Archives for June 2021

CNH Industrial acquires driverless ag vehicle company

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — CNH Industrial expects its $2.1 billion purchase of a South Dakota company will give it an edge in innovating autonomous technology in agriculture vehicles, the global manufacturer said Monday.

The Italian-American agriculture vehicle manufacturer said it has acquired 100% of the capital stock of Raven Industries Inc. headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for $58 per share.

The transaction will be funded with available cash on hand, CNH Industrial said, with a sale to be finalized by the end of 2021.

The sale will position CNH Industrial to have a greater impact on the global agriculture equipment market by “adding strong innovation capabilities in autonomous and precision agriculture technology,” the company said in a statement.

“Precision agriculture and autonomy are critical components of our strategy to help our agricultural customers reach the next level of productivity and to unlock the true potential of their operations,” stated Scott Wine, CEO of CNH Industrial. “Raven has been a pioneer in precision agriculture for decades, and their deep product experience, customer driven software expertise and engineering acumen offer a significant boost to our capabilities.”

In April, Raven Industries acquired the intellectual property of a Massachusetts-based robotics company, Jaybridge Robotics, an early developer of automated agriculture technology,

Raven said it planned to use Jaybridge’s patents and information to continue developing its “driverless ag technology.”

Albania holds 1st wind power tender to diversify energy base

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albania launched a tender Monday for its first onshore wind power program, trying to diversify its water-based energy production.

Albania produces more than 99% of its energy from hydropower, with the main plants located on northern Drini River. That has made the country vulnerable to seasonal changes in hydrology and dependent on expensive, emissions-intensive power imports.

Infrastructure and Energy Minister Belinda Balluku said the Balkan country is trying to minimize its vulnerability to dry years. She invited private companies to offer projects with a capacity of between 10 to 75 MW. Successful bidders will be announced in two years.

The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs has funded technical assistance for the project and preparation of a report to define zones appropriate for wind power, which cover about 20% of the country’s territory.

Last year Albania also launched two tenders for solar energy projects.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is helping the government in Tirana introduce competitive procurement processes for renewable energy projects.

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Follow all AP stories on developments related to climate change at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

Spielberg’s Amblin to make several films a year for Netflix

NEW YORK (AP) — Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker synonymous with big-screen enchantment, has set a new deal with Netflix in which his production company, Amblin Partners, will make multiple feature films per year for the streaming giant.

The partnership, one long courted by Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer, is a major get for the company that, amid increasing competition, brings perhaps the most beloved film director more officially into the streaming fold.

The deal announced Monday doesn’t specifically include any movies to be directed by Spielberg. This December, he will release “West Side Story” theatrically with Disney’s 20th Century Studios. Amblin has a separate deal with Universal Pictures for theatrical releases.

“At Amblin, storytelling will forever be at the center of everything we do, and from the minute Ted and I started discussing a partnership, it was abundantly clear that we had an amazing opportunity to tell new stories together and reach audiences in new ways,” Spielberg said in a statement. “This new avenue for our films, alongside the stories we continue to tell with our longtime family at Universal and our other partners, will be incredibly fulfilling for me personally since we get to embark on it together with Ted, and I can’t wait to get started with him, Scott, and the entire Netflix team.”

Amblin, which takes its name from a 1968 short by Spielberg, has helped produce a wide variety of films outside of those made my Spielberg, including “1917” and “Green Book.” The two companies have previously worked together on TV series and the Aaron Sorkin movie “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a film co-produced by Amblin that was sold by Paramount Pictures to Netflix during the pandemic.

Spielberg has sometimes been seen as against a streaming future for movies. A Deadline Hollywood headline on Monday’s announcement wondered: “Hell Freezes Over?”

But Spielberg in 2019 argued against the anti-streaming impression associated with him. Reports around then circulated that Spielberg believed streaming releases — which he compared to made-for-TV movies — should vie for Emmys, not Oscars. “I’m a firm believer that movie theaters need to be around forever,” Spielberg said that year.

He clarified that big screen or small screen, “what really matters to me is a great story and everyone should have access to great stories.”

“However, I feel people need to have the opportunity to leave the safe and familiar of their lives and go to a place where they can sit in the company of others and have a shared experience — cry together, laugh together, be afraid together — so that when it’s over they might feel a little less like strangers,” Spielberg wrote in an email to the New York Times. “I want to see the survival of movie theaters. I want the theatrical experience to remain relevant in our culture.”

The lines have also blurred since then. While Netflix has given exclusive theatrical runs of a week or more to some of its most prominent releases, traditional studios like Disney and Warner Bros. have embraced more hybrid release models that send movies simultaneously to streaming services.

“Steven is a creative visionary and leader and, like so many others around the world, my growing up was shaped by his memorable characters and stories that have been enduring, inspiring and awakening,” said Sarandos. “We cannot wait to get to work with the Amblin team and we are honored and thrilled to be part of this chapter of Steven’s cinematic history.”

Update on the latest in business:

FINANCIAL MARKETS

Stocks post solid gains

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks are posting solid gains in afternoon trading, following the market’s steep declines the previous week.

Banks, which were hit hard last week, were among the biggest gainers. The S&P 500 was up 1.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.5% and the Nasdaq was up 0.7%.

Stocks fell sharply last week after Federal Reserve officials indicated that they were willing to start raising interest rates in 2022 or 2023, earlier than the Fed had forecast earlier.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.48%.

SUPREME COURT-PATENT BOARD

High court: Congress erred in patent dispute board setup

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says that Congress erred when it set up a board to oversee patent disputes by failing to make the judges properly accountable to the president.

Five conservative justices agreed Monday that Congress had erred, but both conservative and liberal justices agreed on the fix. They concluded that a portion of federal law related to how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board functions can’t be enforced.

The result of the court’s action is that the director of the Patent and Trademark Office can review and reverse any decisions made by the board’s judges. The director is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

CHINA-DIGITAL CURRENCY

Chinese banks promise to step up cryptocurrency ban

BEIJING (AP) — China’s biggest banks have promised to refuse to help customers trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies after the central bank said executives were told to step up enforcement of a government ban.

Regulators appear to be worried that despite a 2013 ban on Chinese institutions handling cryptocurrencies, the state-run financial system might be exposed indirectly to risks. The four major state-owned banks and payment service Alipay promised to step up monitoring of customers and block use of their accounts to buy or trade crypto-currencies.

Promoters of crypto-currencies say they allow anonymity and more flexibility, but Chinese regulators warn that might facilitate criminal activity.

CNH-INDUSTRIAL-AGRICULTURE

CNH Industrial acquires driverless ag vehicle company

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — CNH Industrial says it expects its $2.1 billion purchase of a South Dakota company will give it an edge in innovating autonomous technology in agriculture vehicles.

The Italian-American agriculture vehicle manufacturer said Monday it has acquired 100% of the capital stock of Raven Industries Inc. headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for $58 per share. The transaction will be funded with available cash on hand, CNH Industrial said, with a sale to be finalized by the end of 2021.

The company said in a statement that the sale will position it to have a greater impact on the global agriculture equipment market by “adding strong innovation capabilities in autonomous and precision agriculture technology.”

KATRINA-WASTE-LAWSUIT

Settlement avoids trial in 2011 Katrina trash lawsuit

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A decade-old lawsuit over the awarding of trash disposal contracts during the administration of a convicted former mayor of New Orleans has been settled.

Waste Management of Louisiana had sued River Birch Inc. and its owners in 2011 over contracts involving the disposal of debris and trash following Hurricane Katrina. Trial was to have started Monday.

Waste Management claimed that illegal campaign contributions to former Mayor Ray Nagin prompted Nagin to reverse his approval for the use of a Waste Management landfill. Nagin was convicted of corruption on unrelated matters but he and the River Birch owners denied Waste Management’s accusation. Terms of a settlement reached Friday were not disclosed.

NETFLIX-SPIELBERG

Spielberg’s Amblin to make several films a year for Netflix

The partnership announced Monday is a major get for the company that, amid increasing competition, brings perhaps the most beloved film director more officially into the streaming fold. The deal doesn’t specifically include any movies to be directed by Spielberg. In December, he’ll release his “West Side Story” in theaters.

Amblin, which takes its name from a 1968 short by Spielberg, has helped produce a wide variety of non-Spielberg films, including “1917” and “Green Book.”

Vaccine technology transfer center to open in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The World Health Organization is in talks to create the first-ever technology transfer hub for coronavirus vaccines in South Africa, a move to boost supply to the continent that’s desperately in need of COVID-19 shots, the head of the U.N. agency announced.

The new consortium will include drugmakers Biovac and Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a network of universities and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. They will develop training facilities for other vaccine makers to make shots that use a genetic code of the spike protein, known as mRNA vaccines.

“We are now in discussions with several companies that have indicated interest in providing their mRNA technology,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus at a virtual press briefing on Monday. That technology is used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Africa will soon be able to “take responsibility for the health of our people,” as a result of the new WHO-backed technology transfer hub, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in the press briefing.

It is “just not equitable and not fair” that some people are denied access to COVID-19 vaccines because of where they live, Ramaphosa said.

Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders.

“The faster companies share the know-how, the faster we can put an end to this pandemic,” she said in a statement.

Numerous factories in Canada, Bangladesh, Denmark and elsewhere have previously called for companies to immediately share their technology, saying their idle production lines could be churning out millions of doses if they weren’t hampered by intellectual property and other restrictions.

More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1% have been in poor countries.

South Africa accounts for nearly 40% of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 infections and is currently suffering a rapid surge, but vaccine rollout has been slow, marked by delayed deliveries among other factors.

South Africa currently does not manufacture any COVID-19 vaccines from scratch, but its Aspen Pharmacare assembles the Johnson & Johnson shot by blending large batches of the ingredients sent by J&J and then putting the product in vials and packaging them, a process known as fill and finish. Earlier this month the company had to discard 2 million doses because they had ingredients produced in the U.S. in a factory under suspect conditions.

South Africa’s current wave of infections threatens to overwhelm the country’s hospitals.

“The climb in new cases has been extraordinarily rapid and steep over the past few weeks,” Ramaphosa said Monday in his weekly letter to the nation. “The number of daily new cases jumped from below 800 in early April to more than 13,000 in the past week. In other words, it increased more than 15-fold from the last low point.”

Gauteng province, the country’s most populous with the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, is the worst-affected by the current surge with 60% of the new cases. All public and private hospitals are full, yet the numbers of new confirmed cases continue to rise, the province’s deputy premier, David Makhura, said Monday.

“I don’t want to send a message saying everything is okay,” said Makhura. “I want to say to the people of the province: The house is on fire.”

WHO officials said that while their new vaccine transfer technology will hopefully increase future supplies, it won’t address the immediate crisis, since it will take months for any new factories to start producing shots.

With dozens of countries desperately waiting for more doses after the COVAX initiative, a U.N.-backed plan to distribute vaccines to poor countries faltered in recent months, the WHO has been trying to persuade rich countries to donate vaccines once their most vulnerable populations are immunized.

But Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief, acknowledged that countries have mostly declined to share vaccines immediately.

“When you ask countries (to donate), they say, ‘Well, we’re going to vaccinate according to our priorities and our priorities are our own citizens,’” Ryan said.

He added that while transferring vaccine technology will help in the medium to long term, it won’t help stem the current spike in infections.

“We have not used the vaccines available globally to provide protection to the most vulnerable,” he said. ”And the fact that we haven’t … is a catastrophic moral failure.”

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Cheng reported from London.

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Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Archives for June 2021

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