The French police fired tear gas and arrested more than 250 people in Paris as “yellow vest” protesters returned to the capital’s streets in force for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown.
The “yellow vest” movement, named after motorists’ high-visibility jackets, began in late 2018 in protest against fuel taxes and economic reform, posing a big challenge to President Emmanuel Macron as demonstrations spread across France.
On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the starting points of two authorised marches.
While one cortege set off without incident, the other march was held up as police clashed with groups who left the designated route and set fire to rubbish bins and a car.
Some of the protesters wore black clothes and carried the flag of an anti-fascist movement, suggesting the presence of radical demonstrators dubbed “black blocs” often blamed for violence at street marches in France.
The police arrested 256 people by 6pm (16:00 GMT), many of them for carrying items such as tools that could be used as weapons, including screwdrivers, ice axes and knives.
Protesters face police officers during demonstrations in Paris, France [Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters]The return of the protest movement comes as France grapples with a resurgence in coronavirus cases.
The country’s daily cases of COVID-19 reached a record high of nearly 10,000 on Thursday.
A day later, French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced plans to speed up testing and toughen measures in certain cities as the government seeks to avoid a repeat of the nationwide lockdown earlier this year.
Police called on demonstrators to respect coronavirus measures in Paris, which is among France’s high-risk “red zones” and where it is compulsory to wear a face mask on the street.
On Friday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced slightly tougher rules on how police use controversial rubber-coated bullets and other crowd-control weapons before the marches.
Officers must now ask supervisors for permission to fire the projectiles, which have been responsible for injuries. Jerome Rodrigues emerged as a prominent leader after losing an eye to a police rubber bullet during a protest.
‘Last stand’
Commenting on the relatively low turnout on Saturday, Michael, a 43-year-old protester in the crowd at Place de Wagram, told AFP news agency, “The movement is dead, I’ll say that clearly, but we’re here because we have nothing to lose. This is a kind of last stand.”
Another protester, a 50-year-old civil servant who asked to remain anonymous, said “social and economic robbery” and “our fundamental freedoms increasingly [coming] under attack” drove him out onto the streets.
Pensioners Pascale and Patrick, who had travelled to Paris from Crolles in southeast France, said they were sure “the movement isn’t running out of steam”.
Veterans of demonstrations at traffic roundabouts in provincial towns, the pair said they “don’t want this world for our children and grandchildren, where we’re subjugated by this oligarchy”.
“We’re anti-capitalist, anti-system, former hippies and yellow vests,” they said.
Elsewhere in France, several hundred “yellow vest” protesters gathered in the southwestern city Toulouse in defiance of a ban authorities said had been imposed over coronavirus infection risks.
Police tried to disperse the group with tear gas, a scene matched in Lyon, while people also gathered in Bordeaux and other towns.
“I didn’t back the yellow vests at first but things have only got worse for people in poverty. Nothing’s changed after two years of struggle,” a 53-year-old man calling himself Dodo said at the Toulouse protest.
Legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward reveals in his new book that Donald Trump told him in February of this year that he knew exactly how deadly the novel coronavirus was, and that he was deliberately downplaying the threat to the public. In a bizarre year in media, it’s perhaps the most bizarre development of all: The most famous investigative reporter in the United States getting the most explosive scoop imaginable, and declining to publish it at a time when doing so could have saved lives.
Why did he do this? A day after the information came out, no one knows. Woodward has no convincing explanation for why he didn’t tell the public about this, and the strongest defense his own nominal employer will mount is a narrow, mechanical one.
Here’s the Washington Post yesterday, reporting on the reporting that a Washington Post reporter did not report when it could have most mattered:
“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed.
Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu…This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.
The next month:
Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.
(The taped conversation was published by CNN.)
Woodward—despite having, he said, no agreement with the White House requiring him to hoard information from the interviews for the book—did not report that the president was, by his own admission, deliberately downplaying the seriousness of the crisis. Nor did he pass along the information to one of his colleagues so they could try and track down the information and report it themselves.
His main defense for sitting on the information was that he didn’t know if what the president was saying about the deadliness of the coronavirus was true. His second line of defense was to downplay the value of his own explosive scoop. (“If I had done the story at that time about what he knew in February,” he told the Associated Press, “that’s not telling us anything we didn’t know.”)
Neither line of argument is remotely believable. Woodward had weeks and then months to determine that what Trump said was true and significant and still didn’t report it, even as it became clear that the president’s commitment to carrying out the plan he described in February was costing lives. (Bear in mind the timeline here: As late as March 15, more than a month after Trump described his strategy to Woodward, New York mayor Bill de Blasio was encouraging people to go to bars. Four days later, as cities and states were deciding whether and how to lock down, Trump told Woodward, “I still like playing it down.”) At an even more basic level, it is difficult to conceive of anything more newsworthy than the president secretly telling an elite member of the Washington press corps that he was lying to the public while telling the public to relax and check out hydroxychloroquine and investigate bleach. It’s unclear what there needed to be “nailed down.” Over at Esquire, Charlie Pierce put it as plainly as it can be put:
The interviews with the president* were conducted on the record. As early as January, Woodward could have broken a huge story quoting the president* himself about how the president* was lying to the public and risking the public health. Maybe it would have forced a change of policy that would have saved lives. (Probably not, given what we know about this president’s modus operandi.) Woodward knew the truth behind the administration’s deadly bungling—and worse—and he saved it for his book, which will be released to wild acclaim and huge profits after nearly 200,000 Americans have died because neither Donald Trump nor Bob Woodward wanted to risk anything substantial to keep the country informed.
Woodward’s feeble defense is that what he knew didn’t matter. Defenses of Woodward have been oriented narrowly around his relationship to the Post and his publishers, and around the idea that he, as someone writing a book, was primarily beholden to his book project and not his fellow humans dying in droves.
For example, Post media reporter Erik Wemple launched a wised-up argument that amounted to scolding people for being angry about preventable deaths and implying that they simply don’t understand the way of the world. Publishing the scoop would have prevented Woodward from getting future scoops, he argued; Trump flacks would have denied it was newsworthy at all; and, finally, he pointed out, Woodward isn’t really a Post reporter anyway, but merely someone who publishes scoops in the Post in exchange for a $25 monthly salary. Per Wemple, this is the system working as designed. (Its design perhaps explains why, with early access to Woodward’s book, the Post didn’t report his scoop, reported by Business Insider today, that Trump bragged about “saving” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, believed by Western intelligence agencies to have been involved in the murder of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.)
What any of this has to do with the moral question at the heart of the matter—Should someone who had potentially life-saving evidence that Trump was lying about the coronavirus have shared it with the public, or no?—Wemple didn’t bother addressing. He did pass on Woodward’s insistence that the president’s lies were not a “legitimate public health issue.” If Wemple did ask what Woodward would consider a public health issue, he didn’t include it in his Twitter thread.
Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan aptly summarized the brouhaha while carefully avoiding anything that could be read as criticism of Woodward or the Post. “[Woodward’s] no longer in the daily journalism business,” she wrote, as if reporting critical information in service of the public being somehow below such a towering giant of the craft excused him not doing it. Other journalists, on the right and the left, provided equally callous and craven excuses for Woodward, arguing that even if he had reported the information, it wouldn’t have mattered because people wouldn’t have cared. Why people with such a low estimation of the public and disdain for the idea that giving the public information can effect change are even in journalism is unclear; the only conceivable answers are bleak ones.
The Post, which enjoys the benefits of its branding association with Woodward’s scoops (conversely, the association allows Woodward, whose author page displays five Washington Post bylines this century, to pretend he’s still an active newspaperman, at least until that becomes inconvenient) essentially denied having anything to do with Woodward. A Post flack told me that she’d “need to refer you to Bob or his publisher on this as his book work is done independently of The Post.” When I followed up asking to speak to editor in chief Marty Baron or get an on-the-record statement about Woodward failing to report information of incredible significance in a timely way, the flack emailed me this Twitter statement from another flack, again asserting that Woodward’s book projects have nothing to do with the Post. This neatly sidestepped the question of whether a nominal Post reporter should report critical news.
Post staffers were generally unwilling to touch this topic with a 20-foot pole. One, who was granted anonymity so they could speak freely, said “[It] seems like a trend that feels especially unethical and selfish right now, to save material to sell book copies with everything that’s going on, and it’s disappointing that it’s no different at our place.”
If Woodward reporting his scoop when he got it would have saved even one life, it would have been worth it; this is the criticism of him that matters and the one that has not been answered. The Washington Post’s tagline is “democracy dies in darkness.” People do, too.
Seoul is one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in. These high prices make it a challenge for many people to find affordable housing. As a result, an alternative to the conventional apartment has emerged. Called goshiwons, these are not apartments but tiny rooms that are large enough for a twin-sized bed and some prized belongings. Photographer Sim Kyu-Dong showcased these units—and the people that inhabit them—in a fascinating series of images.
Goshiwons can be a cheap place for a student to study or a housing option for someone who can’t afford an apartment and might otherwise be homeless. There’s no deposit required to live in one; it’s unlike a studio in Seoul, where one would need to come up with money before moving in. Plus, it has some privacy. A room typically has a bed, desk, and closet that affords someone the opportunity to keep their things safe and space to eat and work. But the facilities, such as the bathroom, are shared with other residents.
Like their larger counterparts, a goshiwon varies based on who is living in it. Some folks are neat and tidy while others have carved just enough space for them to sit and nothing else. The room might have a window (for an added fee) and wallpaper to give the room a homier feel. Scroll down to see how people have chosen to live in their goshiwon.
Rajeev Suri, Nokia’s CEO, speaks at the 2018 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Photo: Reuters
The US has continued to pressure countries around the world not to use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s talking head is the US’ key competitive weapon against Huawei, something is not quite right.
Two decades ago, Lucent, an American company, was once the world’s largest telecoms equipment company, until, a shadow of its former self, it was absorbed into Nokia. Still, Lucent’s fate was better than that of Canada’s Nortel, which went bankrupt in 2008. What went wrong?
While the US government is fighting Huawei today, earlier in the last century, it did the opposite – dismembering Western Electric, AT&T’s equipment arm, long before the break-up of AT&T. Its actions led to the creation of two Western Huaweis – Nortel and Alcatel – which became leading competitors of Lucent, the stand-alone American successor of Western Electric.
ITT, a US company which acquired Western Electric’s international operations in 1925, was a key telecoms equipment maker. In the 1960s, through leveraged buyouts, ITT diversified into a range of unrelated businesses, including the Sheraton Hotels chain. Once the largest shareholder of Ericsson, it sold its interests in the company in 1960.
In 1986, an overleveraged ITT sold its telecoms equipment businesses to a French company that would become Alcatel. Meanwhile, the sale of Northern Telecommunications, established by Western Electric to serve the Canadian market, to Bell Canada, resulted in the formation of Nortel.
When Lucent went public in 1996, Alcatel was the world’s largest telecoms equipment company. But in 2006, a struggling Lucent merged with Alcatel; a decade later the combined entity was acquired by Nokia.
More than technological changes and international competition, the fall of the once mighty Lucent may be understood primarily in the American regulatory context and how incentives provided by US capital markets shaped management decisions.
Lucent’s demise was far from inevitable upon its separation from AT&T. Western Electric owed its dominance to being an integral part of AT&T for more than a century. Globally, however, telecoms equipment suppliers usually compete for business outside the umbrella of service providers. Ericsson and Nokia, both from small countries without large service markets, thrive independent from telecoms companies.
More consequential were antitrust actions decades earlier – in 1925 and 1956 when Western Electric’s international and Canadian operations were hived off, resulting in the formation of Nortel and eventually Alcatel which began to compete with Western Electric. Had its limbs not been cut off decades earlier, Western Electric would have been a more dominant global company facing less international competition when it became Lucent.
Lucent, a notable casualty in the dotcom bubble, was a classic case of overextended growth. With aggressive equipment financing, Lucent underwrote a good chunk of capital for new telecoms companies which eventually went bankrupt. Lucent was just as aggressive in engaging in sales and accounting malpractices to deliver “consistent” growth.
Instead of focusing on developing its core products, Lucent spent lavishly on acquisitions which mostly proved to be futile. After the bubble, it made overly drastic cuts to deliver short-term results to the irreparable detriment of its core strengths. Lucent, and ITT earlier, epitomised Anglo-Saxon capitalism’s excesses.
Even though the US lacks a major fully fledged telecoms equipment supplier, it remains a leader in key segments and upstream. Although Huawei may appear to be the global leader in telecoms equipment, market share by segment offers a more useful picture.
For example, Cisco remains the leader in routers. In optical networks, Ciena is a leading competitor. Perhaps, more importantly, the US continues to occupy the top spot in intellectual property, software and chips, through companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, Google and Intel. The US can be a much bigger threat to Huawei than the other way around.
Foreign firms’ know-how helped the development of China’s telecoms equipment industry. Technology transfer started with Shanghai Bell, a join venture with Belgium’s Bell Telephone Manufacturing of Belgium, then an ITT subsidiary. Many foreign companies followed suit to gain access to a large and growing market.
Over time, Huawei learned from a range of international peers, through joint ventures with Lucent, Motorola, Siemens and NEC. Nevertheless, the rise of Huawei was probably a contributing factor, rather than the decisive one, in the fall of some of its teachers in the waves of global industry consolidation.
Lucent’s demise is a uniquely American story. The decisions made by its management were shaped by US capital markets which reward short-term results. In contrast, operating in continental European capitalism, Ericsson and Nokia survived the dotcom crisis as they pursued long-term objectives, subject less to the vicissitudes of capital markets. More than competition from dismembered parts of its former self and Huawei, Lucent was destroyed by American capitalism.
From Microsoft to Facebook, Anglo-Saxon capitalism has fostered radical innovations. But it lacks the patience to cultivate incremental innovations over the long term, as the telecoms equipment industry often requires. This patient capital has supported the unrelenting development – through the ups and downs of markets – of the likes of Ericsson and Nokia.
If the US wants Ericsson and Nokia to remain strong Western alternatives to Huawei and ZTE, it would do best to leave them alone, in safe Nordic hands. Otherwise, these last bastions of defence against “Chinese technological domination” may risk perishing under the warped incentives of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
At $390bn, Tesla is worth a lot to investors. In fact, it’s worth more than all of Germany’s carmakers combined.
Europe started out as the birthplace of the automobile, but it has become the laggard — and not just as far as stock market valuations go.
In the 12 years since Elon Musk released his first full-electric sports car, he’s expanded into battery production at Tesla’s Gigafactory, deployed dedicated charging infrastructure worldwide and developed products that let consumers generate and store energy. His Roadster has become the reference for super-fast travel on a battery and his electric sedans have climbed the rankings to compete with Nissan for the world’s most sold electric car.
Tesla Roadster. Credit: Tesla
In that time frame, prestigious brands in Europe, the likes of Volkswagen and Daimler in Germany but also Renault and Peugeot in France, have mostly struggled with a diesel emissions scandal and displayed a sluggish attitude to shifting to battery-powered cars.
Pessimists say the fate of European carmakers shows the region’s inability to transform even the most brilliant ideas and finest engineering talent into disruptive innovation at scale.
“It’s not lack of vision that is plaguing Europe — carmakers like Renault have long had the vision of a future with electric, connected and autonomous vehicles,” says Francois Veron, the cofounder of investment fund Newfund. “But they failed at industrialising that vision, at adapting their production and supply chains to the new business models of electric cars.”
“Real disruption is more likely to come from an independent player than from the incumbents,” says Veron. “A heavily financed independent player.”
But while Europe does not have a single Tesla equivalent, it does have several companies doing parts of what Tesla does and in many cases doing it better.
Without the media might of the Musk empire, they are less well known, but there are companies such as Rimac making faster electric roadsters, companies like Skeleton Technologies making more powerful ultracapacitors and Einride making electric self-driving trucks.
Here’s part one of our series looking at Elon Musk’s empire and the European technology companies emerging as its rivals. Part one is focusing on cars and batteries, part two on space and part three on hyperloop.
Part one: vroom
Cars are one of the most visible parts of Tesla, and make up the majority of its revenues. In the second quarter of 2020, car sales accounted for 86% of its reported $6bn sales. A newly launched Model Y has got car pundits salivating.
But perhaps the most emblematic of Tesla’s successes lies in its ability to deploy a wide-spanning network of dedicated, ultra-fast chargers called superchargers. They’ve played a key role in helping Tesla’s cars stand out from the rest, by addressing consumers’ fear of running out of juice in an electric vehicle.
In fact, infrastructure that allows for a relatively short charging pit stop along the way is perhaps the only segment where Tesla truly has no equivalents in Europe.
The company boasts nearly 2,000 stations in Europe and the Middle East. Alternatives, even added together and helped by state subsidies, form a smaller network of disparate chargers that are all less powerful — hence slower to refill a battery — and are often faced with compatibility issues.
Every other part of the electric car ecosystem has Europeans in the ring, battling it out with Tesla. Here are the names worth knowing:
Tesla’s hypercar challengers in Europe
Rimac (Croatia)
Tesla’s Roadster makes claims on being the quickest car in the world. According to the company, it’s able to go from 0-60 mph in just 1.9 seconds, and has a top speed of more than 250 mph.
Croatia’s Rimac may be able to just pip Tesla’s record, with claims that its C_Two electric hypercar can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.85 seconds, a whisker faster than the Roadster. And the C_Two claims a top speed of 258 mph.
Mind you, Rimac’s C_Two isn’t in production yet. Any prospective customers will have to wait for 2021 to take delivery, and there are likely to be only a very limited number of vehicles made. Your likelihood of owning a C_Two is probably a lot lower than owning a Roadster.
Rimac C_Two. Credit: Rimac
Rimac, which began with Mate Rimac trying to pimp up his own very beat-up 1984 BMW when he was just 19, is clearly a very different (and much smaller) business than Tesla. But its mission to build electric motor cars that are, well, super fast, is having a surprisingly big reach across the car industry.
Porsche owns around 15% of the company, and Hyundai Motor Group recently invested €80m as part of a new partnership which will see the two companies collaborate on a range of performance electric cars. A number of other carmakers, including Aston Martin and Pininfarina already use Rimac’s battery packs for their own electric supercars.
With serious investors coming in now, Rimac is professionalising and gearing up to go much bigger. Plus, it just recently hired ex-Tesla engineer Chris Porritt as CTO.
Piëch (Switzerland)
Piëch is based in Switzerland but it has deep roots in Germany and links back to Volkswagen.
The company was founded by Toni Piëch, the son of former Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch, whose own ancestors include Volkswagen founder Ferdinand Porsche.
It’s out to build on Germany’s history of top-notch engineering, combined with an electric motor and reviving iconic elements of classic sports car designs, to become the “leading luxury electric mobility brand”.
Piëch Car. Credit: Piëch
“In spirit, we go back to Ferdinand Porsche’s 1931 vision,” the company says on its website. “We aim to build a company that recaptures the artistry, craftsmanship and heritage of the past, but we emerge into 21st century with a new powertrain, a new business model, and an appetite for technology and disruption.”
The company’s Mark Zero all-electric model, scheduled to go on sale in 2022, can get to 100km/h in 3.2s, charges 80% of its battery in 4 minutes 40 seconds, and boasts a range of 500km on a single charge.
One specific: Piëch has no plans to invest in its own manufacturing and relies instead on a network of partners for production — carmakers with factories, assembly and supply chains already set up.
Nikola (US-based, with ties to Germany and Italy)
The other, much-hyped challenger to Tesla is Nikola.
Admittedly that’s partly because of the name of the company, which refers to Nikola Tesla, the engineer and inventor who made important contributions during the 1900s to what we know about electrical supply systems. His surname inspired Musk’s company, and Nikola of course picked up on his first name.
Nikola is going head-to-head with Tesla in electric trucks. The company is US-based, but it does have a big European connection.
Germany’s Robert Bosch and Italy’s Iveco, the truck-maker backed by the Agnelli family, each own 6% of Nikola and were instrumental in building the important parts of the company’s trucks.
More than 200 Bosch employees were involved in building important parts of Nikola’s trucks, including the electric motor for the axle, the vehicle-control unit, the battery and the hydrogen fuel cell. The trucks themselves are being built in an Iveco factory in Germany.
Tesla’s trucks challengers in Europe
The Tesla programme for trailer trucks, dubbed Tesla Semi, has been pushed back a bunch of times and the first units are now expected to be delivered sometime in 2021.
Einride (Sweden)
Stockholm-based Einride’s trucks are not for consumers, but for the logistics industry. The company started off focused on developing self-driving trucks that would transport goods entirely autonomously or controlled remotely. Recently it has acknowledged that the transition to full autonomy may take some time, so it is also building trucks that have space for human drivers.
The trucks will still be all-electric, however, and deals with big companies may do more to speed along the battery-powered revolution than any consumer-focused business. Einride recently signed a deal to supply trucks to German supermarket group Lidl, supporting Lidl’s ambition to make its supply chain emission-free.
Robert Falck, founder of Einride.
Others include:
Volta Trucks (Sweden)
The company recently launched a purpose-built 16-tonne electric truck that can drive up to 200 km on a single charge. The company is expecting to sell 500 of the Volta Zero trucks in 2022, rising to 5000 by 2025. It is expecting to find strong demand in cities like London and Paris where diesel vehicles have been banned from the city centres.
Tesla’s Gigafactory challengers in Europe
Musk called the Gigafactory “the machine that builds the machine” — where everything needed by Tesla would be made, most notably a huge number of lithium-ion batteries for its vehicles. Tesla has three such factories in operation so far, in Nevada, New York and Shanghai, with a factory near Berlin expected to be completed next year.
The idea of the Gigafactory was not only to decrease Tesla’s reliance on overseas suppliers of batteries but bring the cost of production down to under $100 per KWh of energy storage, a level at which it becomes cheaper to build an electric powertrain than an internal combustion engine.
The Nevada Gigafactory had a goal of producing 35 GWh per year by 2020. Opened in 2016, the Tesla facility has a clear head start, but in the past year or two a number of challengers have emerged in Europe:
Northvolt (Sweden)
One of Europe’s biggest battery startups was founded by ex-Tesla employees. Peter Carlsson, who was global head of sourcing and supply chain at the company, worked closely with Musk to launch the Model S. Another Tesla alumnus, Paolo Cerruti, helped Carlsson launch Northvolt, which is building a giant battery factory in northern Sweden, aiming to produce 32GWh of capacity annually — just short of Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory levels — once it is fully up and running. The company raised $1bn last year from investors led by Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs.
Carlsson says that while China and the US have been in the lead so far when it comes to producing the batteries needed for electric cars, Europe now has an opportunity to catch up.
What the Northvolt battery factory in northern Sweden will look like when ready.
“At present, we don’t have enough factories but looking at the projects being planned and constructed as we speak the future looks promising in Europe,” he says. “In Europe, there is a new momentum. We have seen actions in the regulatory space and Europe has started to flex its muscles by backing and financing car manufacturers and others along the supply chain – and the dynamics are strong. To be frank, the US has lost a bit of headway between the shift from Obama and Trump.”
“Europe now has to decide whether it will focus on satellite factories that rely on supplies from Asia or will it build its own ecosystem. There are advantages to the region to have its own ecosystem with all the actors across the supply chain including subcontractors, factories, support to universities and so on.”
“Strategically, it is possible to build it but we don’t have it ready for raw materials as yet. We have the conditions to create nickel and cobalt but it will take time. We are not alone, even in China they are dependent on building supply chains of raw materials, just look at what they are doing in parts of Africa and South America.”
In the meantime, Northvolt is developing patent-protected ways of recycling batteries more efficiently, so that part of Europe’s raw material needs could be supplied this way.
Verkor (France)
The startup exited stealth mode and unveiled ambitious plans to deliver up to 50GWh of battery production capacity. Production in Verkor’s first gigafactory is scheduled to begin in 2023 with 16GWh capacity and ramp up from there.
Backed by French industrial Schneider Electric, real estate group IDEC and the EU’s European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), Verkor is currently looking for land to set up a gigafactory in France. The initial investment in the project is about €1.6bn.
It’s not the only French project of the sorts. Energy giant Total and carmaker PSA have set up a joint venture called Automotive Cells Company, which is also aiming to start deliveries in 2023. The first phase of the project involves a €200m investment and a pilot plant built around an existing facility in Nersac, France, owned by Saft, Total’s battery production arm. Total took over startup Saft in 2016 for €950m.
Fast charging
Europe is also developing breakthrough technologies that could significantly increase the charging speeds for electric vehicles. Charging an electric car at a public charging point can still take several hours — even a Tesla Supercharger station will take at least half an hour — so getting charging times down to a point where they can compete with a few minute petrol refuelling stop is crucial.
Ulracapacitors, which discharge energy much faster than batteries, have been seen as a potential part of the solution. Tesla bought ultracapacitor company Maxwell Technologies for $218m in 2019, in hopes of improving the batteries used in its cars. Battery experts speculated that Musk might be looking to apply some of the technologies used in Maxwell’s ultracapacitors to improve the cost, performance and lifespan of its lithium-ion batteries.
Skeleton ultracapacitors
Skeleton Technologies (Estonia)
A European challenger, Estonian Skeleton Technologies, may be close to this already. The company is developing the SuperBattery, a ground-breaking graphene battery with a 15-second charging time and the capability of being recharged hundreds of thousands of times.
The company has just partnered with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to complete the development of the battery. If this is successful, it would eliminate the three main anxieties of electric car owner: slow charging time, battery degradation over time, and limited range.
Skeleton Technologies chief executive Taavi Madiberk says the technology will “blow existing EV charging solutions out of the water”. He also notes that, unlike Tesla, which seeks to do everything itself, in Europe the key to energy storage breakthroughs will be a collaboration between companies.
Almost nine in ten TikTok users who have used Instagram Reels say that Facebook’s TikTok competitor is basically the same as TikTok. And 61% said they’ll be spending more time in Instagram as a result.
“This strong number for Instagram is driven by the fact that TikTok users who have used Instagram Reels do not think that TikTok is inherently special,” says Tommy Walters, research and insights managers at social media content company Whistle.
That is my sentiment exactly.
TikTok, of course, is being forced to sell to an American company by the Trump administration, although the company is contesting that order in court. That controversy doesn’t have appeared to hurt TikTok: it is still the third most-downloaded app in the United States, according to AppFigures data.
But the controversy is also helping other apps.
Instagram usage is up, but so is Snapchat and other apps.
34% of TikTok users say they’ll spend more time on Snapchat, which is currently the ninth most-downloaded app in the U.S. Only 10% say they’ll spend more time on Triller, a TikTok competitor, and another 10% say they’ll spend more time on Byte.
Interestingly, people don’t seem more worried about Chinese companies getting and using their personal data, which is ostensibly driving the government ruling requiring TikTok’s sale.
Rather, they don’t like it across the board.
“75% are worried about an American company obtaining their personal data,” Whistle says while 67% are very or somewhat worried about a Chinese company obtaining their personal data,” Whistle says, adding that TikTok users aren’t super-happy about copycats. “63% agree that larger social media companies like Facebook, who owns Instagram, should not be allowed to copy newer social media companies like TikTok.”
The sample size is not huge — 686 18-34 year olds — but Whistle says it is nationally representative.
Ultimately, the results cast doubt on whether any company that buys TikTok, if a sale proceeds, will be able to maintain the company’s incredible growth rate, or if that growth might be captured by existing market players like Facebook and Instagram.
And, of course, the news shows once again that no publicity is bad publicity. Even though Tiktok has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, usage is up.
“Since a TikTok ban has been discussed in the news, 44% of daily or weekly TikTok users have been spending more time on the platform, with only 10% reporting spending less time on the platform,” says Tommy Walters.
Figurines of Greek mythical characters Trump ordered removed from the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris in November 2018, now on display in the Oval Office. Photographer: Justin Sink/Bloomberg
After Donald Trump’s planned trip to a French cemetery for fallen Marines was canceled in November 2018, the U.S. leader had some extra time on his hands in a mansion filled with artwork. The next day, he went art shopping — or the presidential equivalent.
Trump fancied several of the pieces in the U.S. ambassador’s historic residence in Paris, where he was staying, and on a whim had them removed and loaded onto Air Force One, according to people familiar with the matter. The works — a portrait, a bust, and a set of silver figurines — were brought back to the White House.
The decision to cancel Trump’s visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside Paris is under new scrutiny after the Atlantic magazine on Thursday published a bombshell report that Trump belittled the American servicemen buried there, part of a broader history of disparaging certain people who’ve served in the military. Trump has vehemently denied making the comments about “suckers” and “losers” in the armed forces.
Never previously reported is Trump’s spur-of-the-moment art caper before leaving the ambassador’s residence.
The incident was met with a mixture of amusement and astonishment at the time, but caused headaches for White House and State Department staffers, according to several people familiar with the episode who asked not to be identified due to its sensitivity.
Chic Mansion
The story unfolded like this: While in Paris with other world leaders to commemorate the centennial of the end of World War I, Trump stayed at the official residence of U.S. Ambassador Jamie McCourt, the palatial Hôtel de Pontalba. The mansion, in Paris’s chic 8th arrondissement, dates to 1842. It has served as a flagship of the State Department’s “Art in Embassies” cultural diplomacy program, and is open to tours.
The president’s planned visit to the Belleau Wood cemetery was canceled when rainy weather grounded the presidential helicopter, according to a redacted email the White House released to rebut the Atlantic story. The U.S. Secret Service ruled out a motorcade for the 56-mile drive, according to two people familiar with the matter.
That left Trump with about six hours of free time in the ambassador’s residence.
The next day, Trump pointed out a Benjamin Franklin bust, a Franklin portrait and a set of figurines of Greek mythical characters, and insisted the pieces come back with him to Washington.
The People’s House
McCourt, the ambassador, was startled, but didn’t object, according to people briefed on the incident. Trump later quipped that the envoy would get the art back “in six years,” when his potential second term in office would be winding down.
The art, worth about $750,000 according to one of the people familiar with the episode, was loaded aboard Air Force One while Trump visited another cemetery before the flight back to Washington.
“The President brought these beautiful, historical pieces, which belong to the American people, back to the United States to be prominently displayed in the People’s House,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in response to questions from Bloomberg News.
Trump’s move prompted some hair-pulling and a furious exchange of emails back home between the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations and White House officials who organized the art transfer. Ultimately, because the art is U.S. government property, the move was deemed legal.
Purchase Policy
Trump, who once used his charity to purchase a large portrait of himself, is known to display in his private West Wing dining room mementos from various official trips and encounters. Over time that’s included a pair of shoes gifted by musician Kanye West and an Ultimate Fighting Championship belt.
A senior White House official said presidents are permitted to display personal gifts from Americans or heads of state while they’re in office, but must purchase them if they want to keep the presents after they depart.
The figurines that caught Trump’s eye found a new home on the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office. Depicting Greek gods, they date to the early 20th century and were made by Neapolitan artist Luigi Avolio, who was trying to pass them off as sculptures from the 16th or 17th centuries, according to London-based art dealer Patricia Wengraf.
Portrait Gallery
In an “Antiques Roadshow” moment, Wengraf described the figurines as “20th century fakes of wannabe 17th century sculptures,” and of little value.
The French art-collection episode comes with a curious footnote. After White House art curators examined the pieces Trump brought home, the president was told that the Franklin bust was a replica. He joked that he liked the fake better than the original, two people familiar with the episode said.
The Franklin portrait snagged from Paris was also a copy — of the one Joseph Siffred Duplessis painted in France in 1785, which was then held by the National Portrait Gallery a mile from the White House.
The curators removed a different portrait of the founding father from the Oval Office and borrowed the original Duplessis from the gallery. That one now hangs in the Oval, not the replica Trump ferried out of France.
TOKYO (Reuters) – In the days leading up to Shinzo Abe’s surprise resignation last month as rumors of his ill health swirled in Japan, the prime minister’s right-hand man, Yoshihide Suga, was courting a ruling party boss whose backing could make him king.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga arrives at the ceremony site where Emperor Naruhito will report the conduct of the enthronement ceremony at the Imperial Sanctuary inside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan, October 22, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-ji
In a secluded dining room in an upscale Tokyo hotel, Suga met with Toshihiro Nikai, the secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), for a traditional Japanese meal. They shared stories from their youth when they both worked as secretaries for powerful politicians, according to a columnist who dined with them.
The dinner, Nikai’s third with Suga in as many months, came little over a week before Abe stepped down as Japan’s longest-serving premier and highlighted the kind of alliance-building that has made Suga the leading candidate to replace him.
At the dinner, Suga thanked Nikai for keeping a firm grip over the LDP, saying it had allowed Abe’s administration to execute its policies with ease, according to Fumiya Shinohara, the political columnist who was there with them.
Two weeks later, Nikai’s group was the first among the party’s factions to endorse Suga for the top job, support that makes him almost certain to be Japan’s next prime minister.
“In an environment where human relationships are paramount, that has been Mr. Suga’s best weapon,” said Shinohara, adding that their exchange over dinner cemented an alliance now poised to control the ruling party.
Suga’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the dinner. Suga has said, when asked on television about their discussion, that he and Nikai share a similar background and that he had introduced him to various people.
Nikai could not immediately be reached for comment.
For the past eight years, Suga, 71, has been the public face of the Abe administration as the government’s top spokesman but long kept a relatively low profile. He became better known to the public when he unveiled the name, Reiwa, of the new imperial era last year, a celebratory moment that marked the ascension of the new emperor and went viral, earning him the nickname “Uncle Reiwa”.
Behind the scenes, associates and analysts say Suga has been instrumental in shifting elements of decision making from Japan’s sprawling bureaucracy to the premier’s office and taming factional rivalries within the ruling party.
Suga is widely expected to stay the policy course set out by his predecessor, maintaining the “Abenomics” pro-growth stimulus policies aimed at pulling Japan out of deflation and keeping the economy afloat during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Suga will carry on the vision Abe is handing over to him,” said Takashi Ryuzaki, a political analyst and former TV journalist. “So there is no need for Suga to have his own vision.”
‘SOMEONE YOU WOULDN’T NOTICE’
In contrast to Abe, the scion of a political dynasty in Japan who staked his career on constitutional reform, Suga began his political career an outsider and rose through the ranks in local politics.
At a news conference on Wednesday where he officially announced his bid, Suga spoke about growing up in a farming community in Japan’s northern Akita prefecture.
“He was very quiet,” said Hiroshi Kawai, a former high school classmate who still lives in Suga’s hometown of Yuzawa and works as a local tour guide. “He was someone you wouldn’t notice if he was there or not.”
Suga left town soon after finishing high school and worked in a cardboard factory in Tokyo to save money for university. After graduation, he worked as a secretary for a prominent national lawmaker from Yokohama, home to Japan’s busiest port.
During his time in local politics, Suga pushed an ambitious project to redevelop Yokohama’s waterfront, according to Isao Mori, an author who published Suga’s biography in 2016. In the eight years he spent in the city assembly, Suga rose to be known as Yokohama’s “shadow mayor,” Mori said.
‘ACTOR ON A STAGE’
Suga has said he begins most days at 5 a.m., checking the news before doing 100 sit-ups and taking a 40-minute walk. Even among staffers used to the grueling schedules of politicians, he was seen as an outlier for his relentless work ethic.
Daisuke Yusa first met Suga in 2004 when he was working as a salesman for a garbage company. Suga soon recruited him to work as his secretary.
“He used to say, think of yourself as an actor on a stage and think objectively about what position you’re in now,” Yusa said, when asked about perceptions that Suga is more of a lieutenant than a leader.
Yusa, now a local politician, said Suga always emphasized the importance of doing one’s best no matter what the job.
“I think he’s been able to remain in such a position without school ties or political faction because he doesn’t try to stand out,” he said.
Under Abe’s first administration in 2006, Suga headed the ministry of internal affairs where he introduced a hometown tax program, offering tax deductions for those who donate money to local municipalities.
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (L) speaks to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga before Suga answers questions during a lower house budget committee session at the parliament in Tokyo, Japan, February 20, 2014. REUTERS/Yuya Shino
Matsushige Ono, who served as a vice minister under Suga, said the program met fierce resistance from some bureaucrats, who opposed introducing a novel tax scheme without precedent.
“He continued to make his case because he saw how this would help rural communities,” Ono said.
NAVIGATING BUREAUCRACY
When Abe regained the premiership at the end of 2012, he again tapped Suga.
In 2016, facing an ever-stronger yen, Suga created a framework for joint Bank of Japan, finance ministry and banking regulator meetings to signal to investors Tokyo’s alarm over spikes in the yen.
Officials had wanted to create such a framework for years, but friction between ministries prevented it from being implemented.
Mitsumaru Kumagai, chief economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research who frequently speaks to Suga, said Suga has been particularly adept at navigating Japan’s complex bureaucracy.
“He is aware of who and where the key person is in any ministry and he understands how to move organisations by instructing that person,” Kumagai said.
This year, support for the administration went into freefall as the coronavirus pandemic battered an already slowing economy. When Abe’s health began to visibly falter, speculation grew over Suga’s ambitions.
Shinohara, who joined the August dinner between Suga and Nikai, said the two men had bonded over their similar backgrounds.
“There are a lot of politicians now who can give good speeches and others from bureaucracies who can manage policy, but he’s the kind of professional politician who has his own distinct smell,” he said.
After dinner, the men left the hotel separately as journalists snapped pictures. A day later, Suga was asked on a TV programme whether he was interested in running for the prime minister’s job. Laughing, he said: “Not at all.”
We’ve all seen old science fiction films where, in the future, people are zipping around on their flying cars. Well, the future is now! In Japan, the Toyota-backed startup SkyDrive conducted the first public run of their flying vehicle. Whizzing around the Toyota test field, the single passenger flying car made quite an impression.
Looking like an enormous drone, the vehicle was manned by a pilot and hovered several feet above the ground while maneuvering around the test field. Though the flight lasted just four minutes, it is an incredible achievement for SkyDrive. Designed to be the world’s smallest electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle, SkyDrive’s SD-03 model takes up the space of just two parked cars. The sleek cabin is surrounded by eight rotors powered by individual engines, which ensures safety during emergency situations.
While the test drive is certainly a breakthrough, there’s still work to be done. SkyDrive is hoping to complete enough test flights in the enclosed area to meet safety provisions that will allow the team to take it for flights outside the test field. Currently, this futuristic mode of transit can only fly for just five to 10 minutes. SkyDrive president Tomohiro Fukuzawa hopes that this can be expanded to 30 minutes, which would make the vehicle helpful in exports.
“We want to realize a society where flying cars are an accessible and convenient means of transportation in the skies and people are able to experience a safe, secure, and comfortable new way of life,” says Fukuzawa.
The aim of SkyDrive is to have its flying car on the market by 2023. To do so, the company will be making a big push in the coming years, helped in part by Toyota’s funding and the expertise of its engineers. Whatever hurdles it faces, one thing is for certain, they’ve brought us one step closer to living out our Jetsons fantasy.
