congress, still need to be educated on how the war in Ukraine affects them and why a Ukrainian victory is in America’s best interests.
“I believe that we must, and that is why we will decide on an additional aid package for Ukraine. It is difficult and unattractive. But I believe that over the next few weeks, the US response will be a beacon to protect our security and democratic values,” Costa said.
The West is afraid of Russia, Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s security and defense council secretary, told the Saturday conference.
“The West does not know what to do with Russia and therefore it does not allow us to win. Russians constantly blackmail and intimidate the West. However, if you are afraid of a dog, it will bite you,” he said.
“And now you are losing not only to autocratic Russia but also to the rest of the autocracies in the world,” Danilov added.
Here’s a look at oil spill disasters. Spill estimates vary by source.
1. January 1991 – During the Gulf War, Iraqi forces intentionally release 252-336 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf.
2. April 20, 2010 – An explosion occurs on board the BP-contracted Transocean Ltd. Deepwater Horizon oil rig, releasing approximately 168 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
3. June 3, 1979 – Ixtoc 1, an exploratory well, blows out, spilling 140 million gallons of oil into the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico.
4. March 2, 1992 – A Fergana Valley oil well in Uzbekistan blows out, spilling 88 million gallons of oil.
5. February 1983 – An oil well in the Nowruz Oil Field in Iran begins spilling oil. One month later, an Iraqi air attack increases the amount of oil spilled to approximately 80 million gallons of oil.
6. August 6, 1983 – The Castillo de Bellver, a Spanish tanker, catches fire near Cape Town, South Africa, spilling more than 78 million gallons of oil.
7. March 16, 1978 – The Amoco Cadiz tanker runs aground near Portsall, France, spilling more than 68 million gallons of oil.
8. November 10, 1988 – The tanker Odyssey breaks apart during a storm, spilling 43.1 million gallons of oil northeast of Newfoundland, Canada.
9. July 19, 1979 – The Atlantic Empress and the Aegean Captain tankers collide near Trinidad and Tobago. The Atlantic Empress spills 42.7 million gallons of oil. On August 2, the Atlantic Empress spills an additional 41.5 million gallons near Barbados while being towed away.
10. August 1, 1980 – Production Well D-103 blows out, spilling 42 million gallons of oil southeast of Tripoli, Libya.
Union Oil Company January 28, 1969 – Inadequate casing leads to the blowout of a Union Oil well 3,500 feet deep about five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. About three million gallons of oil gush from the leak until it can be sealed 11 days later, covering 800 square miles of ocean and 35 miles of coastline and killing thousands of birds, fish and other wildlife.
The disaster is largely considered to be one of the main impetuses behind the environmental movement and stricter government regulation, including President Richard Nixon’s signing of the National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. It also inspired Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to found the first Earth Day.
Exxon Valdez March 24, 1989 – The Exxon Valdez runs aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling more than 11 million gallons of oil.
March 22, 1990 – Captain Joseph Hazelwood is acquitted of all but one misdemeanor, negligent discharge of oil. Hazelwood is later sentenced to 1,000 hours of cleaning around Prince William Sound and is fined $50,000.
July 25, 1990 – At an administrative hearing, the Coast Guard dismisses charges of misconduct and intoxication against Captain Joseph Hazelwood, but suspends his captain’s license.
October 8, 1991 – A federal judge approves a settlement in which Exxon and its shipping subsidiary will pay $900 million in civil payments and $125 million in fines and restitution. Exxon says it has already spent more than $2 billion on cleanup.
September 16, 1994 – A federal jury orders Exxon to pay $5 billion in punitive damages to fishermen, businesses and property owners affected by the oil spill.
November 7, 2001 – The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rules that the $5 billion award for punitive damages is excessive and must be cut.
December 6, 2002 – US District Judge H. Russel Holland reduces the award to $4 billion.
December 22, 2006 – The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reduces the award to $2.5 billion.
June 25, 2008 – The US Supreme Court cuts the $2.5 billion punitive damages award to $507.5 million.
June 15, 2009 – The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals orders Exxon to pay $470 million in interest on the $507.5 million award.
BP Gulf Oil Spill April 20, 2010 – An explosion occurs aboard BP-contracted Transocean Ltd Deepwater Horizon oil rig stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. Of the 126 workers aboard the oil rig, 11 are killed.
April 22, 2010 – The Deepwater Horizon oil rig sinks. An oil slick appears in the water. It is not known if the leak is from the rig or from the underwater well to which it was connected.
April 24, 2010 – The US Coast Guard reports that the underwater well is leaking an estimated 42,000 gallons of oil a day.
April 28, 2010 – The Coast Guard increases its spill estimate to 210,000 gallons of oil a day.
May 2, 2010 –President Barack Obama tours oil spill affected areas and surveys efforts to contain the spill.
May 4, 2010 – The edges of the oil slick reach the Louisiana shore.
May 26, 2010 – BP starts a procedure known as “top kill,” which attempts to pump enough mud down into the well to eliminate the upward pressure from the oil and clear the way for a cement cap to be put into place. The attempt fails.
June 16, 2010 – BP agrees to create a $20 billion fund to help victims affected by the oil spill.
July 10, 2010 – BP removes an old containment cap from the well so a new one can be installed. While the cap is removed, oil flows freely. The new cap is finished being installed on July 12.
August 3, 2010 – BP begins the operation “static kill” to permanently seal the oil well.
August 5, 2010 – BP finishes the “static kill” procedure. Retired Adm. Thad Allen says this will “virtually assure us there’s no chance of oil leaking into the environment.”
January 11, 2011 – The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling releases their full report stating that the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig launched the worst oil spill in US history, 168 million gallons (or about 4 million barrels).
September 14, 2011 – The final federal report is issued on the Gulf oil spill. It names BP, Transocean and Halliburton as sharing responsibility for the deadly explosion that resulted in the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
January 26, 2012 – A federal judge in New Orleans rules that Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, is not liable for compensatory damages sought by third parties.
January 31, 2012 – A federal judge in New Orleans rules that Halliburton is not liable for some of the compensatory damages sought by third parties.
March 2, 2012 – BP announces it has reached a settlement with attorneys representing thousands of businesses and individuals affected by the 2010 oil spill.
April 18, 2012 – Court documents are filed revealing the March 2, 2010 settlement BP reached with attorneys representing thousands of businesses and individuals affected by the oil spill. A federal judge must give preliminary approval of the pact, which BP estimates will total about $7.8 billion.
April 24, 2012 – The first criminal charges are filed in connection with the oil spill. Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP, is charged with destroying 200-plus text messages about the oil spill, including one concluding that the undersea gusher was far worse than reported at the time.
November 15, 2012 – Attorney General Eric Holder announces that BP will plead guilty to manslaughter charges related to the rig explosion and will pay $4.5 billion in government penalties. Separate from the corporate manslaughter charges, a federal grand jury returns an indictment charging the two highest-ranking BP supervisors on board the Deepwater Horizon on the day of the explosion with 23 criminal counts.
February 25, 2013 – The trial to determine how much BP owes in civil damages under the Clean Water Act begins. The first phase of the trial will focus on the cause of the blowout.
September 19, 2013 – In federal court in New Orleans, Halliburton pleads guilty to destroying test results that investigators had sought as evidence. The company is given the maximum fine of $200,000 on the charge.
September 30, 2013 – The second phase of the civil trial over the oil spill begins. This part focuses on how much oil was spilled and if BP was negligent because of its lack of preparedness.
December 18, 2013 – Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP, is acquitted on one of two charges of obstruction of justice for deleting text messages about the oil spill.
September 4, 2014 – A federal judge in Louisiana finds that BP was “grossly negligent” in the run-up to the 2010 disaster, which could quadruple the penalties it would have to pay under the Clean Water Act to more than $18 billion. Judge Carl Barbier of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana also apportions blame for the spill, with “reckless” BP getting two thirds of it. He says the other two main defendants in the more than 3,000 lawsuits filed in the spill’s wake, Transocean and Halliburton, were found to be “negligent.”
January 15, 2015 – After weighing multiple estimates, the court determines that 4.0 million barrels of oil were released from the reservoir. 810,000 barrels of oil were collected without contacting “ambient sea water” during the spill response, making BP responsible for a maximum of 3.19 million barrels.
January 20-February 2, 2015 – The final phase of the trial to determine BP’s fines takes place. The ruling is expected in a few months.
September 28, 2015 – In a Louisiana federal court, the city of Mobile, Alabama, files an amended complaint for punitive damages against Transocean Ltd., Triton Asset Leasing, and Halliburton Energy Services, Inc., stating that “Mobile, its government, businesses, residents, properties, eco-systems and tourists/tourism have suffered and continue to suffer injury, damage and/or losses as a result of the oil spill disaster.” As of April 20, 2015, Mobile estimated the losses had exceeded $31,240,000.
November 6, 2015 – The remaining obstruction of justice charge against Kurt Mix is dismissed as he agrees to plead guilty to the lesser charge of “intentionally causing damage without authorization to a protected computer,” relating to deletion of a text message, a misdemeanor. He receives six months’ probation and must complete 60 hours of community service.
Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.
In Arnold Monto’s ideal vision of this fall, the United States’ flu vaccines would be slated for some serious change—booting a major ingredient that they’ve consistently included since 2013. The component isn’t dangerous. And it made sense to use before. But to include it again now, Monto, an epidemiologist and a flu expert at the University of Michigan, told me, would mean vaccinating people “against something that doesn’t exist.”
That probably nonexistent something is Yamagata, a lineage of influenza B viruses that hasn’t been spotted by global surveyors since March of 2020, shortly after COVID mitigations plummeted flu transmission to record lows. “And it isn’t for lack of looking,” Kanta Subbarao, the director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, told me. In a last-ditch attempt to find the missing pathogen, a worldwide network of monitoring centers tested nearly 16,000 influenza B virus samples collected from February to August of last year. Not a single one of them came up Yamagata. “The consensus is that it’s gone,” Cheryl Cohen, the head of South Africa’s Centre for Respiratory Diseases and Meningitis, told me. Officially removing an ingredient from flu vaccines will codify that sentiment, effectively publishing Yamagata’s obituary.
Last year around this time, Subbarao told me, the WHO was already gently suggesting that the world might want to drop Yamagata from vaccines; by September, the agency had grown insistent, describing the ingredient as “no longer warranted” and urging that “every effort should be made to exclude it as soon as possible.” The following month, an advisory committee to the FDA unanimously voted to speedily adopt that same change.
But the switch from a four-flu vaccine to a trivalent one, guarding against only three, isn’t as simple as ordering the usual, please, just hold the Yams. Trivalent vaccines require their own licensure, which some manufacturers may have allowed to lapse—or never had at all; manufacturers must also adhere to the regulatory pipelines specific to each country. “People think, ‘They change the strains every season; this should be no big deal,’” Paula Barbosa, the associate director of vaccine policy at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, which represents vaccine manufacturers, told me. This situation is not so simple: “They need to change their whole manufacturing process.” At the FDA advisory-committee meeting in October, an industry representative cautioned that companies might need until the 2025–26 season to fully transition to trivalents in the Northern Hemisphere, a timeline that Barbosa, too, considers realistic. The South could take until 2026.
In the U.S., though, where experts such as Monto have been pushing for expedient change, a Yamagata-less flu vaccine could be coming this fall. When I reached out to CSL Seqirus and GSK, two of the world’s major flu-vaccine producers, a spokesperson from each company told me that their firm was on track to deliver trivalent vaccines to the U.S. in time for the 2024–25 flu season, should the relevant agencies recommend and request it. (The WHO’s annual meeting to recommend the composition of the Northern Hemisphere’s flu vaccine isn’t scheduled until the end of February; an FDA advisory meeting on the same topic will follow shortly after.) Sanofi, another vaccine producer, was less definitive, but told me that, with sufficient notice from health authorities, its plans would allow for trivalent vaccines this year, “if there is a definitive switch.” AstraZeneca, which makes the FluMist nasal-spray vaccine, told me that it was “engaging with the appropriate regulatory bodies” to coordinate the shift to a trivalent vaccine “as soon as possible.”
Quadrivalent flu vaccines are relatively new. Just over a decade ago, the world relied on immunizations that included two flu A strains (H1N1 and H3N2), plus one B: either Victoria or Yamagata, whichever scientists predicted might be the bigger scourge in the coming flu season. “Sometimes the world got it wrong,” Mark Jit, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. To hedge their bets, experts eventually began to recommend simply sticking in both. But quadrivalent vaccines typically cost more to manufacture, experts told me. And although several countries, including the U.S., quickly transitioned to the heftier shots, many nations—especially those with fewer resources—never did.
Now “the extra component is a waste,” Vijay Dhanasekaran, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. It’s pointless to ask people’s bodies to mount a defense against an enemy that will never attack. Trimming Yamagata out of flu-vaccine recipes should also make them cheaper, Dhanasekaran said, which could improve global access. Plus, continuing to manufacture Yamagata-focused vaccines raises the small but serious risk that the lineage could be inadvertently reintroduced to the world, Subbarao told me, as companies grow gobs of the virus for their production pipeline. (Some vaccines, such as FluMist, also immunize people with live-but-weakened versions of flu viruses.)
Some of the researchers I spoke with for this article weren’t ready to rule out the possibility—however slim—that Yamagata is still biding its time somewhere. (Victoria, a close cousin of Yamagata, and the other B lineage that pesters people, once went mostly quiet for about a decade, before roaring back in the early aughts.) But most experts, at this point, are quite convinced. The past couple of flu seasons have been heavy enough to offer even a rather rare lineage the chance to reappear. “If it had been circulating in any community, I’m pretty sure that global influenza surveillance would have detected it by now,” Dhanasekaran said. Plus, even before the pandemic began, Yamagata had been the wimpiest of the flu bunch, Jit told me: slow to evolve, crummy at transmitting, and already dipping in prevalence. When responses to the pandemic starved all flu viruses of hosts, he said, this lineage was the likeliest to be lost.
Eventually, companies may return to including four types of flu in their products, swapping in, say, another strain of H3N2, the most severe and fastest-evolving of the bunch—a change that Subbarao and Monto both told me might actually be preferable. But incorporating a second H3N2 is even more of a headache than returning to a trivalent vaccine: Researchers would likely first need to run clinical trials, experts told me, to ensure that the new components played nicely with each other and conferred additional benefits.
For the moment, a slimmed-down vaccine is the quickest way to keep up with the flu’s current antics. And in doing so, those vaccines will also reflect the strange reality of this new, COVID-modified world. “A whole lineage of flu has probably been eliminated through changes in human behavior,” Jit told me. Humanity may not have intended it. But our actions against one virus may have forever altered the course of another.
KRAKÓW, Poland — Elon Musk has upped his war on woke by saying that diversity-oriented hiring policies are “fundamentally antisemitic” and discriminatory, shortly after a private visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.
The controversial tech billionaire was speaking at a European Jewish Association (EJA) conference in the Polish city of Kraków, amid rising criticism that his social media platform — X, formerly Twitter — has allowed rampant hate speech to spread. Musk himself sparked outrage in November when he publicly agreed with an antisemitic tweet claiming that Jewish communities have been “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
While his trip to Poland allowed him to push back at the charges of antisemitism, he also seized the opportunity to turn his fire against one of his favorite bugbears: “Diversity, equity and inclusion” policies.
“Always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book. That’s never a good sign,” Musk told American right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, who joined him on stage. “Sure, diversity, equity and inclusion all sound like nice words, but what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation and it’s against merit and thus I think it’s fundamentally antisemitic.”
Musk, who confirmed that he does indeed write all of his own posts on X, has been vocal about his feelings toward diversity, equity and inclusion, including by claiming, without evidence, that diverse hiring initiatives at Boeing and United Airlines have made air travel less safe.
His comments feed into a broader debate on inclusive hiring policies, most especially on U.S. college campuses. The resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay over a plagiarism scandal was seized upon by Republicans, who claim top schools are examples of American institutions in the throes of a leftist political transformation. Critics argue this radical leftist culture on campuses is stoking antisemitism, and top university leaders hit heavy flak last month for their poor handling of a congressional hearing on the bullying of Jews.
On Monday, Shapiro went easy on Musk, steering the conversation towards meritocracy rather than Musk’s increasingly controversial social media outbursts and allowing the Tesla boss to continue his attacks on a subject he has made a great deal of mileage out of.
“I think we need return to … a focus on merit and it doesn’t matter whether you’re man, woman, what race you are, what beliefs you have, what matters is how good you are at your job or what are your skills,” Musk said.
In defense of X
At the EJA conference — a daylong summit on the rise of antisemitism in the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas — Musk also defended X against accusations of antisemitism and hate speech, saying freedom of speech must be protected even when controversial.According to the billionaire, who cited audits without offering further details, X has “the least amount of antisemitism” among all social media platforms, adding that TikTok has “five times the amount of antisemitism” that X has.
“Relentless pursuit of the truth is the goal with X,” Musk said. “And allowing people to say what they want to say even if it’s controversial, provided it does not break the law, is the right thing to do.”
Musk has faced widespread criticism over the rise of disinformation and hate content since he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022, criticism that intensified in the weeks following the escalation of the Israel-Hamas war last October.
The reported spread of fake and misleading content on the conflict led the EU to launch an investigation into X. And things got worse for Musk after progressive watchdog group Media Matters published a report alleging that X had run ads for major companies next to neo-Nazi posts.
The Media Matters report and Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic post sparked a backlash from several public figures and culminated in an advertiser exodus, as multiple companies pulled their ads from the site, including giants such as Apple, IBM, Disney and Coca-Cola. According to a New York Times report, this could result in a loss of up to $75 million for X.
Musk has since apologized for the antisemitic post — admitting he should not have replied to it — and then traveled to Israel to meet with President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in what could be seen as an apology tour.
Speaking about his visit to Israel, Musk said indoctrinated Hamas fighters have to be “killed or imprisoned” to prevent them from killing more Israelis. And the next step is fighting further indoctrination in Gaza, he added.
“The indoctrination of hate into kids in Gaza has to stop,” Musk said. “I understand the need to invade Gaza, and unfortunately some innocent people will die, there’s no way around it, but the most important thing to ensure is that afterwards the indoctrination … stops.”
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks have killed over 25,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 60,000 since the attack by Hamas on October 7, in which Israeli officials say the militant group killed over 1,200 nationals and foreigners and took 240 hostages.
Musk said the West has shifted to a mentality that equates smaller, weaker groups with goodness.
“We need to stop the principle that the normally weaker party is always right, this is simply not true,” Musk said. “If you are oppressed or the weaker party it doesn’t mean you’re right.”
Musk — who joked multiple times that he considers himself “Jew by aspiration” and “by association” — was supposed to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp on Tuesday alongside other speakers and political leaders from the EJA conference, but he instead took a private tour of the site with his young son.
The Auschwitz Museum itself was among one of the entities that had called out Musk for failing to contain antisemitic content.
Every portfolio should have some “forever” stocks — companies so good that they’re worth holding for a very, very long time.
They’re like keepsakes — oftentimes passed down from parent to child. They can be the bedrock of true generational wealth. So, what types of stocks fit that bill? Well, let’s have a look at three that I consider forever stocks.
Image source: Getty Images.
Amazon
Tech giant Amazon(NASDAQ: AMZN) is a mainstay of my investment portfolio and will remain so for many years to come, for three key reasons.
Relentless focus on the customer: This was the creed of founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, and it still permeates the company today. Look no further than the company’s mission statement: “Amazon’s mission is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
Innovation: Amazon has developed numerous innovations, ranging from its sprawling fulfillment network to its vast array of data centers that make it the global leader in cloud computing services.
Delivering shareholder value: The company constantly reevaluates its finances and workforce, with a focus on balancing shareholder returns and reinvestment in the business. Over the last 10 years, Amazon shares have returned 659%, meaning a $10,000 investment in early 2014 would be worth nearly $76,000 as of this writing.
In short, Amazon is a great company. What’s more, with analysts expecting it to grow sales by 11% this year as its long-term investments in regional distribution combine with a rebound in enterprise cloud spending.
Coca-Cola
Next up is Coca-Cola(NYSE: KO), the legendary maker of iconic beverage brands such as Coke, Sprite, Powerade, Fanta, Schweppes, and Minute Maid, among many others.
The reason I intend to own Coca-Cola stock forever is that the company delivers consistent earnings growth. Over the last five years, Coca-Cola has grown its net income from $6.7 billion to $10.8 billion. Quarterly earnings per share (EPS) have increased at an average rate of 19%. Moreover, free cash flow — the lifeblood of a mature, dividend-paying company — has grown from $6.0 billion to more than $10.2 billion.
That, in turn, has allowed Coca-Cola to increase its dividend consistently. In fact, the company has raised its dividend each year, dating back 62 years — representing one of the longest such streaks on Wall Street.
And what a dividend it is! The company pays $1.84 per share — good for a dividend yield of 3.1% at the current share price. That’s more than twice the 1.4% average yield of the S&P 500 index.
To see how important those dividend payments are over the long term, consider this chart which shows the growth of a $10,000 investment in Coca-Cola over the last 30 years.
KO Chart
The company’s steadily growing payouts make an enormous difference, boosting the total return of the investment from $56,000 to more than $116,000 (with dividend reinvestment).
In short, Coca-Cola remains a solid stock that investors can rely on for the very long-term — a nearly perfect forever stock.
Nvidia
Finally, there’s Nvidia(NASDAQ: NVDA). The reason to own Nvidia forever is simple: Technology is the future.
Never has this been more obvious than right now. Whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, advanced robotics, or gene editing, it’s clear that the next wave of technological breakthroughs will have one thing in common: They will require tremendous amounts of computing power.
That means demand for advanced semiconductors — the type used in the supercomputers and server farms of today and tomorrow — will continue to grow massively in the years to come.
Nvidia, which many experts believe makes the best and fastest chips for high-performance computing, stands to benefit enormously from the rise of AI and other cutting-edge tech innovations.
That’s why Wall Street analysts are raising their forecasts for its future sales at a breakneck pace. The consensus among analysts is that Nvidia will report over $92 billion in revenue for its fiscal 2025. Over the last 12 months, it reported $45 billion in revenues.
Nevertheless, Nvidia isn’t a perfect forever stock for everyone. Income-seeking investors will be better off looking elsewhere, as will value-oriented investors and those who lack the stomach for stocks with high volatility.
However, for long-term investors who a ready to hold on through the inevitable volatility, Nvidia is a forever stock with a high ceiling, and one worth seriously considering.
Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now?
Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Stock Advisor provides investors with an easy-to-follow blueprint for success, including guidance on building a portfolio, regular updates from analysts, and two new stock picks each month. The Stock Advisor service has more than tripled the return of S&P 500 since 2002*.
John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Jake Lerch has positions in Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2024 $47.50 calls on Coca-Cola. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Western warplanes and guided missiles roared through the skies over Yemen in the early hours of Friday in a dramatic response to the worsening crisis engulfing the region, where the U.S. and its allies are facing a direct confrontation with Iranian-backed militants.
The strikes against Houthi fighters are a response to weeks of fighting in the Red Sea, where the group has attempted to attack or hijack dozens of civilian cargo ships and tankers in what it calls retribution for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Washington launched the massive aerial bombardment of the group’s military stores and drone launch sites in partnership with British forces, and with the support of a growing coalition that includes Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, South Korea and Bahrain.
Tensions between Tehran and the West have boiled over in the weeks since its ally, Hamas, launched its October 7 attack on Israel, while Hezbollah, the military group that controls much of southern Lebanon, has stepped up rocket launches across the border. Along with Hamas and Hezbollah, the Houthis form part of the Iranian-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ opposed to both the U.S. and Israel.
Now, the prospect of a full-blown conflict in one of the most politically fragile and strategically important parts of the world is spooking security analysts and energy markets alike.
Escalation fears
Houthi leaders responded to the strikes, which saw American and British forces hit more than 60 targets in 16 locations, with characteristic bravado. They warned the U.S. and U.K. will “have to prepare to pay a heavy price and bear all the dire consequences” for what they called a “blatant aggression.”
“We will confront America, kneel it down, and burn its battleships and all its bases and everyone who cooperates with it, no matter what the cost,” threatened Abdulsalam Jahaf, a member of the group’s security council.
However, following the overnight operation, Camille Lons, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said there may now be “a period of calm because it may take Iran some time to replenish the Houthis stocks” before they are able to resume high-intensity attacks on Red Sea shipping. But, she cautioned, their motivation to continue to target shipping will likely be unaltered.
The Western strikes are “unlikely to immediately halt Houthi aggression,” agreed Jonathan Panikoff, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for the Near East. “That will almost certainly mean having to continue to respond to Houthi strikes, and potentially with increasing aggression.”
“The Houthis view themselves as having little to lose, emboldened militarily by Iranian provisions of support and confident the U.S. will not entertain a ground war,” he said.
Iran also upped the ante earlier this week by boarding and commandeering a Greek-operated oil tanker that was loaded with Iraqi crude destined for Turkey, intercepting it as it transited the Strait of Hormuz. The vessel, the St. Nikolas, was previously apprehended for violating sanctions on Iranian oil and its cargo was confiscated and sold off by the U.S. Treasury Department. Its Greek captain and crew of 18 Filipino nationals are now in Iranian custody, with the incident marking a sharp escalation in the threats facing maritime traffic.
Israeli connection
Washington and London are striving to distinguish their bid to deter the Houthis in the Red Sea from the war in Gaza, fearful that merging the two will hand Tehran a propaganda advantage in the Middle East. The Houthis and Iran are keen to accomplish the reverse.
The Houthi leadership claims its attacks on maritime traffic are aimed at pressuring Israel to halt its bombing of the Gaza Strip and it insists it is only targeting commercial vessels linked to Israel or destined to dock at the Israeli port of Eilat, a point contested by Western powers.
“The Houthis claim that their attacks on military and civilian vessels are somehow tied to the ongoing conflict in Gaza — that is completely baseless and illegitimate. The Houthis also claim to be targeting specifically Israeli-owned ships or ships bound for Israel. That is simply not true, they are firing indiscriminately on vessels with global ties,” a senior U.S. official briefing reporters in Washington said Friday.
Wider Near East crisis
The Red Sea isn’t the only hotspot where American and European forces and their allies are facing off against Iran and its partners.
In November, U.S. F-15 fighter jets hit a weapons storage facility in eastern Syria that the Pentagon says was used by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Shia militants it supports in the war-torn country. The response came after dozens of American troops were reportedly injured in attacks in Iraq and Syria linked back to Tehran.
Israel’s war with Hamas has also risked spreading, after a blast killed one of the militant group’s commanders in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, earlier in January. Hezbollah vowed a swift response and tensions have soared along the border between the two countries, with Israeli civilians evacuated from their homes in towns and villages close to the frontier.
All of that contributes to an increasingly volatile environment that has neighboring countries worried, said Christian Koch, director at the Saudi Arabia-based Gulf Research Center.
“There’s a lot at stake at the moment and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and others are extremely worried about further escalation and then being subject to retaliation,” he said. “Now, the danger of regional escalation has been heightened further, which could mean that Iran will get further involved in the conflict, and this is a dangerous spiral downwards.”
While long-planned efforts to normalize ties between the Saudis and Israel collapsed in the wake of the October 7 attack and the subsequent military response, Riyadh has pushed forward with a policy of de-escalation with the Houthis after a decade of violent conflict, and sought an almost unprecedented rapprochement with Iran.
“Saudi Arabia has had one objective, which is to prevent this from escalating into a wider regional war,” said Tobias Borck, an expert on Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute. “It has attempted over the last few years to bring its intervention in the war in Yemen to a close, including through negotiations with the Houthis and actually from all we know from the outside, [they] are reasonably close to an agreement.”
The Western coalition is therefore a source of anxiety, rather than relief, for Gulf States.
“Saudi Arabia and UAE are staying out of this coalition because mainly they don’t want to have the Houthis attack them as they had been for years and years with cruise missiles,” said retired U.S. General Mark Kimmitt, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. However, American or European boots on the ground are unlikely to be necessary, he added, because “our capabilities these days to find, fix and attack even mobile missile launchers is pretty well refined.”
Far-reaching consequences
At the intersection of Europe and Asia, the Red Sea is a vital thoroughfare for energy and international trade. Maritime traffic through the region has already dropped by 20 percent, Rear Admiral Emmanuel Slaars, the joint commander of French forces in the region, told reporters on Thursday.
According to data published this week by the German IfW Kiel institute, global trade fell by 1.3 percent from November to December, with the Houthi attacks likely to have been a contributing factor.
The volume of containers in the Red Sea also plummeted and is currently almost 70 percent below usual, the institute said. In December, that caused freight costs and transportation time to rise and imports and exports from the EU to be “significantly lower” than in November.
In one indication of the impact on industrial supply chains, U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla said Friday it would shut its factory in Germany for two weeks.
Around 12 percent of the world’s oil and 8 percent of its gas normally flow through the waterway, as well as hundreds of cargo ships. Oil prices climbed more than 2.5 percent following the strikes, fueling market concerns of the impact a wider conflict could have on oil supplies from the region, especially those being shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, linking the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the world’s most important oil chokepoint.
The Houthi attacks on the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest waterways, have already caused major shipping companies, including oil giant BP, to halt shipments through the Red Sea, opting for a lengthy detour around the Cape of Good Hope instead.
According to Borck, the impact on energy prices has been limited so far but will depend on what happens next.
“We need to look for two actors’ actions here. One is the Houthis, how they respond, and the other one is, of course, looking at how Iran responds,” he said. While Tehran has the “nuclear option” of closing the Strait of Hormuz altogether, it’s unlikely to do so at this stage.
“I don’t think the Strait of Hormuz is next. I think there would be quite a few steps on the escalation ladder first,” he added.
But Simone Tagliapietra, an energy expert at Brussels’ Bruegel think tank, warned that a growing confrontation with Iran could lead to tougher enforcement of sanctions on its oil exports. The West has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s increasing sales to China in the wake of the war in Ukraine, which has relieved some pressure on global energy markets.
A crackdown, he believes, “could see global oil prices rising substantially, pushing inflation higher and further complicating the efforts of central banks to bring it under control.”
However, Saudi Arabia and the UAE could help compensate for such a move by ramping up their own production — provided they’re willing to risk the ire of Iran.
Gabriel Gavin reported from Yerevan, Armenia. Antonia Zimmermann from Brussels and Jamie Dettmer from Tel-Aviv.
Laura Kayali contributed reporting from Paris.
[ad_2]
Gabriel Gavin, Antonia Zimmermann and Jamie Dettmer
Verizon mobile phone customers could share a proposed $100 million class action settlement over monthly fees that people suing the communications company claim were unfairly charged and improperly disclosed. But those who want to claim their share of that money need to act by April 15.
Continue reading this article with a Barron’s subscription.
LONDON — The U.K. already has some of the most far-reaching surveillance laws in the democratic world. Now it’s rushing to beef them up even further — and tech firms are spooked.
Britain’s government wants to build on its landmark Investigatory Powers Act, a controversial piece of legislation dubbed the “snooper’s charter” by critics when introduced back in 2016.
That law — introduced in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass state surveillance — attempted to introduce more accountability into the U.K. intelligence agencies’ sprawling snooping regime by formalizing wide-ranging powers to intercept emails, texts, web history and more.
Now new legislation is triggering a fresh outcry among both industry execs and privacy campaigners — who say it could hobble efforts to protect user privacy.
Industry body TechUK has written to Home Secretary James Cleverly airing its complaints. The group’s letter warns that the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill threatens technological innovation; undermines the sovereignty of other nations; and could unleash dire consequences if it sets off a domino effect overseas.
Tech companies are most concerned by a change that would allow the Home Office to issue notices preventing them from making technical updates that might impede information-sharing with U.K. intelligence agencies.
TechUK argues that, combined with pre-existing powers, the changes would “grant a de facto power to indefinitely veto companies from making changes to their products and services offered in the U.K.”
“Using this power, the government could prevent the implementation of new end-to-end encryption, or stop developers from patching vulnerabilities in code that the government or their partners would like to exploit,” Meredith Whittaker, president of secure messaging app Signal, told POLITICO when the bill was first unveiled.
The Home Office, Britain’s interior ministry, remains adamant it’s a technical and procedural set of tweaks. Home Office Minister Andrew Sharpe said at the bill’s committee stage in the House of Lords that the law was “not going to … ban end-to-end encryption or introduce a veto power for the secretary of state … contrary to what some are incorrectly speculating.”
“We have always been clear that we support technological innovation and private and secure communications technologies, including end-to-end encryption,” a government spokesperson said. “But this cannot come at a cost to public safety, and it is critical that decisions are taken by those with democratic accountability.”
Encryption threat
Despite the protestations of industry and campaigners, the British government is whisking the bill through parliament at breakneck speed — risking the ire of lawmakers.
Ministers have so far blocked efforts’ to refine the bill in the House of Lords, the U.K.’s upper chamber. But there are more opportunities to contest the legislation coming and industry is already making appeals to MPs in the hopes of paring it back in the House of Commons.
Some companies including Apple have threatened to pull their services from the UK if asked to undermine encryption under Britain’s laws | Feline Lim/Getty Images
“We stress the critical need for adequate time to thoroughly discuss these changes, highlighting that rigorous scrutiny is essential given the international precedent they will set and their very serious impacts,” the TechUK letter states.
The backdrop to the row is the fraught debate on encryption that unfolded during the passage of the earlier Online Safety Act, which companies and campaigners argued could compel companies to break encryption in the name of online safety.
The bill ultimately said that the government can call for the implementation of this technology when it’s “technically feasible” and simultaneously preserves privacy.
Apple, WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to pull their services from the U.K. if asked to undermine encryption under U.K. laws.
Since the Online Safety Act passed in November, Meta announced that it had begun its rollout of end-to-end encryption on its Messenger service.
In response, Cleverly issued a statement saying he was “disappointed” that the company had gone ahead with the move despite repeated government warnings that it would make identifying child abusers on the platform more difficult.
Critics see a pincer movement. “Taken together, it appears that the Online Safety Bill’s Clause 122 is intended to undermine existing encryption, while the updates to the IPA are intended to block further rollouts of encryption,” said Whittaker.
Beyond encryption
In addition to the notice regime, rights campaigners are worried that the bill allows for the more permissive use of bulk data where there are “low or no” expectations of privacy, for wide-ranging purposes including training AI models.
Lib Dem peer Christopher Fox argued in the House of Lords that this “creates an essentially new and essentially undefined category of information” which marks “a departure from existing privacy law,” notably the Data Protection Act.
Director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, also has issues with the newly invented category. With CCTV footage or social media posts for example, people may not have an expectation of privacy, “[but] that’s not the point, the point is that that data taken together and processed in a certain way, can be incredibly intrusive.”
Big Brother Watch is also concerned about how the bill deals with internet connection records — i.e. web logs for individuals for the last 12 months. These can currently be obtained by agencies when specific criteria is known, like the person of interest’s identity. Changes to the bill would broaden this for the purpose of “target discovery,” which Big Brother Watch characterizes as “generalized surveillance.”
Members of the House of Lords are also worried about the bill’s proposal to expand the number of people who can sanction spying on parliamentarians themselves. Right now, this requires the PM’s sign-off, but under the bill, the PM would be able to designate deputies for when he is not “available.” The change was inspired by the period in which former PM Boris Johnson was incapacitated with COVID-19.
The bill will return to the House of Lords on January 23, before heading to the House of Commons to be debated by MPs | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
“The purpose of this bill is to give the intelligence agencies a bit of extra agility at the margins, where the existing Rolls Royce regime is proving a bit clunky and bureaucratic,” argues David Anderson, crossbench peer and author of a review that served as a blueprint for the bill. “If you start throwing in too many safeguards, you will negate that purpose, and you will not solve the problem that bill is addressing.”
Anderson proposed the changes relating to spying on MPs and peers are necessary “if the prime minister has got COVID, or if they’re in a foreign country where they have no access to secure communications.”
This could even apply in cases where there’s a conflict of interest because spies want to snoop on the PM’s relatives or the PM himself, he added.
Amendments proposed by peers at the committee stage were uniformly rejected by the government.
The bill will return to the House of Lords for the next stage of the legislative process on January 23, before heading to the House of Commons to be debated by MPs.
“Our overarching concern is that the significance of the proposed changes to the notices regime are presented by the Home Office as minor adjustments and as such are being downplayed,” reads the TechUK letter.
“What we’re seeing across these different bills is a continual edging further towards … turning private tech companies into arms of a surveillance state,” says Carlo.
Oracle shares were heading sharply lower in late trading Monday after the enterprise software giant posted November quarter financial results that fell short of both the company’s own guidance and consensus Street estimates.
Continue reading this article with a Barron’s subscription.
It’s year-end and
Tesla is in the midst of its final push to meet Wall Street expectations for a record quarter. It won’t be easy for the battery-electric vehicle leader to sell almost half a million cars amid
higher interest rates and more EV competition. Instead of price cuts, Tesla is using a new tool to move metal: Incentives.
BERLIN — At its summit this week, the European Union is threatening to name and shame more than a dozen Chinese companies that, it claims, are supplying critical technology to equip Russia’s war machine.
But what about the Western companies that make dual-use and other advanced gear that is subject to sanctions and yet, according to an analysis of wreckage found on the Ukrainian battlefield, is used in Russian Kalibr missiles, Orlan drones and Ka-52 “Alligator” helicopters?
Radio silence.
So here’s a trivia question for you: Which company is the leading maker of the so-called “high-priority battlefield items” trafficked to Russia that the Western coalition wants to interdict?
If you said Intel, then go to the top of the class: According to the sanctions team at the Kyiv School of Economics, the U.S. semiconductor giant again leads the pack this year. It’s followed by Huawei of China. Then come Analog Devices, AMD, Texas Instruments and IBM — all of which are American.
Russian imports of microelectronics, wireless and satellite navigation systems and other critical parts subject to sanctions have recovered to near pre-war levels with a monthly run rate of $900 million in the first nine months of this year, according to a forthcoming report from the Kyiv School’s analytical center, the KSE Institute.
All of this indicates that, while Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, had a temporary impact, Moscow and its helpers have largely succeeded in reconfiguring supply chains — with the help of China, Hong Kong and countries in Russia’s backyard like Kazakhstan and NATO member Turkey.
That in turn begs the question as to whether, as the EU strives to deliver a 12th package of sanctions against Russia in time for a leaders’ summit on Thursday, the bloc is serving up yet another case study for the definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
For Elina Ribakova, director of the international program at the KSE Institute, the Western private sector must also be held to account. It should, she argues, be required to track its products along the entire value chain to their final destination — just as banks were forced to tighten anti-money laundering controls and customer checks after the 2008 crash.
“We have a policy in a void. We have put it on paper but we don’t have any infrastructure for the private sector to comply — or for us to check,” Ribakova told POLITICO. “We need to have the private sector enforce and implement this.”
Intel, responding to a request for comment, said it had suspended all shipments to Russia and Belarus, its ally, and that it was compliant with sanctions and export controls against both countries issued by the U.S. and its allies.
“While we do not always know nor can we control what products our customers create or the applications end-users may develop, Intel does not support or tolerate our products being used to violate human rights,” the company said in a statement. “Where we become aware of a concern that Intel products are being used by a business partner in connection with abuses of human rights, we will restrict or cease business with the third party until and unless we have high confidence that Intel’s products are not being used to violate human rights.”
As for Europe, while its companies may not feature among the top makers of critical technology sold to Russia, its industrial businesses are facing growing scrutiny over the supply of machinery and spare parts — often via third countries like Kazakhstan that have seen suspicious surges in imports.
It’s here, also, that Europe has fallen down.
In imposing sanctions, it’s a case of “all for one” — the bloc has jointly agreed on and implemented measures affecting everything from energy to banking.
But enforcement is a matter for individual member countries. Some are on board with the program. Others, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, overtly sympathize with Russia. And others, still, are conflicted — as when it emerged that the husband of hawkish Estonian premier Kaja Kallas owned a stake in a freight firm that still did business in Russia.
Then there are countries like neutral Austria, with historical ties to the Soviet military-industrial complex that have left politicians and law enforcement with a huge blind spot.
That’s important because, as independent researcher Kamil Galeev put it to POLITICO, Russia today still upholds an organizing principle dating back to the early Soviet era that civilian industry should “be able to switch 100 percent to military production should the need arise.”
Justice delayed
Despite evidence of widespread breaches, only a handful of sanctions cases are being pursued by European law enforcement. Among them, German prosecutors have secured the arrest of a businessman suspected of supplying precision lathes to two Russian companies that make sniper rifles.
But the wheels of justice turn slowly: The arrest in August of Ulli S. — prosecutors, following German tradition, have not published his full name — relates to the initial imposition of Western sanctions over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The press had already cracked the case by the time the suspect appeared in court, naming DMG Mori — a Japanese-German joint venture — as the supplier. One customer was Kalashnikov, maker of the famed AK-47 rifle. The other was Promtekhnologia, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. and featured in POLITICO’s sniper bullets investigation. Promtekhnologia makes the Orsis sniper rifle promoted by action movie actor Steven Seagal — now a Russian citizen — and used by President Vladimir Putin’s men in Ukraine.
DMG Mori, formerly called Gildemeister, suspended sales to Russia after the full-scale invasion. But, because it has closed down its operations in the country, it says it is no longer able to keep control over its machines made there (although an internal probe did find that they were being used for civilian purposes). The German Federal Prosecutor did not respond to a request for comment.
The real bad actors
It’s not just in stopping imports to Russia that sanctions are falling short of their stated intention.
Vladimir Putin’s former wife, Lyudmila (left), and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France a POLITICO investigation found | Yuri Kochetkov/EPA
Russians with close ties to Putin — and their money — continue to be more than welcome in Europe despite the death and destruction his regime has unleashed. His former wife, Lyudmila, and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France, as a POLITICO investigation found at the start of the year.
And when the European Council — the intergovernmental branch of the EU — does sanction Russian business leaders suspected of aiding and abetting the Putin regime, it has often relied on slipshod evidence that makes the decisions easy to challenge in court, POLITICO has also found.
Nearly 1,600 Western multinationals continue, meanwhile, to do business in Russia. Many that announced they would pull out have struggled to do so, as POLITICO discovered when it investigated Western liquor companies that said they had quit Russia — only to find that their booze was still freely available. And some companies that did stay, like Danone and Carlsberg, have been shaken down by Putin and his cronies — a case of Russian roulette, if ever there was one.
With the EU apparently lacking the means, or the political will, to do more to economically isolate Russia, the bloc is sending its sanctions envoy, David O’Sullivan, on a mission to apply moral suasion to countries that are, as he diplomatically puts it, “not aligned” on sanctions.
On the high-priority battlefield technology, Sullivan told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast last month that the EU has had “a limited success — but in an area which is absolutely critical to the defense of Ukraine.”
More broadly, he said: “The sanctions are a sort of slow puncture of the Russian economy. Perhaps not the blowout that some people initially predicted, but … the air is escaping from the tire and sooner or later the vehicle is going to become impossible to drive.”
To be fair, O’Sullivan isn’t overselling the efficacy of sanctions. And he may ultimately be proven right.
But he only will be vindicated if Western governments do a better job of holding their own businesses to account in stemming the flows of technology, equipment and spare parts that sustain Putin and his war of aggression.
That will come down to whether they have the will to enforce their decisions. And the evidence so far is that they don’t.
BRUSSELS — In early August, Bulgarian officials spotted something they weren’t sure was legal.
Barrels of Russian oil were arriving in the country priced above a $60 limit allies had adopted to sap Moscow of critical revenue for its war in Ukraine.
Bulgaria was in an unusual position among its partners. It had been given an exemption to European Union sanctions barring most imports of Russian oil, ostensibly to ensure the country wouldn’t face acute energy shortages even though the EU’s broader policy aimed to crush Russia’s main cash artery following its full-scale assault on Kyiv.
But could Bulgaria still import Russian oil if it was above the price cap? Customs officials in Sofia wanted to know for sure, so they reached out to EU officials asking for “clarification,” according to a private email exchange dated August 4 and seen by POLITICO.
The answer: Let it in.
“Crude oil imported based on these derogations does not need to be at or below $60 per barrel,” came the EU’s reply.
Green light in hand, Bulgaria proceeded to import Russian crude exclusively above the price cap from August until October, according to confidential customs data seen by POLITICO. The shipments were worth an estimated €640 million, according to calculations by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) think tank. The cash went to Russian energy firms, which pay the taxes helping fill the Kremlin’s war chest.
The sanctions gap is emblematic of the broader flaws that have corroded the EU’s attempt to stymie the billions Russia earns from energy exports. Roughly a year after adopting the initial penalties, legal loopholes have combined with poor enforcement and a mushrooming parallel trade to keep Moscow’s fossil fuel revenues flowing, and feeding almost half of Vladimir Putin’s war-hungry budget.
Russian oil is likely winding up as fuel in Europe via new routes. Enforcement across the Continent is scattered and reliant on inconsistent data. And a whole new black market has sprung up to insure, ship and hide Russia’s fuel as it travels the world.
The sanctions, in other words, have come up short. Russia’s oil export earnings have dropped just 14 percent since the restrictions were imposed. And in October, Russia’s fossil fuel revenues hit an 18-month high.
It also appears the EU has run out of steam to do much about it. The latest EU sanctions package, set to be finalized at a leaders’ summit this week, is mostly focused on administrative tweaks that experts say will do little to curb widespread evasion. Absent are any efforts to drop the level of the oil price cap further.
“The whole sanction mechanism works only if you keep adopting on a regular basis decisions that close loopholes and impose new sanctions,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told POLITICO. “Every actor in the world has the capacity to adapt.”
The Bulgarian oversight
The reason behind Bulgaria’s price cap loophole is arguably a clerical oversight.
When the EU wrote the G7 nations’ price cap into law, officials expressly forbade EU shipping firms and insurance companies from trafficking Russian oil above the $60 threshold to non-EU countries. The aim was to squeeze the Kremlin’s revenues while keeping global oil flows steady.
But officials never thought to impose similar rules on shipments to EU countries, partly because Brussels had banned Russian seaborne crude oil imports that same day.
Except for Bulgaria.
The backdoor has meant millions in extra revenue for Moscow. According to CREA, Russian oil export earnings from Bulgarian sales between August to October — a third of which came from sales above the price cap — raised around €430 million in direct taxes for the Kremlin. All Russian-origin shipments delivered during this time — priced between $69 and $89 per barrel — relied on Western help, including from Greek ship operators and British and Norwegian insurers.
And it was all technically legal.
The situation “reveals that Bulgaria has aided Russia to exploit this glaring loophole to maximize the Kremlin’s budget revenues from these oil sales without any apparent benefits for Bulgarian consumers,” said Martin Vladimirov, a senior analyst at the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) think tank, which has studied the issue.
More broadly, Bulgaria’s exemption from the Russian oil ban has been lining the pockets of both Russia’s largest private oil firm, Lukoil, which dominates Bulgaria’s fuel production with its sprawling Black Sea refinery, and the Kremlin itself.
More broadly, Lukoil’s crude oil imports to Bulgaria raked in over €2 billion in export revenues for Russia since the sanctions went into effect in February, according to a new CREA and CSD analysis. And the Kremlin has made €1 billion in direct taxes from the sales, POLITICO revealed last month.
There is now mounting pressure to mend these money-making fissures.
Bulgaria has vowed to cut short its opt-out from the Russian oil ban by six months, provisionally moving the deadline up to March.
And Kiril Petkov, the former prime minister who leads one of two parties controlling Bulgaria’s current governing coalition, told POLITICO the price cap workaround should “absolutely” be closed too. He vowed to pressure the government and ask the European Commission, the EU’s executive in Brussels, to do so, while insisting that Bulgaria is accelerating its efforts to shake off its Russian energy ties, unlike nearby countries like Slovakia.
Bulgaria proceeded to import Russian crude exclusively above the price cap from August until October, according to confidential customs data seen by POLITICO | Robert Ghement/EPA-EFE
“We do not like the $60 loophole that was created by the EU Commission derogation,” Petkov said. “We don’t want Putin to receive any euro that he doesn’t have to.”
The Bulgarian case “highlights one of the many loopholes that make sanctions less effective at lowering Russian export earnings used to finance the Kremlin’s war chest,” according to Isaac Levi, who leads CREA’s Russia-Europe team.
Bulgaria’s finance ministry and Lukoil didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Not all rainbows and unicorns’
A major challenge is poor monitoring and enforcement.
In October, a report commissioned by the European Parliament found EU sanctions enforcement is “scattered” across over 160 local authorities, while capitals have “dissimilar implementation systems” that include “wide discrepancies” in penalties for violations.
That assumes you can find a breach to begin with. Even those involved in shipping oil get only limited access to information on trades, according to Viktor Katona, chief crude analyst at the Kpler market intelligence firm.
Insurers, for example, rely on a single document from firms buying and selling oil cargoes pledging the sale is not above $60 per barrel, which amounts to a “declaration of faith,” he said.
The EU’s upcoming 12th package of sanctions is trying to crack down on this problem with new rules forcing traders to actually itemize specific costs. The goal is to prevent buyers from purchasing Russian oil above the limit and then hiding the extra costs as insurance or transport fees. But few in the industry have high hopes the added paperwork will stop the workaround.
Several EU countries with large shipping industries are also reluctant to tighten the price cap, making things even trickier. During the latest round of sanctions, Cyprus, Malta and Greece once again raised concerns over calls to strengthen the restrictions, according to two EU diplomats, who like others in the story were granted anonymity to speak freely.
A diplomat from a major maritime EU nation said stricter sanctions would only push Russia to use more non-Western operators to ship oil. Instead, the diplomat argued, the focus should be on broadening the countries adhering to the price cap. Currently, the G7, the EU and Australia are on board.
“It would be stupid to push for price caps, and then other shipping registers do not abide by it because they are not EU members,” the diplomat said, adding that “all that will be achieved is the total destruction of the shipping industry.”
Meanwhile, EU countries are still allowing Russian oil cargoes to cross their waters on their way elsewhere.
CREA research on behalf of POLITICO found that 822 ships transporting Moscow’s crude transferred their cargo to another ship in EU territorial waters — the majority in Greek, but also Maltese, Spanish, Romanian and Italian waters — since the oil sanctions kicked off last December. The volumes were equivalent to 400,000 barrels per day.
A Commission spokesperson defended the EU sanctions, noting Russia has been forced to spend “billions of dollars” to adapt to the new reality, including on new tankers, and its oil extraction and export infrastructure as Western demand shriveled.
That has caused “serious and ongoing economic and policy consequences,” the Commission spokesperson said. And CREA did find that the oil price limit has stripped the Kremlin of €34 billion in export revenues, equivalent to roughly two months of earnings this year.
Others point out that teething issues are normal — it’s the first time the EU has deployed sanctions at such a scale.
“Let’s be fair … all of the sanctions measures are unprecedented, so there’s an element of learning by doing it, as well,” said one of the EU diplomats. “We don’t live in a perfect world: it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.”
Deep dark waters
Instead of accepting the tough rules designed to drain its finances, Moscow has sparked a sanctions circumvention arms race, looking for loopholes as part of what one senior Ukrainian official has described as a “cockroach strategy.”
To ensure it can sell its fossil fuels at whatever price it can get, in violation of the oil price cap and other restrictions, Russia has presided over the creation of a parallel shipping market that, through a mixture of law-breaking and law-bending, is lining the pockets of its state energy firms and oligarchs.
A “shadow fleet” of aging tankers has emerged, mysteriously managed through a network of companies that obscure their ownership, frequently trading their cargo of fuel with other ships at sea. To help them escape the jurisdiction of Western sanctions while meeting basic maritime requirements, a cottage industry of murky insurance firms has sprung up in countries like India.
“When they were introduced, the sanctions seemed to be having an effect for a very short time. But now the state of play is most of the sanctions that have beeninplace have not really worked — or they’ve been very limited in terms of what they’ve been able to do,” said Byron McKinney, a director at trade and commodity firm S&P.
As Russian trades move increasingly away from Western operators and traders, that makes tracking them even more difficult, said Katona, the Kpler oil analyst.
“Every single” Russian type of oil now trades above the price cap, he said, while CREA estimates only 48 percent of Russian oil cargoes were carried on tankers owned or insured in G7 and EU countries in October.
“It’s like coming to a party and telling everyone not to drink alcohol, but not coming to the party yourself,” Katona said. “How do you make sure that no one’s drinking?”
At the same time, countries like India have increased their imports of cheap Russian crude by 134 percent, CREA found, processing it and then selling it everywhere. That means European consumers could unknowingly be filling up their cars with fuel produced from Russian crude, bankrolling Moscow’s armed forces at the same time.
The waning West?
The EU is well aware of the problem.
“Unless you have big players like India and China as part of it, effectiveness sooner or later fades away,” conceded one senior Commission official.
“It shows us the limits of what the tools of Western players can achieve at a global level,” the official added, noting it’s “a lesson in how much the [global] power balance has changed compared to 10 or 20 years ago.”
Expectations are low, however, that India or China — or Turkey, another critical shipping country — will come around to the price cap any time soon.
And back in Brussels, political leaders seem to be throwing up their hands. When EU leaders gather for their summit on Thursday, the sanctions package they’re expected to endorse will do little to stanch the flow of Russia’s energy cash, omitting any measures targeting Russian oil or lowering the price cap.
Until such steps are taken, Russia’s finances won’t truly wither, said Alexandra Prokopenko, an economist and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“The oil price is now the only real channel of transmission for external risk,” she said. “Russia will feel extremely bad if the average price on its oil is $40 or $50 per barrel — that would be painful for its budget and for Putin’s ability to finance expenditures.”
Getting to that point, however, was never going to be easy.
“The Russian economy was quite a big animal,” Prokopenko said, “that makes it hard to shoot it with a single shot.”
Victor Jack and Giovanna Coi reported from Brussels. Gabriel Gavin reported from Yerevan.
Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting from Brussels.
Here’s a look at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. On December 14, 2012, six adults and 20 children were killed by Adam Lanza, who had earlier killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their home.
Weapons found at the scene were legally purchased by Nancy Lanza.
Lanza used a Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S rifle during the shooting spree. Three weapons were found next to his body; the semiautomatic .223-caliber rifle made by Bushmaster, and two handguns. An Izhmash Saiga-12, 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun was found in his car.
December 14, 2012 – At an unknown time, 20-year-old Adam Lanza kills his mother Nancy, 52, with a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle. Lanza then drives his mother’s car to Sandy Hook Elementary, about five miles away.
At approximately 9:30 a.m., Lanza arrives at Sandy Hook Elementary, a school with about 700 students. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had installed a new security system that required every visitor to ring the front entrance’s doorbell for admittance. Lanza shoots his way through the entrance.
Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach step out to the hall to see what is going on, and are followed by Vice Principal Natalie Hammond. Hochsprung and Sherlach are killed, and Hammond is injured.
The first 911 calls to police are made at approximately 9:30 a.m. Police and first responders arrive approximately five minutes later.
Lanza enters the classroom of substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau. Lanza kills 14 children as well as Rousseau and a teacher’s aide.
He then enters the classroom of teacher Victoria Soto. Six children in the room, as well as Soto and a teacher’s aide, are killed. Lanza dies by suicide in the same classroom, ending the rampage in less than 11 minutes.
At about 3:15 p.m., an emotional President Barack Obama gives a televised address, “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” He orders flags to be flown at half-staff at the White House and other federal buildings.
December 15, 2012 – Connecticut State Police release the names of the victims: six adult women and 12 girls and eight boys, all ages six and seven.
December 16, 2012 – Obama visits with the relatives of those who were killed. He also attends an interfaith vigil. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” he says. “These tragedies must end, and to end them we must change.”
December 17, 2012 – Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy announces a statewide moment of silence on December 21. He also requests that bells be tolled 26 times in memory of the victims.
December 18, 2012 – Newtown Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson announces Sandy Hook students will remain out of school until January. At that time, they will be taught in a converted middle school.
January 8, 2013 – Malloy announces the names of the people who will serve on the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, to review current policy and make recommendations on public safety, mental health and violence prevention policies.
March 2013 – A new police report reveals Lanza possessed a list of 500 of the world’s most notorious mass murderers, and was trying to rack up the greatest number of kills in history.
November 25, 2013 – Connecticut state officials release a report closing the investigation into the shooting and confirm that Lanza had no assistance and was the only shooter.
December 27, 2013 – The final report on the investigation into the shooting is released.
November 21, 2014 – The Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate, as directed by the State Child Fatality Review Panel, releases a report profiling Lanza’s developmental and educational history. The report notes “missed opportunities” by Lanza’s mother, the school district and multiple health care providers. It identifies “warning signs, red flags, or other lessons” that could be learned.
April 14, 2016 – A superior court judge rules that the wrongful death suit against gun manufacturers can proceed. The judge denies a motion to dismiss the case on the basis that firearms companies have limited liability when their products are used by criminals, according to a federal law passed in 2005.
October 14, 2016 –Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis dismisses a lawsuit that families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims had filed against a gun manufacturer, invoking a federal statute known as PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The law prohibits lawsuits against gun manufacturers and distributors if their firearms were used in the commission of a criminal act.
March 14, 2019 – The Connecticut Supreme Court rules that the families of the Sandy Hook victims can go forward with their lawsuit against Remington, which makes the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used in the shooting.
April 5, 2019 – Remington files an appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking the high court to decide on the state’s interpretation of a federal statute that grants gun manufacturers immunity from any lawsuit related to injuries that result from criminal misuse of their product.
July 27, 2021 – Remington offers nearly $33 million to nine families of victims killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in a proposed lawsuit settlement.
February 15, 2022 – A settlement is reached between the nine families of victims killed and the now-bankrupt Remington and its four insurers, according to court records. The plaintiffs’ attorneys say the $73 million settlement also includes “thousands of pages of internal company documents that prove Remington’s wrongdoing and carry important lessons for helping to prevent future mass shootings.”
August 4, 2022 – A jury decides that Jones will have to pay Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim, a little more than $4 million in compensatory damages.
October 19, 2023 – A federal bankruptcy judge rules that bankruptcy proceedings will not shield Jones from more than $1.1 billion in damages he owes the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims.
November 22, 2023 – In a court document, the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims offer Jones a “path out of bankruptcy” if he pays them a “small fraction” of the more than $1 billion he owes in damages, which could help resolve the bankruptcy cases of both Jones and Free Speech Systems. The families suggest Jones pay at least $85 million over 10 years — $8.5 million per year for a decade, in addition to half of any annual income over $9 million, “with a proportionate reduction of liabilities for each year of full payment.”
The Victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School
Allison Wyatt, 6 Ana Marquez-Greene, 6 Anne Marie Murphy, 52 (Teacher) Avielle Richman, 6 Benjamin Wheeler, 6 Caroline Previdi, 6 Catherine Hubbard, 6 Charlotte Bacon, 6 Chase Kowalski, 7 Daniel Barden, 7 Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, 47 (Principal) Dylan Hockley, 6 Emilie Parker, 6 Grace McDonnell, 7 Jack Pinto, 6 James Mattioli, 6 Jesse Lewis, 6 Jessica Rekos, 6 Josephine Gay, 7 Lauren Rousseau, 30 (Teacher) Madeleine Hsu, 6 Mary Sherlach, 56 (Psychologist) Noah Pozner, 6 Olivia Engel, 6 Rachel D’Avino, 29, (Therapist) Victoria Soto, 27 (Teacher)
