Florida gun control: NRA files lawsuit over new measure that raises buying age to 21 - Independent

10/3/2018

Florida gun control: NRA files lawsuit over new measure that raises buying age to 21

Lawsuit comes the same day Governor Rick Scott signed gun control measure into law

Jeremy B White San Francisco

Spurred to action by a national outcry after the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Mr Scott and the Republican-controlled Florida legislature unified behind raising the age for buying all guns to 21. Previously, certain firearms could be purchased by 18-year-olds.

While gun control advocates hailed the new law, the National Rifle Association (NRA) called it an unconstitutional violation of the Second and Fourteenth amendments.

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“At 18 years of age, law-abiding citizens in this country are considered adults for almost all purposes and certainly for the purposes of the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights”, a lawsuit filed by the NRA in a Florida district court said.

“This blanket ban violates the fundamental rights of thousands off responsible, law-abiding Florida citizens and is thus invalid”, the complaint said.

Representatives for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Director Rick Swearingen, the defendants in the lawsuit, did not respond to requests for comment. Student activists who survived the shooting and have since emerged as vocal gun control advocates reacted to the lawsuit with derision.

“How am I not surprised”, student David Hogg wrote on Twitter.

Efforts to enact new gun control measures in response to prior mass shootings have faltered, in part because of the NRA’s immense political influence.

But the bloodshed in Parkland, Florida, during which a gunman killed 14 students and three school employees, has galvanised young people and unleashed political momentum for tougher gun laws. By rallying behind the measure, Mr Scott and fellow Florida Republicans showed a rare willingness to defy the NRA.

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So too did Donald Trump, who during a remarkable White House meeting embraced ideas that are anathema to the NRA - including stripping guns from people without due process - and has chastised legislators and governors for being “afraid” of the gun rights organisation.

The White House has since backed away from those remarks, with Mr Trump - who won strong backing from the NRA during his campaign - reiterating his support for the organisation’s agenda.

McDonald’s Is Flipping Its Arches Upside Down in Honor of Remarkable Women - TIME Business

McDonald’s Is Flipping Its Arches Upside Down in Honor of Remarkable Women

Posted: 07 Mar 2018 01:51 PM PST

No, you’re not living in a very literal Upside Down: the iconic golden arches of some McDonald’s franchises across the country will be flipped on March 8 as a nod to International Women’s Day, that’s all.
It’s a “celebration of women everywhere,” a McDonald’s spokesperson told Business Insider, and it’s a first in the brand’s history “in honor of the extraordinary accomplishments of women everywhere and especially in our restaurants.” The gesture will go beyond the outdoor signs, including all of the fast food brand’s social media logos in the M-to-W changeup. And 100 restaurants are getting special “packaging, crew shirts and hats and bag stuffers” for the day, too.
McDonald’s will not be the only brand to make a statement in honor of the holiday, of course: already, Barbie has released a line of commemorative dolls representing history-making women, and Google is making its own play for telling women’s stories.

Saw this McDonald’s sign upside down in Lynwood. 😂🤣😂💀 pic.twitter.com/MFrf4rudzi

— Reuben Hernandez (@reuben81691) March 7, 2018

.@McDonalds in Lynwood is flipping more than just burgers: The company flipped its iconic golden arches into a W for women https://t.co/PZwwCLTkSG pic.twitter.com/LAM33K6Ly1

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) March 7, 2018

Then again, not everyone is on board with the mega-chain’s approach to recognizing women’s contributions.

McDonalds: In celebration of women we are flipping the arches upside down.

Or you could give your employees better benefits.
McD: Look it's a W!
Maybe a living wage? Better family leave? A career path forward in the face of automation?
McD: The W stands for women.
— bogwolf (@truebe) March 7, 2018

Sam Nurnberg testifies at Russia probe grand jury after TV meltdown in which he said he wouldn't - Independent

9/3/2018

Sam Nurnberg testifies at Russia probe grand jury after TV meltdown in which he said he wouldn't

At one point this week Mr Nunberg said he thinks it would be 'funny' if he were arrested

Clark Mindock New York @ClarkMindock

After a bizarre week that included erratic media appearances, former Trump political adviser Sam Nurnberg has testified before a grand jury investigating allegations of collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

Just days earlier, Mr Nunberg embarked on a strange string of erratic live interviews on America’s major news networks, telling each that he planned on tearing up the subpoena he had been given by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

During some of those appearances, show hosts asked if Mr Nunberg understood that defying a subpoena could lead to some jail time, and the conservative activist challenged Mr Mueller to arrest him. During at least one interview he said getting arrested would be “funny”.

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Mr Nurnberg seemed less interested in speaking to the media Friday when he left the federal courthouse in Washington, ignoring the assembled reporters there eager for a comment.

His lawyer, Patrick Brackley, also did not comment.

Mr Nunberg worked for Mr Trump starting in 2014, was fired and rehired once, then was fired once more in late 2015 for racially insensitive Facebook posts.

He is thought to be able to provide potential information on several areas of Mr Trump’s career, though it is not immediately clear what areas of interest Mr Mueller might be most interested in, or what he told the grand jury Friday during his appearance there.

Following Mr Nunberg’s erratic interviews in which he said he planned on defying the subpoena, the former Trump adviser quickly backed down and indicated that he was planning on showing up to testify before the grand jury after all.

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In yet another twist to the affair, Mr Nunberg also told a Fox Business Network reporter that he was planning on beginning substance abuse treatment after the grand jury appearance. During at least one of the live interviews in which he said he was going to defy the subpoena, an anchor suggested to him that they could smell alcohol on his breath.

“There’s something, and drinking I believe is a big part of it, and that’s what happened yesterday,” Charles Gasparino, the reporter, said. “That’s where the story actually goes from here.”

That potential drug or alcohol addiction led to a slew of analysis in which it was pondered whether the grand jury would accept testimony from someone who is incapacitated in some way or another. Others wondered if Mr Nunberg was bluffing, and had delivered the strange interviews on purpose in order to draw attention to the issue.

Who OPEC Sacrificed for the Greater Good - Bloomberg

Who OPEC Sacrificed for the Greater Good

Delays to output cuts made life even more difficult for Venezuela and Angola.

By

March 11, 2018, 6:00 PM GMT+11

s Wil Riera/Bloomberg

TOTAL SA +0.04

AT CLOSING, MARCH 9TH

46.46 EUR

OPEC has achieved an unprecedented degree of compliance with its current output target, exceeding its agreed production cut by 44 percent, but all is not as rosy as it might seem on the surface. This newfound sense of purpose hides a huge cost borne by two of the group's members that found themselves on the wrong end of Saudi oil policy as prices collapsed and who may struggle to recover from the consequences.

The nature of this cost was clearly identified on Feb. 23, 2016 in a conference in Houston, where Saudi Arabia’s then-petroleum minister, Ali Al-Naimi, explained to a packed room of investors and senior industry figures why his country was flooding the market with crude. Perhaps -- irritated by journalists who liked to characterize his country’s policies as a war on booming U.S. shale supplies -- Al-Naimi wanted to set the record straight.

The producers of those high-cost barrels must find a way to lower their costs, borrow cash or liquidate. It sounds harsh, and unfortunately it is, but it is the most efficient way to rebalance markets.

While that wasn’t entirely new, the thing that set his speech apart was the detail. Al-Naimi talked about how a price surge had "unleashed a wave of investment around the world into what had been previously uneconomic oil fields." In addition to U.S. shale he listed the Arctic, Canada's oil sands, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt and deep water frontiers.

All of those areas were affected by the slump in oil prices that accompanied OPEC's pump-at-will policy. But the impact was particularly brutal in two areas -- and both are members of OPEC. Two years on, the oil industries of Venezuela and Angola, which was at the forefront of deep water development, are looking a mess. And these nations' dependence on oil revenues makes the collapse far more painful than it has been for other countries that have seen their production fall.

Venezuela's output is now at its lowest level in almost 30 years, leaving aside the brief dip in production that accompanied the general strike at the end of 2002. A lack of investment and loss of technical expertise amid the economic chaos that has gripped the country has dragged output down from a peak of almost 3.5 million barrels a day reached in 1998, shortly before President Hugo Chavez came to power. The country's output has fallen by 460,000 barrels a day from the October 2016 level used as a starting point for OPEC's cuts agreed in November that year. As part of that deal, Venezuela pledged to reduce production by a more modest 95,000 barrels a day.

30-Year Slump

Venezuela's oil production is at its lowest in nearly 30 years - apart from the brief impact of a general strike

Note: A general strike at the end of 2002 briefly took oil production below 1 million barrels a day

But for Angola the story really is one about the impact of the collapse in oil prices. When the country joined OPEC in 2007, it was looking forward to achieving a production rate of 2 million barrels a day. A decade later that seems a remote dream, with output struggling to stay above 1.6 million amid delays and cancellations of new projects and steep decline rates at existing ones.

In most cases, production from Angola's deep-water fields peaks early and declines rapidly. Linking a number of fields into a single production unit and staggering their start-up can help to prolong plateau flows, but recent projects show that even this has a limited impact.

Angolan Flows

Angola's offshore fields peak early and decline fast, needing a steady flow of new projects to maintain output.

The fall in oil prices had an immediate and dramatic impact on drilling activity, with the number of active rigs falling from 18 at the start of 2014, when oil prices were close to $110 a barrel, to just one in January. Start-up of Total SA's Kaombo Norte project has been pushed back from 2017 to later this year, while the Chissonga project -- which Total also acquired when it purchased Maersk Oil last year -- was shelved indefinitely when oil prices collapsed in early 2016.

Rig Exodus

Drilling activity in Angola's waters slumped as oil prices fell -- and shows no sign of recovering

Note: number of active rotary rigs drilling for oil

Saudi Arabia’s policy of refusing to countenance output cuts as oil prices collapsed in 2014 and 2015 probably didn’t help either country. Had the world’s biggest exporter done what it normally did during times of oil-market crisis -- namely, cut production -- perhaps prices would have stayed a bit higher and the plights of these nations would be marginally less awful than they are now. Although the pump at will policy was short-lived, it has had a long-lasting impact.

Winners and Losers

Oil production capacity is set to rise in low-cost Middle East OPEC countries and fall elsewhere

The International Energy Agency says that both nations’ capacity to pump crude will fall more deeply in the next few years than any other members in OPEC. The agency's medium-term outlook shows a clear shift in OPEC's oil production capacity over the next five years in favor of the group's low-cost Middle East producers over high-cost members like Angola and Venezuela - just as Al-Naimi predicted. With suggestions that the U.S. shale boom could also start to top out by the mid-2020s, a gravitation back towards a dependence on Middle Eastern oil is starting to look even more likely.

EON Agrees to Buy RWE's Innogy, Upending German Utility Industry - Bloomberg

EON Agrees to Buy RWE's Innogy, Upending German Utility Industry

By , , , and

March 11, 2018, 7:16 PM GMT+11

RWE will emerge owning minority stake in enlarged EON

Deal sees RWE taking both Innogy and EON’s renewable assets

Headquarters of Eon in Essen. Photographer: Patrik Stolarz/AFP via Getty Images

EON SE agreed to acquire Innogy SE from German rival RWE AG, transforming the energy industry as Europe’s largest economy continues its switch to renewable power.

In a complicated deal involving shares and asset swaps, EON SE will emerge with the retail and network businesses of both companies, while RWE will end up owning the combined renewable generation as well a large stake in EON. The statement came after Bloomberg News reported that they were in advanced talks, citing people familiar with the matter.

The agreement sees EON acquiring all of RWE’s 76.8 percent stake in Innogy, giving RWE 16.7 percent of EON’s equity in return. EON will also make an offer to Innogy’s minority shareholders that values the company at 40 euros ($49.22) a share, or about 22 billion euros in total.

Domestic competitors RWE and EON have been transformed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s shift toward an economy powered by renewable energy instead of nuclear and fossil fuels. Once among the most stable profit contributors among Germany’s biggest companies, the two utilities were forced to take billions of euros in writedowns and a de-facto break up after German wholesale power prices tumbled.

The changing regulatory environment has also led to a slew of dealmaking in the industry. EON is in the process of selling its 47 percent stake in conventional power utility Uniper SE to Finland’s Fortum Oyj.

Innogy has attracted interest from other European utilities, including Engie SE, Enel SpA and Iberdrola SA, the people said. Macquarie Group Ltd. may acquire smaller businesses including in Eastern Europe from the combined entity, they said.

Engie, Enel and Iberdrola couldn’t be immediately reached outside of regular business hours. Macquarie declined to comment

E.ON is Germany’s biggest investor in renewable energy, with more than 10 billion euros in wind solar and storage, while RWE is the country’s biggest power producer, though with a heavy focus on conventional sources. Innogy has sought to broaden its global footprint, with wind and solar assets that stretch from the U.S. to Australia.

A deal with E.ON would come as Innogy is without permanent leadership. Chief Executive Officer Peter Terium left the company in December following a profit warning and trouble in the U.K. business. Uwe Tigges, Innogy’s human resources officer and a management board member, has assumed the CEO role on a temporary basis. Chief Financial Officer Bernhard Guenther became the victim of an acid attack last week and was admitted to the hospital with severe injuries.

Innogy’s full first year on the German stock exchange hasn’t given investors any returns, falling 1 percent in the course of last year. So far in 2018, the stock is up 6 percent.

— With assistance by Brian Parkin, Ed Hammond, and Dinesh Nair

After a Century of Daylight Saving Time, Its Benefits Are Still Unclear - Forbes

After a Century of Daylight Saving Time, Its Benefits Are Still Unclear

By DAVID Z. MORRIS March 10, 2018

Some tonight, you will either manually set your clocks ahead an hour, or (more likely) your various smartphones, tablets, and computing devices will adjust themselves for you. Those devices will be carrying forward a practice that dates to March of 1918, when the U.S. — following Germany and Great Britain – implemented a plan for Daylight Saving Time.

The initial justification for the policy, implemented by Woodrow Wilson, was that it would save energy that could go towards helping fight World War I. The same rationale would be used for the expansion of Daylight Saving in later decades, including its national formalization in the 1960s.

Following World War I, though, a different rationale surfaced. According to Smithsonian Magazine, department store owners pushed for the policy to continue, since more people shopped after work when it was light out later. The policy has also benefited sports like golf.

Those motives haven’t proven entirely durable. One study found that Daylight Savings actually increased home energy consumption and emissions, though a conflicting Department of Energy study found a small but significant decline. More damning was a 2016 J.P. Morgan study finding that, while there’s some boost to spending when Daylight Savings Time goes into effect, it’s offset by a substantial drop when clocks are switched back.

And Daylight Saving does not, contrary to widespread myth, particularly benefit farmers. In fact, farmers lobbied against it for decades.

So the commercial motives for Daylight Saving Time may not be all they’re cracked up to be. Some subtler positive effects have been measured, including declines in robberies – but so have increases in heart attacks and workplace accidents, thanks to the effects of sleep disruption.

On balance, the objective evidence against Daylight Saving Time seems to outweigh arguments in its favor. But groups lobbying to eliminate it have an uphill battle – polls in recent years show a majority of Americans still support the policy, even if it costs them sleep once a year.

Former Obama official says it is ‘impossible’ for Trump be ready for North Korea meeting by May - Independent

9/3/2018

Former Obama official says it is ‘impossible’ for Trump be ready for North Korea meeting by May

The official says 'perhaps Mr Trump wants a [public relations] opportunity, perhaps because he's desperate to do a deal'

Mythili Sampathkumar New York @MythiliSk

A pedestrian walks in front of a huge screen flashing a news report relating to US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong in Tokyo on 9 March 2018. TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images

A national security official under former President Barack Obama said it is “impossible” for President Donald Trump to be ready by May to have a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Samantha Vinograd, former senior adviser for the National Security Council, said: "There is no way that President Trump can be ready, by May, to have a high stakes negotiation on denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula, it's just impossible”.

The reclusive and mercurial Mr Kim had extended an invitation to meet, which Mr Trump accepted in a reversal of the publicly tense relations between the two.

READ MORE

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The proposed meeting in May would not the first time Pyongyang has participated in negotiations. China hosted a series of talks involving South Korea, Russia, Japan, and the US in early 2000s.

During the Winter Olympics, Mr Kim's sister Kim Yo-Jong became the first member of the family to set foot in South Korea and meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

And, though Ms Vinograd said on CNN that this situation may be different, "that doesn't mean we should rush into a nuclear summit”.

She said Mr Trump’s lack of political and diplomatic experience does not bode well for the administration rushing into a meeting like this.

"Perhaps because he wants a [public relations] opportunity, perhaps because he's desperate to do a deal,” Ms Vinograd posited about why Mr Trump would accept the invitation and set a target date so soon.

Mr Trump has repeatedly criticised previous administrations and Mr Obama’s “strategic patience” in foreign relations, particularly in his dealings with Mr Kim’s continued development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme despite United Nations sanctions.

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Ms Vinograd worried: “You can't wing it. [Mr Kim] is going to be fully prepared. I think that he's playing to the president's ego and the president's weaknesses by flattering him”.

The announcement also came as a surprise to Mr Trump’s own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who just hours before the announcement said that the US was a “long ways from negotiations”.

But, Mr Tillerson said the President made the decision to accept the invite “himself,” a move he said was a “dramatic” reversal in posture for North Korea.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Mr Trump “is getting exactly what he wants” with Mr Kim, having relayed to South Korea that Pyongyang had expressed a “commitment” to ending its nuclear programme, while also suggesting Mr Kim would suspend any nuclear or missile tests during any direct talks.

Vice President Mike Pence made it clear though that the US made “zero concessions” in order to get the invitation, which was a result of the US delegation’s trip to the Winter Olympics last month.

Though Republicans in Congress also praised the diplomatic tactics of the US for getting the invitation and cited it as proof that sanctions against Pyongyang were working, not everyone was optimistic about the meeting.

Democratic Senator Ed Markey said Mr Trump should treat it “as the beginning of a long diplomatic process” and his usual “unscripted” remarks and inflammatory tweets that could derail it.

Timeline of Trump's relationship with North Korea

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Only Kim Jong-un will benefit from a US-North Korea meeting

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, said the Republican president would need help from others in the US government when discussing such a complex issue face-to-face with Mr Kim.

“It will require the President to rely on the expertise within the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and throughout the government, and not simply on his own estimation of his skills as a ‘˜deal maker’.” Mr Schiff said.